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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

The main missing word is "voters," which appears only once: "California's legislature has only made matters worse. A bill it enacted in 2019, ostensibly intended to protect gig workers, threatened to undo the business models of some of the state's biggest tech companies until voters granted them a reprieve in a November referendum."

Voters put California's legislators into office and voters continue to vote for dysfunctional policies, like the continuation of Prop 13 (https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/). While "bad government" is to blame, the proximate cause of "bad government" is still voters.

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That's a great point... and in theory the government elected by the voters is supposed to reflect he will of those who put them into office. But in practice, I don't always see it panning out that way. Prop 22 being a good recent example. California voters elected a state assembly, which passed AB5. But then Prop 22, by direct referendum overturned AB5. So wouldn't this be a case where the government didn't act consistently with the will of the voters?

Nitpick: they didn’t overturn AB5. They just added gig workers to the list of exceptions. Essentially nullifying the whole thing.

I’d say that it’s not a direct comparison because of the immense lobbying effort by Uber, Lyft, etc. that convinced many that the companies would disappear overnight if Prop 22 didn’t pass. An uninformed populace is easier to sway (hence the whole representative democracy part) and they (the companies) took advantage of that for their own gain.

> So wouldn't this be a case where the government didn't act consistently with the will of the voters?

Not necessarily. To illustrate I will give you an even more confounding example from my own stage of Washington. Here, voters passed by referendum a transit proposal to build extensive light rail in the Puget Sound region.

The referendum was a very well put together one. It clearly stated the rail projects planned, how they would be funded and the tax implications involved.

All in all it was a good government wet dream. Responsible legislation, necessary for our growing traffic issues without bloat and funded with short term debt paid through clear taxes all passed by direct democracy.

Two years later another referendum passed by the voters left the transit projects in place but gutted one of the main taxes that was planned to pay for the project. The transit authority is now spending a good deal of time reorienting its project planning to account for this (on top of COVID concerns).

Why? Why would this happen? Honestly because voters are fickle, contradictory and inconsistent.

Very illustrative example. So in this thread, I'm reading the opinion that "it's not the fault of government, it's the fault of the voters". But your point (hope I'm not misrepresenting it), aligns more with "it's actually the voters who are fickle and don't always vote in a way that's aligned with their best interests".

So what are we left with? :(

Some would say, by supporting great public services today, funded by debt paid for by future generations (i.e. not them) that the voters voted in a way precisely aligned with their own best interests.

It's not so much that it's not aligned with their interests. It's more that voters wish to live free of consequences. But most of public policy is about trade-offs. Republicanism is supposed to help this. For example, the longer terms for senators and having them originally chosen by the legislature was supposed to insulate them from the public a bit so they could make people take their medicine.

Unfortunately, Republicanism broke down fairly quickly in America due to special interests and the separation of powers making it very easy to jam up a bill you didn't like. Basically anyone with a lobbyist has a veto power.

My prescription, we need Republicanism. We probably need to do away with referendums or subject them to a lot more parliamentary rules and rigor. To keep thisall from becoming 18th century guilded age corruption we need to do some other things too. We need to effectively kill the power of lobbying. We need to give state and federal representatives massive budgets so they can afford their own researchers. We probably need much larger legislatures, (hundreds or thousands of seats). And we need a new way to choose some of our representatives. Something that incorporates randomness to ensure regular people who live regular lives are actually participating.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

I think it's called stockocracy :-)

That this is a thing makes me feel like way less of a crank. I've been telling anyone who will listen that we need randomness in our politics for like 7 years now. People often do not respond well.

Yeah afaik it was a thing during ancient Greek democracy, also the Viennese used a version of it....

But to add to these thoughts, coming from a society that people often consider as one of the better democracies (Switzerland) I find it very annoying the system of a majority winning... I mean in this day an age of potential cyber voting, if a suggestion was to get 50% or less of positive votes (such a a vote for free public transport in Geneva which got 27%) it should at least be tried out....

Also the inflation of bureaucracy needs to be addressed.. my suggestion would be that those voting get to share part time (if they want to) in the physical running of government as part of it's bureaucracy and receive payment ( it's often a sinecure... especially in these insecure times....

AB5 was in response to the California Supreme Court ruling in Dynamex v. Superior Court. In Dynamex, the court created a new 3-part test that replaced the old Borello standard from 1989. AB5 carved out exceptions in the wage law statute. If it wasn't enacted, most contractors would be considered employees under Dynamex.

> But then Prop 22, by direct referendum overturned AB5.

Voting can also be influenced by short term events.

1) AB5 was a garbage bill so it was a good target.

2) Uber/Lyft/et al poured a MASSIVE amount of scare tactic marketing into this. They also horribly misused their email and phone number database which, in my opinion, should get them drastically fined--I sure as hell didn't give them permission to use my email/phone number to be lobbied to.

3) This was combining with the fact that due to Covid a lot of people are getting zero assistance and, for them, the only money they may be making may be coming in from Uber/Lyft.

This is pretty much a perfect storm for getting a bad proposition through.

Not if the reason the voters keep on voting for the same policies is because they’ve slowly been indoctrinated to believe in the politics.

All the more reason why it's important to vote. When you don't vote, someone votes against your interests.

Well when elected officials misspend tax money, it's only an inevitability that propositions like prop 13 pass. People on here talk about prop 13 without having actually lived in CA before Prop 13. Before prop 13, there was still lots of bad governance, so voters decided to at least cap the amount they were going to spend on stupid policies.

Surprised no one on here has mentioned the obvious gorilla in the room: leftist "progressive" policies that make business impossible.

There are better ways to cap government income than what is effectively rent control for rich people.

A lot of areas have laws that only allow total revenue to go up by say 1% a year. So when they do tax assessments, they have to lower the property tax percentage for everyone equally to stay under the limit.

Sure there are but none had ever gotten to the point of actually being enacted other than prop 13. in a working state, legislators would have self discipline and not require direct propositions to be kept in line.

The voters voted that only people who are silly enough to not already own a house will foot the bill. If I own a multi million dollar house and pay $1k in taxes per year, why wouldn't I vote for all the tax increases in the world (save for repealing prop 13)?

In your example from the article, it talks about how voters did vote in the company's best interests, which keeps those companies in line with the framework used in the rest of the country.

Was that an intentionally undermining of whatever point had set out to make?

Because I can dissect that part too, which is also the same as the rest of the country: nobody else really runs for these positions.

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