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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

Let's be fair, in a real democracy, there would be no government secrets... I mean.. we're paying for all that, we need to know.

Imagine being an owner of a company, and having some middle managers talking stuff in secret and saying that you don't need to know stuff, just let them use the money, and you don't even get to see the contracts.

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It's not too different in the corporate world. I'm an owner of Apple, Google, Microsoft and others and they refuse to divulge their secrets to me. I can't see their contracts, strategy documents or root passwords.

you have a choice of whether to own Apple or Google.

the government offers no such choice, it is a monopoly.

the government is not a corporation.

Of the people, by the people, for the people. In a properly functioning democracy the government should be the monopoly of the people.

There would be government secrets as long as there's more that 1 country. Also, unlike companies countries have subjects can be bad actors and there's no way to get rid of, so some stuff will have to a secret even if the world is run by a single government.

That would be nice but it would put you at a significant disadvantage compared to authoritarian/totalitarian states which would certainly have very terrible consequences.

You can say the same about the decision making: in a democracy it's hard to agree on an action, whereas a dictator can just do anything.

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