4 ms·
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
by bena 1y 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 1y agoWould be interesting to know who petitioned for the votes.
- bena 1y agoThe 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 1y agoThere are also negatives that come with casinos. The taxes are nice but the crime isn't.
- trollbridge 1y agoIn other words, we should let powerful corporations control the agenda of democracy, not the demos (that is, the people)?
- daedrdev 1y agoThere 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 1y agoThere should be an exponential backoff rule for failing propositions.
- daedrdev 1y agoI 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 1y agoI 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.
- namaria 1y agoNo, 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.
- bena 1y agoI 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
- dredmorbius 1y agoThe 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 1y ago[deleted]
- wincy 1y agoThink 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.