If the citizens are unhappy with the government, they can protest and they can vote to replace the government.
How much good does this do you once the government has sold off the national infrastructure (and perhaps even its own sovereign powers) to mafiosi, foreigners, and their agents?
Where can you vote for reversing the destruction of industries which took 70 years to build?
Where is the voting booth where you can go to vote against having had your popular culture murdered through vulgarization?
> How much good does this do you once the government has sold off the national infrastructure ...
It does a lot of good if you vote in a government that buys back said infrastructure. "Sold" does not equal "destroyed".
But let me address your more general point as I understand it. There is no system that will protect you from a government that makes terrible decisions that destroy the country. What is your solution? Don't allow the government to sell anything? That's like banning knives because knives can be used for murder. Or perhaps have a committee that decides what can be sold? Well the government is already such a committee.
The only "solution" I see is to decide the government owns everything, so nothing important can be sold by mistake. Well the evidence of the previous century suggests that this creates much worse problems than it solves. This system has been tried, and it failed.
Governments, and people in general, make terrible decisions. Some of them outright disastrous. The best you can hope for is a system that lets you minimize the damage. Today it seems that democracy and capitalism is the best combination we have for minimizing the pain inflicted by people upon themselves.
And sometimes they make corrupt decisions. For instance, the example given in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2589559 seems like an obvious example of corruption. There should absolutely be recourse for actions like this on both ends of the trade rather than just kicking the old guys out and having to buy it back for almost 10x what it was sold for.
If you buy stolen property, you're pretty much screwed. If you get sweet deals from corrupt officials, you should get screwed too.
How much good does this do you once the government has sold off the national infrastructure (and perhaps even its own sovereign powers) to mafiosi, foreigners, and their agents?
Where can you vote for reversing the destruction of industries which took 70 years to build?
Where is the voting booth where you can go to vote against having had your popular culture murdered through vulgarization?