NSA spying row: Denmark helped US gather data on European officials, says report

Re:NSA spying row: Denmark helped US gather data on European... by bryanrasmussen on Monday May 31, 2021 @01:51AM (#27340629)

I think it would be fair to say that any Democracy past a certain size (and that size is probably not going to be much bigger than a medium sized city) is going to have parts of it that will not be exposed to public scrutiny and operate independently of the public will.

I'm pretty sure the majority of Danes would be against helping the U.S spy on other EU nations. But it was done because the country was not asked. There are of course other things that the government wants to do that they are prevented from by popular sentiment.

Both Autocracy and Democracy are present in any system, their distribution just changes due to circumstances.

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Re:NSA spying row: Denmark helped US gather data on European... by visualradio on Monday May 31, 2021 @03:52AM (#27341398)

Any state which enforces private land tenure in a non-reciprocated manner will tend towards autocracy over time. A distinguishing feature of high functioning republics is the ability to organize reliable public assessments of direct taxes on landed property within their borders. Under corrupt governments the assessments are never kept up to date and the nobility is given arbitrary and excessive privileges and exemptions to shift direct contributions to the least advantaged members of society. Maybe 50% of local governments and 20% of regional states in the U.S. are high functioning. The federal government was able to organize assessments in 1798, 1813-1816, and 1861 but is generally not high functioning.

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