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Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

The main problem with direct democracy as performed in the US is that it's trivial to manipulate with sufficiently large ad campaigns, because the average voter is not super well informed on most topics and is usually not motivated to dig deeply when i.e. a ride-sharing company spends a cool hundred million to get the legal outcome they want.

This is not to say that the alternative is immune to these problems, but as a former long time california resident direct democracy was directly responsible for many of the state's problems, i.e. prop 13.

In many cases any special interest or sufficiently motivated rich person can also just keep putting their pet issue on the ballot over and over until it passes.

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Do you mean to tell me that the general public weren't in favor of being screwed over by ride sharing companies, so much so that a 7/8 majority would be required to overturn their "democratic " decision? I'm not sure that HN is an appropriate forum for strong, unsupported opinions like that.

That aside, I don't think a system where the spending disparity is in the territory of $200m vs $20m can be perceived as fair. I'd feel upset about it even if it turned out the way I personally wanted.

Or sarcasm, to be fair ;-)

To add to the counter-argument you've already acknowledged, direct democracy at least forces the lobbying (and potential misinformation) out into the open. I think this particular part of the argument might boil down to "who is more likely to be able to discount misinformation and value accurate information, the general public or a handful of elected representatives and their private advisors"?

Sufficiently motivated and rich people are also motivated to repeatedly put their pet issues to our political representatives (sometimes alongside big political contributions).

Seems like a case of pick your poison (and antidotes).

Prop 13 is far from being agreed on as a problem amongst Californians. When your property tax could reasonably exceed your mortgage, something must change.

That prop 13 is not agreed upon by residents of California's population as a major destructive force here is precisely their point.

It has been both absolutely disastrous and incredibly popular.

Disastrous in your view. In the view of many homeowners, not so much.

There are competing interests and multiple perspectives to most of these issues where one position is not absolutely right as compared to the other.

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