Jeremy Zawodny, blogger and Yahoo employee extraordinaire, recently discussed the internet gambling industry and raised some interesting questions:
That got me wondering… What’s the big deal about letting someone gamble without flying to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, etc. to play slot machines or blackjack? Is it actually a danger to society or is this the remnant of some economic policy whose goals elude me?We have state lotteries (i.e. “the tax on people with poor math skills”) all over this country. What’s wrong with using a computer to try to win some money?
As Rothbard and others have pointed out, this wanton Puritanism is hypocrisy plain and simple. In addition, is there an objective line that shelters online securities trading from an arbitrary definition? Why is investing in stocks online not metaphorically seen as gambling?
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Because, in theory, stock investing is a positive-sum game.
Since aggressive violence is a negative-sum game, and since 99% of government activity consists of aggressive violence, perhaps most of what government does should be illegal, too.
Illegal gambling is illegal because government isn’t part of “The House”.
The government just doesn’t like it when people make decisions on their own.
1) Presumably State sanctioned/run gambling assures a payout while private sector may not, and when it doesn’t, someone either has to accept it or they swim with the fishes.
2) Gambling is thought to be bad in that people lose the children’s milk money and the mortgage/rent money, and so the dependents become burdens upon the State one way or another.
Puritanism is simply the conservatives social policy to disallow behaviors that might cause economic harm to the populace at large, unfed children and desperados who have lost their savings and so turn to desperate measures to survive.
That’s the theory anyway, but as in most cases of such logic, the baby is thrown out with the bath water and the vast majority who engage in “vices” do so responsibly. Social policy of the left and right seems to take the upper (negative) tail of the distribution curve and use it as an excuse to invade private affairs beyond what the area under that part of the curve should warrant.
We are living in an age of extremism in public policy and most just shuffle along obediently.
Metaphorically, buying stocks can be seen as gambling, online or no. The two activities have many elements in common, including the associated psychological factors. One advantage gamblers have is that the odds are well known, as is the certainty of losing over the long run!
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