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Comment by pinephoneguy | Hacker News Reader

There are many people who argue that the middle and working classes actually have less say in democracy (as opposed to say, monarchy) because the people at the top can easily afford to buy out all the media.

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> people at the top can easily afford to buy out all the media.

Do autocracies have a history of freedom of the press? Can you think of many examples?

I think the point might be that democracies are like autocracies -- just with extra steps. The wealthy and powerful call the shots in all in political systems.

In non democracies the powerful takes the wealth and are therefore wealthy. In democracies many powerful people are still not wealthy since they don't have the power to just take it, and the wealthiest persons are far from the most powerful ones since there is a limit to what money can buy, that is the main difference.

Many European states (some of the better ones) are still monarchies.

They are still democracies, they just have some legacy celebrities they call King/Queen.

The aristocracy still has power and is supposed to be a balance for the democratic part (like the senate/president balances against congress in the US.) When they become "just celebrities" they're not doing their job. You can see where a lack of balance gets you in eg Canada which only has a parliament. (I guess they technically still are under the Queen but she seemed to have more or less abandoned them even before she was bed ridden.)

The point is rather shallow, in that case. There are measurable differences in quality of life (e.g. human development index) between established democracies and autocracies.

This is of course true. Democracies are not 'the same' as autocracies, but they have features that are similar, like wealthy people having outsized influence over policy and law creation compared with regular citizens. Democracies, in some cases at least, try to limit this to some extent But I've never heard of a society where warehouse workers have the same political power as CEOs, despite being greater in number.

Well there can't be that many people in the "many people" you reference because I've never heard that before. On its face it seems pretty ridiculous, if for no other reason than historically monarchies and a thriving, growing middle class have usually been mutually exclusive.

Manufacturing Consent

I feel like most of Chomsky's political ideas are crap but he absolutely nailed the pathological social effects of PR.

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