Christopher Bradley writes
My first wife's family ran a liquor store. If a booze house didn't have a state of Maryland gambling machine on the premises all of the traffic would go to to the one down the road.
And oh-my-God did the poor and downtrodden line up so the state could stick it's nasty tentacle into their wallets. Talking about: guys living hand-to-mouth as day-laborers. In their fifties. Gals on welfare with too many kids, not enough money and no daddy in sight. Old gents on a pension just barely getting by. Guys who caught fish in the Patuxent for dinner because food at the grocery was too expensive.
Twenty years on I want to go back in time and bitch slap them all and tell them to put that god-damned money into the BANK that was across the street.
So, yes, by all means - keep the state out of the gambling business. It's yet one more damned government agency and the fewer of them we have the better.
But people will always find ways to shit all over themselves. No government trickery needed.
I'm not a fan of lotteries for a whole lot of reasons, but they're pretty regressive and they're also gambling. It's regressive because millionaires don't play the lottery - it is designed to take advantage of poor people's hopes and desperation. Which I think stinks. State lotteries are callous attempts by the state to capitalize on poverty by tricking the poor into shouldering a bigger share of the budget through psychological manipulation.If the Poor didn't spend their money buying Lotto tickets, they'd just piss away the money on something else. That's why they are poor.
My first wife's family ran a liquor store. If a booze house didn't have a state of Maryland gambling machine on the premises all of the traffic would go to to the one down the road.
And oh-my-God did the poor and downtrodden line up so the state could stick it's nasty tentacle into their wallets. Talking about: guys living hand-to-mouth as day-laborers. In their fifties. Gals on welfare with too many kids, not enough money and no daddy in sight. Old gents on a pension just barely getting by. Guys who caught fish in the Patuxent for dinner because food at the grocery was too expensive.
Twenty years on I want to go back in time and bitch slap them all and tell them to put that god-damned money into the BANK that was across the street.
So, yes, by all means - keep the state out of the gambling business. It's yet one more damned government agency and the fewer of them we have the better.
But people will always find ways to shit all over themselves. No government trickery needed.
