This is the classic result of the problem with democracy and “concentrated benefits and disperse costs”. Legal gambling is a HUGE money making opportunity for casinos, and for most voters it is just a minor negative. Of course, utility wise, the minor cost times the number of voters is much higher than the concentrated benefit, but the concentration makes it worth it for casinos to keep fighting for legalization. The cost of fighting for it is less than the benefit when it is legalized.

Now that it is legalized, though, there is no one who has a concentrated enough cost to fight for its reversal. It is more rational to just suffer the small cost of gambling instead of fighting hard for its repeal.

So as you say, they only have to win the fight once, and it is won forever, and society is slightly worse off.

This is the exact same reason Intuit keeps winning the tax battle… it matters more to them than anyone else, even though it makes it a little bit worse for everyone.

It also doesn't help that these days the stwte/country is probably large enough to gather ebouygh of a petition for whatever you want. Just word it nicely and you can get 10k, 100k people to say "sure why not?"

Apathy reigns as usual.

It isn’t apathy, it is rationality. Why would I spend a ton of time fighting against a problem that is a minor inconvenience to me? I have a lot of important things going on in my life, and a limited amount of time and energy to do things. It isn’t rational for me (or most people) to spend a bunch of time, money, and effort fighting against legalized gambling.

There literally isn’t enough time in the day for me to fight against everything, so you pick and choose where to spend your energy.

Agree.

I like the idea of policy changes like this having an expiry date a few years in the future, which forces a periodic revote if some party wants to keep the new policy. Like a political office term, this should be long enough to give businesses a timeframe they can plan around, and an opportunity for voters to see how the policy played out.

Perhaps it would lead to an ever-increasing pile of legal "confirmation dialog boxes" that bore the public. But I like that the default action (doing nothing) would lead to regulations being deleted, as there are few forces that act to reduce regulation, and having too many regulations is another slow-burn energy sink for everyone.

We have this in WA and it's arguably very dysfunctional, particularly because due to property tax caps it has kind of turned into government-by-renewed-levy, and causes all sorts of headaches when one particular levy to fund one project has a surplus and another has a deficit due to completely normal deviations in tax projections.

Thanks for the data point!

How would that work for something like legalize gambling? The default state would be for gambling to be legal (since a law is required to make it illegal). So in a few years when the `legalize gambling` law was up for review, what would happen?

Which policies would be up for review? Everything? Do we have to re-outlaw murder ever 5 years?

I don't see a problem with having to re-criminalise gambling every few years -- do you?

Regarding murder, I don't have a problem with having to periodically re-criminalise that either, though I think that for cases like this where there's enough of a consensus, the ban could be either permanent or much longer-term (e.g., every 50 years). In fact, having overly frequent votes on such serious crimes might encourage people to try to overturn them as a prank.

I don't think I trust our government on this. Look how many times they threaten shut down for routine things like increasing the debt ceiling; I can just imagine representatives threatening to not renew the outlawing of murder unless something else is added to the bill.

>Why would I spend a ton of time fighting against a problem that is a minor inconvenience to me

That's ideally why we elect proper representatives and have advocacy groups who can expend that energy. We don't do too much better there, spending a fee hours researching who will actually fight in our interest instead of enabling the armies of minor inconveniences to stack up.

Sad thing about the US is that it's a reactive country, not a preventative one. It really doesn't try to act on stuff until it's arguably too late.

That you don’t have the power to fight for or against these measures is explained by you not living in a sufficiently democratic society. A democratic society would have democratic organizations that deliberate on these matters. Professional lobbying is the opposite of that due to concentration of wealth.

As someone who has done signature collection this is mostly correct but it ignores what the actual barrier is which is proof of work which is proof of money. The idea that a ballot initiative that's just a good idea someone had winding up on your voting paper will never happen because no one has money to collect signatures from millions of people and the annoying ceremony related to it. And this is working as designed because citizen ballot initiatives are despised by legislatures because the only reason to need them is because your representatives are fucking up that badly. So there's two kinds of ballot initiatives generally

* Coalition of nonprofits desperately trying to actually represent the will of the people in defiance of the legislature. Good recent example would be abortion amendments that pass without too much trouble in red states. Democrats might need to adjust their barometer on how Americans actually feel about immigration but Republicans have refused to acknowledge the Overton Window on abortion is passing them by.

* Cash grabs because some financially interested party realized the money to get legislation this way is worth the investment.

Like inflation messing with fines, but population growth undermining signature-gathering to be a pointless formality.

Externalities

It’s more of a problem with oligarchy and oligarchic tendencies.

Don’t make things into a game theory problem. It’s a power problem.

