You vote them out once in a while maybe if the herd does not forget being fooled. And their place is taken by the same sort.

And why do you think the same people would vote differently for some crazy idea directly or via the party promoting that same thing?

> You vote them out once in a while maybe if the herd does not forget being fooled. And their place is taken by the same sort.

Again, referendums doesn't magically make politics and politicians disappear. It's a rather terrible instrument for governingf.

> why do you think the same people would vote differently for some crazy idea directly or via the party promoting that same thing?

The crazy idea isn't "Tax X". The idea is that parties create budgets and the budgets must be balanced. That is: you might have one party saying "We'd add tax X and fund program Y" and another party saying "We don't want spending proram Y because we don't want to raise taxes".

The "crazy idea" isn't Tax X or program Y. The crazy idea would be to have the cake and eat it: to have the increased spending and not the increased tax. Now, you can of course solve this in referendums too. You can ask people "Do you want program Y, funded by Tax X" and people can say yes or no. The problem with this is, that it snowballs very quickly. Every expenditure ties into everything else because a state budget is extremely complex. A program might be a useless waste unless another program is also funded. And a tax might not cover an expense unless something else also happens (and so on and so forth). In the end, to get something that is possible (consistent) you would often get one big direct democracy vote: which budget do you want A or B or C? Which is fine! But who would create those options?

The least bad solution to that that i know of is: let people freely suggest these. Let them organize in groups and people can vote for their ideas as consistent sets of ideas such as "budgets".

We are not talking about eliminating politicians. You said the direct democracy is worse than some other, perhaps representative. I asked why and you keep repeating because it is bad. Sorry I just stop here.

The above message was the “why”: because it forces consistent (e.g budget neutral) ideas to be voted on.

Direct democracy doesn’t do that so isn’t viable for all decisions. Personally I think it’s useful in so few situations that it’s best left alone.