This is hard to talk about, because we live in a debased period.
Government’s job, in a democracy, should be to increase the welfare of the people and represent their will.
Because people elect the government, they need to know what the government is doing and has done in order to choose who to elect.
This is fundamental.
When people do not know what the government is doing, they cannot make good decisions.
Further, elected representatives (in principle, not in current practice) are the employees of the population. As employers, the population has a right to know what the representatives are doing. (Or if you prefer another metaphor, perhaps better, they are trustees.) They don’t have the right to know everything, but anything related to the job, including corruption and double dealing, they do.
The only possible exceptions are certain military related issues which would be very useful to enemies, but even there, the span is limited.
The reason for this, because apparently it’s not obvious, is that if electors don’t know what the people they elected and the government those people run are doing, they can’t make good decisions, like choosing to, oh, fire them.
As an aside, this is also why we have a right to know what our government is doing and why they don’t have a right to spy on us: they work for us, we do not work for them. Even so, their personal lives, other than graft and blatant hypocrisy should be off the line. But what they do officially we need to know.
If government doesn’t serve the people, it becomes tyranny.
The current system of classifying virtually everything and then lying and lying and lying is clearly anti-democratic and tyrannical.
What we have right now in most countries (see France, Pensions for a non-American example) is not democracy. It is oligarchical tyranny: the rule of the few over the many.
Nor is this just about “ought”, the problem with endless propaganda is that our elites have been running our countries terribly. They have mishandled the economy repeatedly since 1968 or so, have completely bungled climate change and ecological collapse, have made the middle and working classes poor and the rich richer. They have been running government for the benefit of the few, not the many. The only major notable exception is China, and from what I hear from those on the ground, that’s changing for the worse and has been since after the 2008 financial crisis.
Governments which impoverish the many to benefit the few are tyrannies and need to be overthrown. But one of the ways they get there is by constant lying and saying “we’re lying and concealing for your own good. You’re children, it isn’t safe for you to know.”
Anyone who thinks you don’t deserve or need to know what they’re doing on your behalf isn’t your friend or your employee, they are your master and they see you as their slave.
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