This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 30th, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown.

The process of putting voters directly in charge of selecting legislation has risks and opportunities.

John Caldera, president of the Independence Institute in Colorado,

says the rewards of the initiative process tend to outweigh the costs

and often serve as a check on legislatures that are out of touch with the demands of people.

We spoke last month in Nashville.

Some states, if you want to put a measure on the ballot, the state legislature has to approve it.

And in other states, a group of people with an idea and a passionate commitment to that idea can simply get it on the ballot with enough

support from the public so how do those states differ and and how does that function?

I think you'll find that a lot of the Western states are the ones that created systems to get

around corrupt legislators.

A hundred years ago that a lot of the mining interests and agricultural interests

had a complete lockhold on these states and many of them found a way to get

around through the initiative process. It's called the initiative and

referendum. There's actually two different ways of doing this. The

referendum is that when the legislature passes a new law and the

citizens don't like it they can overturn it with a vote.

The initiative is where the citizens create their own new law and bring it to the people and basically leap right over the

legislature to make these changes. In a state like Colorado our Constitution

clearly says that we the people are actually part of the legislature.

So everyone is a legislator.

All right, so my Libertarian's spidey sense tingles when you want to hear about the initiative and

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