You believe that people will solve problems. I believe that in order to solve problems, people would need to become experts, and they won't tend to do that. So long as they aren't experts, they're exposed to taking the wrong actions or, usually, no action at all.* This is why a central brutal authority can have a secondary role as collector of experts, to put them to the task of protecting the people from themselves.
I remember the old conservative talk radio talking line, "These people believe they know what you should do better than you! Can you believe it?" I do now believe it.
*The absolute best lesson that Thinking Fast and Slow teaches is a basic human shortcoming: What You See Is All There Is. Things you don't know do not form any part of your understanding. You have a hard time imagining the things you're unaware of. An expert is a person who spends his time and efforts becoming aware of as much as possible about a subject so that their choices and actions are made against the richest landscape of understanding. Any prosperous society will need experts to help them make decisions in all sorts of avenues of life. The idea that the market will find these experts, that non-experts will stumble on real experts instead of expert-fakes is silly to me. It's like letting the public vote on Global Warming or Evolution. The idea the gov't can leverage their experts and their mandate to find these people and put them to purpose is less so.
edit A prosperous society could probably get away with not having experts at the helm so long as they're sitting on a rich income stream ala Rome's endless conquests or America after the world wars made them the only game in town. It might even be that rich income streams are all that matters and not even experts will find the absolute best most efficient configuration of resources to support a people. All of the sudden Sarah Palin's Drill Baby, Drill is making a lot of sense...
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