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.