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My grandpa used to say every few years they’d vote on allowing casinos. And every few years the people of Missouri would vote NO casinos. But one time, they vo

• JoshTriplett 2y ago
  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.
• bena 2y ago
  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.
  • xg15 2y ago
    Would be interesting to know who petitioned for the votes.
    • bena 2y ago
      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.
  • tartoran 2y ago
    There are also negatives that come with casinos. The taxes are nice but the crime isn't.
  • trollbridge 2y ago
    In other words, we should let powerful corporations control the agenda of democracy, not the demos (that is, the people)?
    • daedrdev 2y ago
      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.
      • namaria 2y ago
        There should be an exponential backoff rule for failing propositions.
        • daedrdev 2y ago
          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.
          • namaria 2y ago
            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.
            • trollbridge 1y ago
              ... which is why it would be reasonable to allow local government units to implement rent control.
  • dredmorbius 2y ago
    The Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson, 1965: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action> <https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=63B1D140FD13A03F15BF8422C975C36C 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43775531>
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • wincy 2y ago
    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.
• frakt0x90 2y ago
  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/ https://xkcd.com/882/
• mhb 2y ago
  It's not just casinos. It's also the Constitution. And they've had over 200 years.
  • johnnyanmac 2y ago
    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.
    • mhb 2y ago
      Not overtly modifying it with amendments. Nibbling away at it with, for example, insanely broad interpretations of interstate commerce.
• soupfordummies 2y ago
  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.
• cortesoft 2y ago
  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.
  • johnnyanmac 2y ago
    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.
    • cortesoft 2y ago
      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.
      • akoboldfrying 2y ago
        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.
• radicalbyte 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • ludicrousdispla 2y ago
    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
    • radicalbyte 2y ago
      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.
  • daedrdev 2y ago
    I feel like it is literally impossible to make a law that is actually able to do this
• _Algernon_ 2y ago
  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.
• daedrdev 2y ago
  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.
  • johnnyanmac 2y ago
    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.
    • dornan 2y ago
      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.
      • johnnyanmac 2y ago
        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.
        • daedrdev 2y ago
          Build housing since we aee clearly in a shortage since they can raise rent so high
        • JoshTriplett 1y ago
• andrepd 2y ago
  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.
• raxxorraxor 2y ago
  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.