The editors of The Weekly Standard seem to think they have caught columnist George Will in a contradiction, or at least a change of heart. Will recently criticized the newly passed ban on Internet gambling as “Prohibition II,” a “mother-hen” attempt “to purify Americans’ behavior.” But 13 years ago, the Standard points out, Will was lamenting the “social costs” from “the rapid spread of legalized gambing”: “We are gambling with our national character, forgetting that character is destiny,” he wrote back then.

But surely, from the notion that gambling has many social costs, it does not follow that government must prohibit gambling. Many things that are utterly deplorable also ought to be legal because they flow from the exercise of individual rights. (White-supremacist tracts and misogynistic rap lyrics come immediately to mind.)

That is a libertarian argument for allowing behavior that carries social costs; there is also a conservative argument for doing so. It might go something like this: A virtue that is imposed from above ceases to be virtuous; only when someone is free to choose is he to be commended for choosing well. It is courageous to run into a burning building to save a child—unless someone with a gun is threatening to shoot you if you don’t. Indeed, the purpose of moral education is to teach people to do the right thing even when no one is watching. A society seeking to encourage virtue must therefore rely on persuasion rather than coercion.

People ought to be free to gamble, to proclaim white supremacy, and to call women degrading names—and noble enough to refrain from all three. 

Put so well that I have to agree. (100%, this time). But I can think of one problem here: The Libertarians and Woodstockians and Slackerians can easily use the same persuasive argument for legalizing pot. Then I’d have to breathe that poison in when just going about my daily affairs. Here’s to hoping that cannot be done.

Margie,

In 2000 the GAO conducted a study on the effects of gambling in Atlantic City at the request of Rep. Frank Wolf. While they cautiously make it clear that the jury is still out on the actual severity of many of the effects they do write the following:

“NGISC and our case study in Atlantic City found mostly testimonial evidence that pathological gambling has resulted in increased crime and family problems (such as domestic violence, child abuse, divorce, and homelessness).”

I have a real problem with state lotteries, actually. Either running a lottery is right or it is wrong. There is no excuse for a government monopoly on that business. If it is morally wrong for a private corporation to run a ‘numbers racket’ then it is wrong for government to do it. State lotteries already shamelessly target the stupid and the poor with expensive marketing campaigns intended to dupe people out of their money. I can’t imagine how this is better or less harmful than if non-government entities were allowed to run lotteries for profit.

I have less of a problem with government regulating large businesses in order to avoid ‘social ills’ than I do with government exercising the same control over the lives of individuals. Inconsistant? Perhaps. I’m really just a pragmatist at heart.

Please enumerate these social and economic costs and how prevalent they are. It has been my observation that anyone with a compulsive behavior is going to find a way to indulge it.  Is the damage so great as to justify a governmental interference in personal liberties? I ask out of curiousity, not to be difficult. It just had not occurred to me that gambling was that big a problem. And things like state lotteries do a lot of good for education. Where do you draw the line and why that would be compelling enought to justify interference by Big Brother?

May a suggest a compromise? Allow legal gambling among individuals but prohibit the establishment of casinos and slot machines. If people want to get together for poker tournaments or what-have-you and gamble their paychecks away then they are free to do so. Tax it as any other income and give participants the same access to the law as people engaging in any other activity (thus avoiding seedy, black-market-type problems).  But none of these massive businesses preying on entire communities and sucking paychecks up en masse on a macro-economic level.

In this way the principle which you outline of not imposing virtue from above is mantained. Yet we also avoid most of the social and economic costs of wide-spread gambling.

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