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.