There is evil in this world, of all sorts. It grows out of pure hearts, the emergent effect of a million good intentions. It grows out of ambition, sorrow, rage, and every human emotion under the sun. There is no simple answer to the vast majority of it. It is an ultimately human failing, in nearly all of its forms, and it sometimes seems that to purge ourselves of it would be such a change that whatever remained afterwards would be abhorrent.
That’s not to say we haven’t tried. The winding roads of history are littered with attempts to kill various evils, with varying, often ironic, results. Prohibition and corn flakes. The most successful and enduring attempts are constantly belittled for being imperfect or, worse, succeeding through imperfect methods.
Gambling suffers approximately zero of this complexity. Las Vegas was not built with a single noble intention in mind. The very structure of a scratch-card game ensures that society would be better off without its arrival. Not only is it a tumor, it is something that is very minimally entwined with everything else. Let me be clear. To excise wrath from our hearts would be to cut them apart. To excise gambling is relatively nothing. Nothing! NOTHING!
Let me be clear - I don’t think I am the first person to realize gambling is evil. I know I am very, very far from it. But somewhere along the way, we lost the fucking plot. Politicians campaign on complicated socioeconomic distribution schemes with a million knock-on effects. I don’t know if I have ever heard a politican said they would put restrictions on gambling, which is up there in the “no lead in drinking water” and “no murder” tier of uncomplicatedly good goals.
I’ve drawn the sketch, but let me color in just how amazingly free and delicious of a lunch we’re leaving on the sidewalk. Lotteries are essentially a money redistribution system bolted on to the side of our economy, so we’ll have to examine what exactly an economy is, and what money is, to get a clearer picture of why they’re so evil.
All economies are essentially systems for managing the distribution of goods and services produced by people. A good economy will result in an “efficient” production of goods and services, where “efficient” is up for debate depending on someone’s personal beliefs. However, gambling produces a distribution of goods that is worse by nearly anyone’s metric.
In a money-based economy, which all economies of any considerable scale are based on currently, money is an intermediary in this goods-distribution process, representing an abstract amount of value added that would otherwise be hard to transfer and hold onto. It is due to a few properties: It is splittable, holds value well (ideally), easily transportable, plentiful, and universally recognized.
This is why people are both wrong and right when they say money is worthless. They’re right in that it has no intrinsic value - but it has immense extrinsic value, because universally recognizing it lets people do beneficial actions that are otherwise impossible. A farmer can sell his harvest in the fall and use the profits to support himself throughout the year, while barter would mean his grain spoiled before he could trade some of it. In this vein, they’re wrong in that just printing more of it would therefore not hurt anything - it would hurt those beneficial actions. The farmer’s money would lose value, so it becomes a less efficient store of value that he very much provided to others.
(This is also why you should be very, very, very, very concerned when the government meddles in the economic system, because power over the economy is power over the distribution of goods and services, which is all that matters when it is the only way to obtain goods and services.)
In the end, though, money doesn’t matter at all, except so far as it affects the distribution of goods and services in an economy. Monopoly money does not let you buy things and therefore affect that distribution - local currency does.
With this understanding in mind, let’s see how gambling affects the distribution of money among people, and how that ends up changing the distribution of goods and services in an economy. Let’s first look at who’s losing money and therefore distribution power.
One important thing to note is that gambling rates are higher in poor populations, especially problem gambling, which is defined as gambling so bad it harms your daily life. Symptoms are listed as being unable to afford daily necessities, avoiding going out, and unemployment. Especially popular amoung poor populations are oftentimes state-run scratch cards and lottery tickets. For those for whom a dollar matters the most with regards to improving their quality of life, gambling takes up time and money that would otherwise be spent on making them happier.
This isn’t to say that gambling isn’t bad when richer people do it, either. Because even if it came from people for whom the money doesn’t matter much, it results in a distorted distribution of goods and services that benefits nobody that’s actually adding value to others’ lives.
There are two beneficiaries of gambling: gambling companies, and government. When money goes to gambling companies, it is not being earned for providing a good or service. It gets re-invested in making the money extraction process more efficient, or goes to the pockets of the types of people who would build a gambling empire. Every dollar is competing against every other dollar for the goods that exist. Money going to such people takes relative purchasing power away from everyone else.
Far more evil, though, is government, which largely gets its money from scratch-card purchases. Let us assume a maximally benevolent government that earnestly intends to use the proceeds to benefit poor people. The money isn’t used efficiently. It changes hands, re-invested in continued lottery operations, used to grease the wheels of the distribution mechanism that is bureaucracy. In the end, it is leveraged to provide goods and services to poor people.
Great. Awesome. Except, wait - remember, that scratch-card money came from primarily poor people. Taken from their hands, used to sustain the very machinery that takes it from them, and what remains is used to buy goods and services that they could otherwise obtain a greater number of. But what if mostly rich people bought the scratch cards? First, they don’t. Second, there are better and fairer redistribution methods that don’t require expenditure on gambling infrastructure. They’re called taxes.
