In the US, “Karen” is a slang term for someone, typically a middle-aged woman, who is perceived as entitled, demanding, and overly assertive. They complain aggressively and are self-important or unreasonably demanding, sometimes with connotations of privilege or prejudice.
Martin suggested I watch some stuff on how the Swiss Govt works and I stumbled on this video about Swiss strict-ness. Imagine two policemen running after you on the street to give you $150 fine because you spit on the ground, or put home trash into a public trash can. Or a $800 fine because you bought the cheaper meat from France and brought it home to Switzerland.
I’m not implying that a bunch of whiney “Karen” laws will be passed in LL, but just putting it out there that if you allow one type of person to be in the position to make laws and never challenge them, you will end up dealing with a bunch of really stupid laws.
The Swiss are unknown for their peculiar laws for sure but the power of referendum allows us to challenge such laws or even stop them from becoming law in the first place the way I understand how that system is supposed to work.
Yes as far as I can tell, it is somewhat similar to California’s initiative process. In CA a group of citizens can go out and get a ton of signatures and get a proposal put on the ballot to be voted on.
In CA, the problem is that getting 550,000 signatures is incredibly burdensome and so it usually requires money backing it to hire signature-getters. Switzerland is quite a bit easier with 50,000 signatures required but it is still a lot for a single person to do. Both Switzerland and CA have roughly the same pass rate at around 35% of proposals/referendums.
I have lived in CA before and so I know only the largest issues make it through the initiative process. I am wondering if also in Switzerland only the big issues get challenged and so the small laws like an import tax/ban on meat just slides on thru with no one questioning it. The people in that video seemed to not be very aware of what exactly the rules even were. And then they end up supporting the current law even though they personally desire to buy the French meat at half the price.
Hopefully Liberland’s digital system will solve a lot of these problems. Hopefully, it will be much easier than CA or Switzerland for the LL citizens to initiate a vote and be successful in changing a law. Because if the LL govt puts a ton of administrative requirements before a citizen vote, thus ensuring the citizen vote means almost nothing, then LL might not be much different from every other country where the people are pretty much just captives of their govt.
The way the Swiss use the referendum from what I have read is more so a political tool by the different parties there for get out the vote or force the Federal Assembly to draft a law on a certain issue even though they know their measure fail but to get a comprise on that subject. So a lot of the measures fail but by the time that ballot measure gets to the poll there is a comprise bill in the Federal Assembly going through the process of being passed.
