Varoufakis to Publish Notorious Eurogroup Recordings from 2015 Meetings

You're getting emotional and in the process trying to out words into others people's mouths for no good reason. Greece's problems were a political and institutional problem, and it's not possible to hide this fact and its consequences. You cannot have a string of governments patently and systematically committing state-wide accounting fraud, and even resorting to paying consultants to optimize their fraud, and still try to spin it as emotional pettiness. Eventhough the actual Greek people had to bear the blunt of the problem, that changes nothing with regards to the problem, what caused it, andwho were responsible for it.

OP stated monetary policy, not economic.

Furthermore, Greece's problems were primarily caused by the way Greek governments systematically mismanaged the Greek state, having resorted to a perverse and continuous push for a combination of massive accounting fraud and overspending fueled by collosal levels of sovereign debt.

Yes? Cash is the standard method of payment, what is the issue exactly? Regardless of that, employees (who are the majority of the workforce in pretty much every country) can't tax-evade.

> What do you mean the population wasn't asked?

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22385367

And at the end of the day, even if there was true democracy it would still not make sense to blame all the population for the choice of the majority. In the same way that you can't blame every American for the killer drones, or every German for the election of the NSDAP.

To be clear, we agree on this.

My point was that, in a direct democracy, it's not just the public's ends that are paramount, but also the public's preferences on means.

One good example of what I'm talking about is Ancient Greece, which was a direct democracy, despite having so-called representatives. In the Ancient Greek system, people were chosen for the civic duty of governing the country like they continue to be chosen today for jury duty: they were drafted by lottery. They weren't afraid of politicians betraying the public will, because any politician that did anything the public didn't like, would be killed.

And to be clear, "anything the public didn't like" included, for example, being friendly to foreign diplomats, or accepting gifts, even if these things would have had no later bearing on their political decision-making, i.e., on their practice of their profession.

In such a context, a politician is forced to not only act toward the will of the people, but also to "perform politics" in a way that avoids upsetting their citizen-base, and so to avoid using some of the most effective political tools because the public finds them uncouth. Also, such performances often require the use of ineffective or downright counterproductive political tools, simply to satisfy the public.

A clear modern example of the effect of direct democracy is when a municipal elected official, e.g. a county sherriff, feels pressure to put a suspect behind bars for a crime there's not yet sufficient evidence they committed, simply because the public demands that someone be punished for the crime.

The entire point of representative democracy, is that the public is often irrational in ways that makes their proximate demands an ineffective way of achieving their own stated will. In this example, the public nominally wants to see justice done—but in the implementation of it, directly demands injustice. A representative is supposed to listen to the will of the public, certainly, but to ignore the direct demands; or translate the direct demands into the will they stand for.

Patients know their symptoms but not the causes. Users know when there's a bug but not the correct fix. Well, voters know when there's a problem, too; but they're not any better at figuring out what to do about it than patients or users are.

People don't have enough money to get by? Fixing that is certainly "the will of the people", and a politician that hears that complaint but doesn't do anything about it is certainly not being a representative. But the decision between fixing it via welfare, jobs programs, minimum wage, UBI, etc? That's statesmanship. And letting the public decide which of those policies is better is just abdicating the responsibility to practice the job of politics; just like a doctor just giving someone pills for whatever disease they think they have would be an abdication of responsibility for the practice of the job of medicine.

On the low end of the scale someone could have used undiplomatic language that with the right media framing could anger a lot of people, without beeing that damning from an objective angle.

On the other end however you get things that we might want to know about, e.g. when someone in a high office defends a genocide, or says something so clearly evil that the potential damage of not publishing the recording outweighs every individual right.

I am not a fan of Varoufakis, but I could imagine him not taking this decision lightly (otherwise he would have published it way earlier). This points to something closer to the latter category.