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Comment by Blackthorn | Hacker News Reader

> Why do people buy common shares which give them no voting rights as a shareholder?

Because you believe in the people who have the voting rights?

Let's get real here: for those of us buying stock with voting rights, we don't really have voting rights. The proportion we have is so vanishingly small it's the same as not having voting rights in the first place.

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Exactly, Just like democracy is the same as a dictator

Well, in an actual democracy you'd have one person being worth one vote. That certainly doesn't exist where I live (USA), and it doesn't exist with corporate voting shares either (where money = votes), so that analogy is pretty much bunk at the start.

I've heard various 'arguments' that the US is not a democracy, but not based on the fact that one person-one vote is untrue; what do you mean by this? Is it something to do with the electoral college system, or perhaps the large class of disenfranchised persons?

Short answer: the US has two senators for each state, some states have much more population than others, so proportionally a vote in Wyoming counts "more" than a vote in California. This has direct effects in the legislative branch (the Senate) and indirect effects in presidential elections (electoral college) and thus also indirectly in the Supreme Court (nomination + approval).

Well, the US also has the House of Representatives where representation is proportional.

A bicameral congress most certainly does not disqualify the entire system from being considered a democracy.

Yeah, I am not trying to make a political statement, I'm just explaining why people say that

Here's an example. There are 600,000 people in Wyoming. They have 2 senators.

There are 700,000 people in Washington DC. They have zero senators. There are over 3 million people in Puerto Rico. They also have zero senators.

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