Voting for People Who Aren't Born Yet

Seven states will put an environmental measure in front of voters this November, and reading through all nine at once — a $500 million Arkansas bond, a Colorado sales-tax carve-out, a right to hunt written into a state constitution, a right to buy natural gas written into another, a Georgia acreage limit, a Louisiana lead-pipe fund, a Massachusetts conservation trust, a Rhode Island watershed bond, and California's Proposition 45, already covered at length in Proposition 45 and the Two Kinds of Delay and Owning Essential — the topic labels stop being the interesting variable. Water, wildlife, energy, land: none of that groups them usefully. What groups them is a structural choice buried in each one, visible only once you ask a single question of every measure on the list: who, exactly, is bound by a "yes," and did that person get a vote?

Most ballot measures bind the people who voted on them. These don't, not entirely. Two of the nine borrow against a taxpayer who hasn't been born and can't yet object. Two more try to freeze a policy preference into a state constitution specifically so a future legislature — elected by future voters, responding to future facts — can't easily undo it. The rest are more ordinary, and worth naming as the baseline the first two categories deviate from.

The bonds: spending now, billing later

Arkansas's Natural Resources Commission Bond Measure authorizes up to $500 million in general-obligation bonds (GOBs) for water treatment, waste disposal, pollution abatement, drainage, irrigation, flood control, and wetlands projects. Rhode Island's Environment and Watershed Protection and Development Bond Measure authorizes $55 million for similar purposes at a tenth the scale. Both are structured the same way underneath the different numbers: the state borrows against its own future tax revenue, spends the proceeds on projects this year's voters have decided are worth having, and repays the debt — principal and interest — out of taxes collected from residents over the following ten, twenty, sometimes thirty years, a population that overlaps only partially with the electorate that approved the borrowing in the first place.

That's not a criticism specific to environmental bonds; it's how essentially all general-obligation municipal debt works — a flood-control system or a wetlands restoration project genuinely can outlive the generation that pays for it, and spreading the cost across the years the benefit actually accrues over is not obviously less fair than making one cohort of taxpayers absorb the whole bill up front. A reservoir built this decade serves the people who move to the state in the next one. Financing it as if only the current population will ever benefit would be its own kind of unfairness, running the opposite direction.

But the mechanism deserves to be named plainly rather than waved through under the environmental label, because a bond measure is doing something a straightforward appropriation isn't: it's a present electorate making a binding financial commitment on behalf of a future one that has no seat in the room. A resident who turns eighteen the year after the bond passes inherits a portion of that debt's service obligation with exactly as much say in the matter as a resident who voted against it — none, retroactively, either way. That's true of every bond ever issued, environmental or otherwise, but it's worth sitting with specifically here, because "environmental protection" is the kind of cause built to make that structural fact disappear from view. Nobody campaigns against clean water. Fewer people notice that the actual question on the ballot isn't "should we protect this wetland" — nearly everyone agrees on that — but "should this specific cohort of future taxpayers, none of whom are in this election, be the ones who pay for it."

The constitutional locks: freezing a preference against future correction

Colorado carries the more unusual pair. The Right to Hunt and Fish Initiative would write a constitutional right to hunt, fish, and take wildlife into the state constitution, while nominally preserving the legislature's regulatory authority over how that right gets exercised. The Right to Purchase and Sell Natural Gas for Cooking or Heating Amendment would do the structurally identical thing for a different practice: a constitutional guarantee that Coloradans can buy, and utilities can sell, natural gas for cooking and home heating.

Neither measure changes what's legal today. Coloradans can already hunt, fish, and heat their homes with gas; nothing about current law is under active repeal. What each measure changes is how hard it becomes to change that in the future — moving the underlying policy out of the statute book, where a simple legislative majority can revise it as conditions change, and into the constitution, where undoing it requires the far higher bar of another constitutional amendment. That's the entire function of the amendment, stated without the campaign gloss: not to legalize something currently illegal, but to make a currently uncontroversial practice much harder for a future legislature — responding to future information, future costs, or a future electorate that simply weighs the tradeoffs differently — to restrict.

There's a real liberty argument for doing exactly that, and this site has made versions of it elsewhere: Personal Sovereignty argues that decisions about how someone lives, heats their home, or spends their time belong with the person living that life rather than with a distant regulatory body weighing costs it doesn't personally bear, and a constitutional floor is a genuine defense against a future majority deciding, on someone else's behalf, that a personal practice they don't share isn't worth the tradeoff anymore. A rural Coloradan who hunts for subsistence or a homeowner who heats with gas because it's what their house was built for has a real interest in not having that option revoked by a legislature seated decades from now, elected by a very different population, responding to pressures that have nothing to do with them.

