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Comment by lucianoq | Hacker News Reader

> People in private converse completely differently (more freely) than in public.

They are deciding about life and death of people of a country (or many). They're not discussing about what's your favourite food and which sex position you like the most.

Those conversation MUST be open and public, so people can judge the work of their delegates and decide to vote them again or not.

If you don't want to be heard, don't present yourself as a candidate. There are plenty of roles in companies that are private enough to speak privately.

Eurogroup, Ecofin, European Commission, European Central Bank, ESM are secrets just to subtract power from citizens, so to reduce democracy.

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On the other hand, organizations that are able to keep their internal deliberations private have a strong advantage over ones who must ‘think’ openly.

Imagine negotiating with an employer, except your inner monologue is always spoken aloud.

One unintended (?) consequence of extreme transparency for governments, is that it makes government ineffective and easily subverted or outmaneuvered by opaque organizations, like corporations and less liberal state actors.

Except that in the case of politics, the "out group" who that information is kept from are the people being governed. And do you want politics to have a "strong advantage" over it's citizens?

By the way, this goes hand in hand with the encroachment on ordinary citizens' rights (often with exceptions being carved out specifically for parliamentarians).

> Except that in the case of politics, the "out group" who that information is kept from are the people being governed. And do you want politics to have a "strong advantage" over it's citizens?

Obviously you want your elected representatives to do what's best, not what gets you trending in the polls. In this particular case we should expect the EU to step up and help out member-states in need in spite of the political abuse and exploitation by populist parties of problems such as the sovereign debt crisis.

> On the other hand, organizations that are able to keep their internal deliberations private have a strong advantage over ones who must ‘think’ openly.

I agree, but an advantage over whom exactly? In this case it's simply an advantage of the ruling political and economic elite over European citizens (Greeks especially).

There are few instances when things really should be kept secret e.g. during wars, but this was not one of them.

But this is a story of European government bodies versus Greek government bodies. You identify SYRIZA with The People too easily.

What, Varoufakis is a world-renown professor of game theory. You don’t think he has an agenda? Is it impossible that this agenda clashes against the Good of Greek People?

> I agree, but an advantage over whom exactly? In this case it's simply an advantage of the ruling political and economic elite over European citizens (Greeks especially).

Not quite, the problem are extremist and populist political parties who abuse any crisis to force their way into relevance without playing any constructive role in any part of the problem. There's a long list of examples in European history of how extremistm exploits economic and financial crisis for their own self-interest and in the process causing a long steam of suffering and misery. It happened often enough to enable us to learn from that mistake.

Democratic institutions must be transparent. But of course, the eurogroup is NOT a democratic organization. It makes you wonder why an unaccountable organization like the ECB was allowed so much power.

>On the other hand, organizations that are able to keep their internal deliberations private have a strong advantage over ones who must ‘think’ openly.

Not necessarily. If there is secrecy within the organization, any leader of a subbranch can abuse his power along the line of the movie Dr. Strangelove.

States and Organizations/Corporations are NOT at the same level.

States create and enforce the laws, they can do whatever they want. Their only limit is the people willingness expressed via elections.

Corporations can never be above a State if they play in a game where the State decides the rules.

Completely unrealistic. If Eurogroup meetings were to become open, they would simply become like any other kind of parliamentary "debate", with politicians holding speeches directed at their voters rather than genuinely intended to reach a consensus. The real negotiations would then move elsewhere.

It's the Greek politicians who put the country in a life or death situation. Greece has had +100% of debt to GDP for decades, spending that debt on god knows what.

It's 2012-2015, Greece is about to default on that very debt, and asks responsible countries to guarantee Greek debt... and they want the Eurogroup to guarantee it because they want to issue more debt! Issue more debt! A country that is unable to repay it's current debt!

Varoufakis, playing with people's lives and futures...

His position as finance minister of Greece in 2015 was that Greece should not be forced take on more debt, as it is unable to repay the debt it already holds. The position of the Eurogroup was that Greece should take on more debt.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/greece-debt-res...

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