Thread by @ddayen

Read the thread, but I'd say payday lenders & debt collectors & drug manufacturers & minimum wage employers & muni bondholders who don't like public banks all had plenty to lose right now from policies recently advanced in the state. But we're both talking around something-

https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1359963595304366081

The biggest advance in recent state policymaking was ending worker misclassification, a groundbreaking law codifying the principle that workers deserve benefits.
And Uber, Lyft & Doordash spent $200 million to evaporate it and literally create their own labor law.

They could do that because of the ballot measure system, which is at the root of most of California's problems, including the housing-related issues Ezra is right to decry.

California for 40+ years has been running a radical experiment of massively subsidizing suburban sprawl through radically reduced property taxes. Prop 13 is the original sin policy that even in 2020 is apparently inviolate, even when just trying to reform the commercial side.

This essential inequity indirectly led to all the other ones. And the ability of any monied interest to buy themselves the law they seek debilitates policymaking to extreme degrees. There was a situation with soda taxes that exemplifies this brilliantly theintercept.com/2018/07/02/sod…

Short version, cities wanted the freedom to establish soda taxes, the industry threatened to run a costly ballot measure, the state lege then passed an exclusion on soda taxes until 2030.

I don't care what you think about soda taxes, that was a hostage situation, because large-money interests know they have a good chance at purchasing democracy. And that underlies the policy apparatus here. It's not just performativeness, it's terrible policy structure.

I think this is a good debate to have and I'm glad Ezra wrote carefully about it, but I think the role of direct democracy, and more important the *consequences* of direct democracy, should never be far from the assessment of CA governance.