The entire process of "approving" articles is democratic. The community of users decides what is interesting enough to appear on the front page. If you personally disagree that a particular article should be on the front page, well ... your only recourse is to flag it. If a democratic site is not what you want, then you don't want HN.
Actually, there are moderators who can and do kill stories, more or less according to the guidelines ( http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ). If a completely democratic site is what you want, you want reddit.
Democratic Reddit, where votes can be bought for 20-for-$1 https://coinbase.com/checkouts/35297a275c385a75d231fd4a6edd5...
If HN's front page were open to anything and everything, and links were voted for based on their importance in the real world, the actual Hacker News content would be completely buried. The real world is far more important than most of what's on Hacker News, so paradoxically, if we want to maintain the quality and focus of HN, real world articles like this need to be excluded, even if we all agree they are very important.