And this is a maximally benevolent government. When’s the last time you saw one of those, eh?
Let’s recap. Purchasing power is taken from the hands of poor people, who gained their money from providing value to the lives of others. It is sometimes given to people who have provided precisely zero value and used to divert production that could otherwise enrich lives to grow the gambling tumor. It is otherwise is diminished and then used by the clumsy hand of government to purchase goods and services without their assent or decision in the process.
There is no reason to be in favor of this, if you care about people.
The costs of this are not abstract and vague. Diminished purchasing power is starving kids, leaky shoes, missing textbooks, and going hungry. The gambling tumor is Las Vegas, empty light, a vast monument to soulless waste. The clumsy hand of government is cultural development programs while people die.
And these are only the first-order effects. While scratch-cards and lottery tickets have huge edges of over 50% loss for the player (Gambling advocates insist this simple calculation is useless, because of course they do,) casinos have smaller edges but have other costs. They choke communities, draining time and money, they target seniors, they use vasts amounts of contruction materials and amazing land that could otherwise build stores and houses.
Let’s address a few objections.
“Gambling isn’t about the money - it’s about the joy, the promise. of a big payout.”
Oh? What joy do you feel scratching off a scratch-card ticket? A short high, perhaps, followed by a scratching urge that doesn’t go away? And that’s if you win. If you lose, there’s only that urge. Nobody who’s ever been trapped in its grasp will tell you it’s worth it. It ruins lives, for a thrill you could get much more fulfillingly from a video game or a gym. Gambling doesn’t sell hope. It sells the neediest of us down the river.
“Gambling is essentially egalatarian - Lady Luck visits everyone equally.”
Lady Luck is a fickle mistress, but she’s predictable if you’re willing to wait her out. Gambling businesses never, ever go broke due to losing money because people won too much, only because they couldn’t steal enough money to build the tumor to a stable state.
“But this is all about the losers. What about the winners?”
What about the winners? Every winner has a million losers. And what does winning get you? If you’re unlucky, a target painted on your back, where everyone you know will take advantage of your goodwill until you’re broke and picked to pieces. If you’re lucky, you have a hundredth of the purchasing power lost by everyone else gambling for the same jackpot. The improvement in a winner’s life is never, ever outweighed by the misery inflicted on the losers.
“This would be government overreach - what about freedom?”
I love freedom. Love, love love it. But if you believe in government as a concept, then you recognize that government exists to solve coordination problems, where odious incentives result in worse outcomes. This is a classic example of such a situation, with NO negative outcomes of the proposed intervention. Nobody is against government restricting people from dumping lead in the water supply. The only reason that this could be seen as government overreach is that it hasn’t been done yet. If you want no government, well… maybe I’ll write a blog post about that sometime.
“This is great and all… but wouldn’t implementation be hard?”
It is vitally important that we separate our goals and our actions. We must decide first what we decide to make manifest, and then decide on the actions to serve those goals. This is an ideal you should hold, to see gambling dismantled. The actions that would make this manifest are shockingly simple, too, compared to the other evils of the world. Slaying Smallpox required massive education and vast infrastructure. Gutting gambling would be as simple as laying down a fiat. Not easy, but simple.
“What about small, interpersonal gambling?”
Yes, this is something I’m not actually against. Betting a few dollars on cards or pool with your friends is pretty low-stakes, genuinely enjoyable for some people, and doesn’t result in the growth of massive tumors on the side of our economy. Go for it. It’s the high-margins house-versus-citizen gambling industry I’m against.
Look at the wider world. Think tanks aflush with Caesar and MGM’s money encourage responsible gambling, safeguards that leave their revenue streams untouched. No underage gambling, when most gambling happens in the 20s and beyond. Spending limits, to encourage people that they can go in, that it’s a “safe” way of doing it. It’s encouraged by the Responsible Gambling Council!
Every single one of these sites focuses on problem gambling, conveniently leaving out that “safe” gambling, which they don’t not endorse, leads to problem gambling. They dispel “myths” that nobody believes, such as gambling making money, while never mentioning that gambling doesn’t actually feel good. The bootleggers are making straw baptists.
The simple, stark truth is this. Every dollar spent on a scratch card or a casino is a small victory waged by insanity and evil against good and order. For whatever reason, everybody that claims to care about people has left this by the wayside, sweet-talked by equivocation, assuming that regular gambling isn’t evil because problem gambling is.
All gambling is evil gambling.
If we are to say we strive to be good, then we must set our hearts against evil, in any form. Not only is gambling evil, it is an obvious evil, hiding in plain sight, that the world forgot. It is an uncomplicated evil, that has never done good. In a world without free lunches, its death would be a precious, rare victory.
We may not slay the beast today, nor tomorrow. It will be victory enough for today to recognize what has been in front of our eyes for so long, that this is a monster, and it must be felled. There is no complexity in sharping your blade, no moral quandry. You’re never getting another deal this good, for the rest of your fucking life. Take it.