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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

Few democratic countries can manage their finances well. Switzerland comes to mind. But the general experience is that if the population can vote itself more money and services at the cost of a) either someone else, or b) growing national debt, they usually will. We are well down the same road in Czechia.

Europe has a very long history of banking, but at the moment when the Euro was created, most of the obliterated national currencies were weak, reflecting distrust towards their overlords. Switzerland, the country with the strongest national currency in Europe, never felt compelled to join the bloc.

Historically, authoritarian countries tend to go bankrupt over war expenses, democratic countries over handouts. The British pound was strongest at the time when the country was somewhat semi-democratic, neither-nor. But that is a very unstable configuration.

Pick your poison.

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What would be "well managed finances"? The objective is to improve the living, not how you manage the money.

At all points in history most of people were trying to do "things at the expense of someone else" (colonialism, feudalism, etc.). Borrowing and not repaying is one of the most reasonable ways to do that - I think it's a clear improvement from killing/enslaving people, so I think it's an improvement.

The objective is to improve the living without worsening it in the long run.

Andreas Papandreu, the king of Greek debt, is long dead, but debt that he ran up is still saddling the young Greek generation. The artificial living standard growth which resulted from his reckless borrowing helped him getting reelected several times, but the guy died in 1996 and now people who even weren't alive back then are carrying the burden of his electoral success that was bought by unsustainable spending. One of the insidious properties of national debt is that it comes at cost of people who aren't born yet. They are in no way represented in the democratic process, but they shouldn't be ignored either. We understood so much at least with regard to environment (albeit the implementation is far from perfect), we should do the same with regard to finances.

Compared to death and outright enslavement, bankruptcy is better, but it is a choice between Black Death and some treatable cancer. We should strive for better.

You mention bankruptcy, it should be noted that Greece was loaded up with debt it could never hope to pay back to private French and German banks, and it was not allowed to declare itself bankrupt and restructure. Instead, they kept "extending and pretending" rather than restructure the debt. Some economists have called it a modern form of debtors prison.

The Greeks also had no control over monetary policy as a result of being part of the EU currency union so they were essentially at the mercy of the banks and the EU leadership.

There are no authoritarian countries in the bloc. So what is your point?

EU itself is quite an undemocratic institution. Jean-Claude Juncker and his infamous quotes about pushing through legislations is fantastic.

That isn't necessarily the EU being undemocratic but national governments using the EU to do things that are difficult to do back home.

Cant upvote your comment as much as I'd like.

Basically every official function in the EU is either directly voted for (not the EUs fault if people don't vote) or nominated by someone democratically elected.

If you don't see the difference between a truely authoritarian regime and the EU, you never paid attention in history class or current world events.

There's a lot of negotiations behind closed doors where we don't know how decisions are made. E.g. how the EC is formed.

EU is run in authoritarian ways, but so far it's in, let's say, benevolent dictator mode. But same mechanism can be easily abused. And it's already abused. Just in ways that don't affect day-to-day life too much. But overall it's very bad for the society which does not feel attached to decisions of it's servants. Which is the bad thing. Democracies can easily cause a lot of harm (e.g. wars, repressions etc) too. But authocracies ruin societies for a loooong time. Wether they spilled blood or not.

EU lobbying isn't any worse than other political lobbying, both of which are bad.

What the EU does so, is managing to get 27 nations to work on compromises. And it does so quite well, sometimes better and sometimes not. That, obviously, involves a ton of politics (humanity hasn't figured out a different approach yet, heck, even the most authoritarian and absolutists governments had tons of politics). The core fact remains so: all participants in EU governance are either elected directly at EU or national level or nominated by those elected parties.

It’s not about lobbying. And it’s far past managing sovereign nations to compromise. Modern EU is a beast of its own and its own interests. Which so far is power grab from member states. And trying to push through infamous laws. Such as chat surveillance.

The core fact is that EU governance is far removed from the people. It’s too huge and too diverse. But it’s perfect ground for deep state (deep union?) to find ways to work around democratic instruments.

Yep, and that's even before mentioning the absurd cost it has for the little real benefits the citizen truly experience. I don't know about the poorer countries in EU, maybe they get net positive benefits; but as far as I can tell, for a country like France, you only get less efficient use of the taxation money, and the outcome are generally disconnected so not necessarily well spent.

There is a lot of propaganda around what EU is paying for or allowing. But the truth is that each country would be able to do the exact same thing if they wanted to, just with better money efficiency because it wouldn't have to be cut so much for feeding the bureaucracy monster of the EU...

Same here re propaganda. The only difference is we get a lot of your tax money to listen to that propaganda :) But as we catch up economically, we'll get less and less euromonies.

And yes, it's terribly inefficient too. The only thing it's efficient at is building a class of people who rely on EU institutions for their wellbeing. Collaborator class if I may?

Yes, collaborator is a nice way to put it. I have had the (dis)pleasure of spending a bit of time near Brussels with some people that do "work" tightly related/linked to EU stuff.

This is EXACTLY what it feels like; and in most cases it was pretty clear to me that those people cost more money to society than any kind of "value" they were bringing.

But the whole thing is politics anyway, so outcomes are kinda irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. To me it looks like a prototype of some sort of new communist system, where the "leaders" choices are completely disconnected from the rest of the population...

The EU isn't democratic in that basically every official function is only through multiple indirections dependent on the voters. So the will of the people and the sovereignty of the voters is diluted through a multitude of political backroom deals that are anything but democratic. Just look at how von der Leyen came to her job.

Back in the day, when there was still a communist bloc, this kind of system, a "soviet republic" consisting of a hierarchy of workers councils was the usual example for how you can have elections but not have democracy. Because the hierarchy of councils will dilute any kind of will and sovereignty of the people into the will of the political upper class.

I think this is a bit misleading. The EU is the way it is because of democratic decisions. The commission isn’t democratic because it’s a civil service. The Parliament is less powerful than you’d expect because it would challenge national governments. The true power of the EU is the Council of Ministers, which are the representatives of the national governments.

Most people looking for “more democracy” are actually advocating for a more politicised commission, which is a very bad idea.

And this civil service have a ton of power to bring forward policies. Which is undemocratic.

IMO more politics at EU level overall is a bad idea. The strength of europe is diversity and competition within the region. Not a bureaucracy superstate on shaky legs with a rather long runway to die.

European Parliament is not even a parliament because it can't propose any laws in the first place. It can only approve or decline laws proposed by the European Commission. It can't act on its own. The only such a parliament in the world

You're just saying it's a technocracy in a nicer way

I’m saying it’s what people want. Very few people complaining about it being undemocratic actually want it to be “more democratic” because that would involve a transfer of power from the member states to the EU.

In as much as it is what people actually want through revealed preference, it’s as democratic as they come.

My last point (there are more of them in the comment) is that historically, authoritarian countries have gone bankrupt from other reasons than democratic countries, but democracies are prone to bankruptcies too. There is nothing about democracy that results in good management of public finances.

The original article uses "Antidemocratic" as a subtly negative value judgment. One of my points was that "Democratic" management of finances has often turned sour, too.

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