I am not “making” anything into a game theory problem, game theory is simply explaining WHY it becomes a problem.

How to solve the problem is a separate issue, but the problem can be described with game theory.

Many supposed explanations of the problems with democracy are really about the nominative democracy not being democratic enough. Concentrated power of a non-democratic entity. That’s the parsimonious explanation.

They did this with a giant new jail and its financing via sales tax in my hometown.

First they bundled it in the regular November election. It failed. So then they bundled it in a run-off or primary election. It still failed. Finally they ran it on a solo ballot and it finally passed.

I was like 19 or so. Voted against it every time but that was sort of an eye-opening moment for young me.

When America rebuilds itself after the coming fall I really hope that the new founders implement an exponential back-off into things like this.

yeah, the second time an issue has a vote, it should be a vote on whether to have another vote 'to vote on the issue'... then if that second vote fails, then the third time it comes up it should be a vote on whether to vote again in order to decide whether to have another 'vote on the issue' ... repeat as necessary

Yeah and there should be a kind of two-phase commit added.

Take the Brexit vote: there should have been one vote to say "do we want to leave the EU" and then a second vote where we either accepted the CONCRETE negotiated deal, or stayed.

It builds resilience and redundancy into systems for the big questions.

I feel like it is literally impossible to make a law that is actually able to do this

Same thing is how encryption backdoor laws and other erosions of rights work. Be vigilant because the first time the vote goes through, they will never hold another vote.

From a memorable villain monologue:

> all we need... is for one of us, just one, sooner or later to have the thing we're all hoping for. One good day.

It's like p-hacking but with voting. Try enough tests/samples/whatever and eventually you'll get something that's "statisitically significant". Like the old xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/882/

It's not just casinos. It's also the Constitution. And they've had over 200 years.

Well yea. That why modifying the constitution is a monumental effort. They don't want things to sway as the congress and president shifts. It was easier for Texas to try and secede than to try and change the constitution in their favor.

Not overtly modifying it with amendments. Nibbling away at it with, for example, insanely broad interpretations of interstate commerce.

To be fair, when you don't have casinos, you don't have casino taxes, casino employment, casino tourism, etc.

Also, you don't just "have" casinos, building any building of that size is at the very least a multi-month affair and likely multiple years.

So once you say "yes", you've set something in motion that is way harder to unwind than it was to kick off.

Also, I can see it being the casinos themselves asking permission to enter the state. Once they're allowed in, why would they ask to leave? That would be the job of someone else.

In other words, we should let powerful corporations control the agenda of democracy, not the demos (that is, the people)?

There is a similar case in California where every year a ballot initiative is proposed to repeal a law banning local rent control. Despite it failing every election it continues to get proposed. So its not just corporations who can do this, the demos do it too.

There should be an exponential backoff rule for failing propositions.

I don't like the idea because if you notice public opinion are slowly shifting on an policy you could purposefully propose it each backoff date to entrench it for like 8 or 16 years when public perception does swap.

I was joking, but my serious opinion on this is that direct democracy doesn't scale. For a country like Switzerland that is basically a small patchwork of villages up in the mountains it is probably fine, but for a polity of 39 million people and one of the biggest economies on Earth I should say it's a bad fit. Maybe for some local propositions.

... which is why it would be reasonable to allow local government units to implement rent control.

No, that doesn't follow at all. My point is about the scale of ballot measure not the effects. That would be for the State legislature to decide, in my opinion, not a State-wide referendum, is the point.

I was not trying to say that.

I was implying the repeated votes to allow casinos were being put forward by the casinos themselves. They had a vested interest in the vote.

They have no vested interest in the opposite. Someone with that interest needs to lobby to get that vote to the people. Expecting the casinos to do that is weird

The Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson, 1965:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action>

<https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=63B1D140FD13A03F15BF842...>

Very strongly recommended. I'd stumbled across this in my uni days, and its power and insight were obvious even to naive me then. It's since emerged as a classic of economics.

PaulHoule is also a fan: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43775531>

There are also negatives that come with casinos. The taxes are nice but the crime isn't.

Would be interesting to know who petitioned for the votes.

The casinos. That’s the only reason it kept coming up.

If the people want them gone, they have to do the same as the casinos did.

Think of all the jobs we’re missing out on by fentanyl being a controlled substance! All the pharmaceutical jobs and good middle class workers that could help with the injections, the poor needle makers. And think of the poor morticians and doctors losing out on the income from the overdoses!

Just because something costs a lot of money or takes a lot of effort doesn’t mean it’s good? It’s a non sequitur.

There is a similar case in California where every year a ballot initiative is proposed to repeal a law banning local rent control, in the last election it was prop 33. Despite it failing every election it continues to get proposed.

