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Comment by long_time_gone | Hacker News Reader

More like, we'd be better off if voters didn't demand short-term actions with negative long-term effects.

Precisely this. In LA there are constant referendums about homelessness, in CA massive budget increases, and yet, nobody will allow a shelter or multi-family unit to be constructed in their neighborhood, lest their soaring land value peak.

In CA, it's my firm belief that people have a tad too much power over the minutae of government operations. What did we even elect people for if we are going to try to solve everything with referendums and protests?

For some reason, referendum-soaked Switzerland is governed somehow more sanely.

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Switzerland

If you somehow could swap the US population with the Swiss (times 30, of course), I imagine our homeless problems would evaporate within a few years. I believe homelessness represents a social issue in North America, not a political one. I live in New York and I don't think any amount of affordable housing, handouts, or government intervention solve fix the problems of the people I walk past every day, nor will they stop the pipeline of people soon to be in the same position.

Luckily, SB9 and SB10 are massive pushes in the right direction for California, accompanied by incandescent rage of my local NIMBYs.

those bills are for political optics and favor, not to really make a dent in the homelessness issue. they're designed to allow people who already own land to make some extra cash, not to provide housing (less than 2% of CA residential properties can even take advantage of them). what we need are real, significant zoning reforms. things like making every residential zone mixed-use (residential + light commercial), and remove setback requirements, floor area ratio (FAR) restrictions, yard/parking specifications, and height restrictions.

So CA is too democratic in your opinion? It should slide more towards tyranny?

Sounds more like too much direct democracy, and needs to slide further towards representative.

You mean too little direct democracy. Only a handful of people are actually engaging in local politics and therey are no longer representing the community as a whole. Special interest groups are the opposite of democracy.

Is that your opinion on marijuana policy in California?

Which issues, pray tell, are best governed by local control and which are best governed by top-down, remote decision makers?

The emperor can also be your representative, and so is Putin to russians, and the slightly more complex US system. The slider is democracy to tyranny, just because we dont yet have democracy in most or all countries doesn't change anything here. We just have twisted its meaning to describe some decision power when choosing tyrants. Either all decide equally-democracy , or fewer to very few or one-tyranny.

Feels like a flamebaity false-dichotomy.

Is it really tyrannical to, say, elect officials to act on our behalf and consider long-term impacts and x-order effects?

Because to me that just sounds a little more "republic" and a little less "direct democracy".

Absolutely not. Democracy can be fair and open elections, not crowdsourced legislation.

That's exactly it. One of the reasons that the US (and other representative democracies) have limits on direct voter rule explicitly to prevent a "too democratic" situation yielding "mob rule" outcomes.

Sounds like a reason to justify tyranny to me. What do you mean mob rule. In a (true) democratic society just a small group can change something the majority disagrees with because they got together? The majority is also together in the same matter isnt it?

Well, the idea recognizes two concepts:

- We don't want the minority enforcing on the majority

- We don't want a plurality or even a majority enforcing on a minority under certain circumstances

So, for instance, even if 300 million Americans think "sfe22 should be stripped of their assets and have it given to us 300 million" that's not going to happen. Yes, that is 'tyrannical' of you to have such power but it is so nonetheless.

Unfortunately I don’t agree. If 95% Americans want to steal my assets, something is wrong with the them (or me), and I should have probably seen it coming and leave. Why would I want to live in such extreme society anymore. If I was used to set an example that still would tell many a lot about this hypothetical america. Would a tyrant really be of any help then, maybe if it was somehow “good” to me, for a limited time but definitely does not justify its existence and cost on freedom and wealth.

Right, and that's your thesis for the world, but America lives under a different thesis, and some individual rights are protected, _even_ if 95% of people disagree.

Who decides what are individual rights? Would they be held up if 95% disagree with it? I mean it might work idk, it would just not be a democracy.

You're right. 95% is a bit much since they'd just amend the constitution and whack me. But it goes up to 66%-1 in the legislature, and I think that would correspond to ~75% in real life, so that's good.

That's the paradox isn't it. Mob rule ends up being tyranny.

Democracy isn't a Boolean value, it's a cluster of loosely related concepts and practices.

Total democracy is mob rule of the majority.

Voters didn’t order the SROs in bunker hill destroyed. Follow the money. Who stood to gain in the time when that SRO was raized into a parking lot then turned into the hotel Bonaventure in downtown LA? It wasn’t voters, it was a handful of politically connected people.

I think you may underrate how much people in the local community hated SROs. It was definitely politically popular at the time to remove them.

And why not allow them now? If you compare the housing market to the job market, the general opinion (in the US) is that there should be very few restrictions for jobs in terms of low salaries and work conditions (and the lack of unions allows that). The same reasonning should allow to have low quality housing but cheap. But there are no downside for the ones who profit from employing people with very low salaries and very poor work conditions, whereas letting exist cheap housing indeed makes the property value around them go down. So it is really a choice made today not to reduce homelessness.

Yeah, voting whites hated the low income blacks latinos and asians who rented these, doesn't mean it was the right thing to do.

You can drill-down to a specific SRO building to find a unique story, but the overwhelming trend from 1960-2010 was to eliminate SRO because of health and safety concerns.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

A positive interest rate demands short term actions with immediate effects and disregards negative long term effects. Getting rid of positive interest rates requires eliminating all monopolies. It is a cat and mouse game but it is THE cat and mouse game. If you win you win big.

Collectively we would be better off but many individuals would not be which is the crux of the problem.

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