But the same move that protects a practice from a future majority's overreach also protects it from that future majority's correction, and a constitution has no mechanism for telling the two apart in advance. If natural gas heating turns out to carry a cost — to air quality, to climate, to infrastructure economics — that isn't visible yet, or isn't yet weighed the way this year's electorate weighs it, the amendment doesn't ask that future body to make its own judgment on the merits. It hands that future body a constitutional wall to climb over first, regardless of what it eventually concludes. The entrenchment is content-neutral in exactly the way that should give a liberty-minded reader pause: it works exactly as well for a policy this site would defend as for one it wouldn't, because a constitutional amendment doesn't know the difference between protecting a right and freezing an era's answer to a genuinely open question. This year's majority gets to bind every future majority to its own conclusion — which is a strange thing for a "right" to do, if a right is supposed to mean the state can't act, rather than meaning today's voters can't be argued with tomorrow.

The rest: mostly ordinary, one exception worth flagging

Not every measure on this fall's ballot fits either family, and the contrast is useful. Colorado's sporting-goods sales-tax retention measure lets the state keep and spend tax revenue it already collects on conservation and wildfire prevention rather than routing it elsewhere under an older revenue cap — a straightforward reallocation of existing money, reversible by ordinary statute, that binds no one who isn't already in this year's tax base. Louisiana's measure permitting public funds for lead and copper service-line replacement on private property is an authorization, not an appropriation or a bond — it opens a door that a future legislature and future budget cycles still have to walk through, and can just as easily close. Massachusetts's Nature for All Fund and Rhode Island's watershed bond are more of the same two families already covered above, at smaller scale.

Georgia's measure is the one worth a second look, because it launders an ordinary legislative preference through the same constitutional-amendment machinery Colorado is using for its rights. Doubling the acreage a single owner can enroll in the state's conservation-use property-tax classification, from 2,000 to 4,000 acres, is a tax-policy change of the kind state legislatures make by simple statute all the time — nothing about setting a different acreage cap requires constitutional permanence. Routing it through a ballot amendment anyway buys the same thing Colorado's rights amendments buy: insulation from the next legislature's second thoughts, applied here not to a personal practice shared by millions of residents but to a tax break whose main beneficiaries are the owners of the largest landholdings in the state. The entrenchment tool is the same one being used for a genuinely popular claim about personal liberty in Colorado. In Georgia it's being used to fix a specific number, benefiting a specific and fairly narrow class of large landowners, permanently enough that a future legislature finding the number too generous would need a statewide ballot campaign to say so.

What ties the two families together

A bond measure and a constitutional-rights amendment look like opposite instincts — one spends money, the other refuses to spend political capital ever again on a settled question — but they're doing the same structural thing from opposite directions. Both take a decision that an ordinary legislature could otherwise revisit each budget cycle or each session, and move it outside the reach of the people who will actually be living with the consequences when the bill comes due or the facts change. A bond binds a future taxpayer's wallet. A rights amendment binds a future legislature's judgment. Neither binds the electorate that's actually voting this November — that electorate is the one doing the binding, not the one being bound, which is exactly what makes both mechanisms so easy to vote for.

None of this is an argument against issuing environmental bonds or against constitutionalizing a genuine right — this site has already made the case, elsewhere, for taking personal-liberty claims seriously even when they cut against a fashionable environmental consensus. It's an argument for noticing that "environmental measure" is doing a lot of the same rhetorical work here that "affordable" and "essential" did in The Municipal Trilemma and Owning Essential: a label with near-universal sympathy, attached to a mechanism — debt service, constitutional entrenchment — whose actual reach extends well past the people currently being asked to approve it. A voter weighing any of these nine measures is being asked, more honestly than the ballot language admits, not just whether they support clean water or the right to heat a home with gas, but whether they trust themselves to bind someone who isn't in the room to answer.

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A note on how this piece was written: every argument, source, and structural decision in this essay is ours — we chose the framework for grouping these measures, worked out the logic connecting them, and directed what each paragraph needed to say. The sentences themselves were drafted with AI assistance from that outline and then edited by hand. We'd rather say that plainly than have a reader guess at it.

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Sources: Ballotpedia, "2026 ballot measures"; California Secretary of State, certification of measures for the November 3, 2026 general election ballot; Ballotpedia, "Georgia Increase Acre Limit for Agriculture and Timber Conservation Use Property Tax Classification Amendment (2026)"; Ballotpedia, "Rhode Island Environment and Watershed Protection and Development Bond Measure (2026)".