That one would unfortunately have a huge impact on some people. Aka, anyone who may need to house themselves one days but can't afford to buy. Sure hope we keep fighting that.

Rent control is beneficial to incumbent long term tenants but is pretty bad for everyone else including those who are looking for an apartment. It's one of the many "pro-renter" regulations that constrains supply and makes rent higher.

Price controls don't work for groceries or gasoline, why would they work for rent?

If you can find data in support of such a policy I'd be interested to see it.

Rent control serves as a means to add stability. If landlords could evict tenants without cause and immediately rent to someone else for $100 a month more whenever the market changes, they would. That's bad for everyone.

The problem is that when a tenant has been renting the same place for 20 years with the landlord raising the rent as much as legally allowed each year, and it's drastically below market rates, but if the landlord evicts them they can't rent to anyone else for a year. The solution to that is to build more housing to bring down market rates so that people aren't trapped in one place forever.

Yes. But the thing is incumbent renters don't really have many rights in the US. The landlord is perfectly free to kick you out by not renewing the lease, and they need no reason to not renew it. So any benefits can be nullified by the very party the law is trying to protect you from.

>Price controls don't work for groceries or gasoline, why would they work for rent?

Whats the alternative? They increase rent to the point where people are kicked out anyway? Every option leads to unattainable rent except for the rich.

Build housing since we aee clearly in a shortage since they can raise rent so high

The alternative is to build more houses, and keep building, and keep building, until everyone can afford it. You cannot solve a supply shortage by controlling price; that just transforms an affordability problem into an availability problem. You solve a supply shortage by increasing the supply.

Sure. What's the intermediate solution while we face inevitable zoning lawsuits, economic constraints from recession, and other NIMBYism? By the same logic we should have had a high speed rail built pre-COVID. But if there's one thing laws know how to do, it's stall.

The intermediate solution is to build a little more housing, everywhere that you can win those battles, and encourage people to disfavor more restrictive areas until those restrictions are finally defeated. You cannot solve a supply problem by restricting prices, you can only turn an affordability problem into an availability problem.

You're assuming the people are able to move out of the restrictive areas and find work in the less restrictive areas. That doesn't tend to be how urban density works, unfortunately. Mayyybe if we had the high speed rails ready it'd have merit...

I woildnt mind moving to central valley if we weren't in an age where everyone is RTO'ing and there's zilch for tech jobs in Fresno and Bakersfield. Cheaper housing with no job market is a net negative.

>you cannot solve a supply provlem by restricting prices

Is it really a supple provlem, though? The US keeps saying it's unemployment and homelessness is so historically low. It seems more like housing is getting greedy and doesn't care how many leave the city. Tha very much can be fixed with proper pricing controls.

> You're assuming the people are able to move out of the restrictive areas and find work in the less restrictive areas.

No, I'm not assuming that. It's an awful thing that many people do not have flexibility in where they live. That's made more awful by restrictions on building that make it difficult for people to live affordably in many places.

You asked for an intermediate solution; the intermediate solution is "do what we can, where we can, while working towards the full solution".

> Is it really a supple provlem, though? [...] It seems more like housing is getting greedy and doesn't care how many leave the city.

The ability for housing to charge higher prices is a supply problem. There's much more demand than supply, so if someone can't pay the asked rent, the next person coming along will; as long as that demand is higher than the supply, price controls can't solve the problem. For the most part (ignoring some additional perverse incentives we should also address, which sometimes lead people to leave rental properties empty for a long time), if that wasn't happening, the rents would go down until there's a tenant willing to pay them. If it's possible for people to raise rents massively and still have tenants, build more houses until that's no longer possible.

(There are other ways to "solve" the problem, but they aren't desirable ones. If the local job market collapses, demand will go down massively, and there will no longer be a supply shortage, so rents will go down (or get converted to sales, and sale prices will go down). That's not a positive outcome for a location, or for the people in it. I mention this only because there can be other markets, other than housing, where "decrease demand" may be desirable rather than "increase supply".)

There are additional depths of complexity here, in that the market for sales and the market for rents interact in a variety of ways, as well as the job market in various locations and the market for sales/rentals. "build more" is still the answer to a lot of those problems, but I still want to acknowledge the additional complexity.

Kinda how the European """parliament""" works. It's the only body called "parliament" in the entire world that I'm aware of which does not have the power to propose laws.

Therefore: if the commission wants a law, all they have to do is keep trying. If it fails, they try again. If it passes, well it only has to pass once. Because the parliament can't introduce bills which means it can't repeal existing laws.

This will be controversial, but it is essentially true. This is like EU style democracy. If the vote never passes too often, stop asking and do it anyway.