> This distinction is meaningless. Only if you subscribe to the most naive grade-school model of democracy. A government isn't actually the will of the people

> This distinction is meaningless. Only if you subscribe to the most naive grade-school model of democracy. A government isn't actually the will of the people made manifest; it's an organization made up of people, processes, and constraints. Just like a corporation isn't actually the will of the shareholders made manifest. > The motivations of the "structured entity" is defined by the nebulous collective will of the population. Once again, this is an absurdly naive view of how governments function. There is a voting mechanism in place which usually does a sort of OK job of keeping the government's behavior in line with the population's preferences, but this breaks down all the time and even in equilibrium doesn't work very well. I suggest reading Bueno de Mesquita's _The Logic of Political Survival_ if you're interested in developing a realistic model for how government behavior emerges.