More gambling needed to feed ineffectual government

Gambling is taking the course that was obvious when Connecticut challenged the duopoly of Las Vegas and Atlantic City with the Foxwoods Resort casino in 1992 and the Mohegan Sun casino in 1996.

Unwilling to watch its residents keep dropping their money in Connecticut’s casinos, Massachusetts has just authorized three casinos and a slot machine parlor. Rhode Island will hold a referendum in November on whether to authorize casino games at the slot machine parlor in Lincoln. And New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has just proposed a state constitutional amendment to allow casino gambling throughout his state, which already has Indian casinos upstate and small casinos at racetracks.

The argument for more gambling is the same everywhere: State tax revenue is down and state governments want more money.

There is a libertarian argument for more gambling, too. Like drug use and prostitution, gambling is a victimless crime, so people should be able to gamble if they want to, even if government itself can hardly make a libertarian argument in the age of the Patriot Act and the federal government’s recent suspension of habeas corpus in the name of curbing terrorism.

The argument against more gambling, generally conceded, is that it exploits mainly the poor and causes addictions that destroy families and foster crime through theft. Government answers this objection with token appropriations for gambler rehabilitation programs.

Now full Internet gambling may be on the way because of the U.S. Justice Department’s recent interpretation of federal law to allow Internet gambling across state lines on anything except sporting events. So anyone with a credit card or checking account, and not just a brokerage account, might gamble anywhere any time.

While he says he doesn’t especially like it, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy wants Connecticut to exploit the opportunity for Internet gambling, starting with a more aggressive state lottery. Maybe the lottery could get into Internet gambling with card and casino games without infringing on the state’s grants of exclusivity to the Indians.

When Connecticut was alone with its franchise northeast of Atlantic City, casino gambling could be justified as importing more wealth into the state from visitors than it cost through social pathologies. But as casino gambling and now Internet gambling regionalize and nationalize themselves, Connecticut’s casinos will draw mainly from Connecticut’s own residents and thus weaken other entertainment and hospitality industries here. For unlike other industries, casinos produce nothing of value; they just redistribute money, largely from the poor to the rich and the government.

The liberal argument in favor of more gambling is that government’s redistribution of wealth is on balance healthy and outweighs gambling’s own redistribution of wealth away from the poor, as well as the social pathologies. But this is contradicted by the last several decades of declining real average incomes and worsening poverty throughout the country. The evidence is that government policy first creates problems, particularly family disintegration, as childbearing outside marriage now accounts for about 40 percent of the nation’s births, and then creates expensive but futile programs in the guise of remediating those problems, which get worse anyway.

As so many of them now are either employed by the government or government contractors or receive income through entitlement programs, most liberals can rationalize almost anything that increases the government’s revenue and authority, including more gambling, no matter who gets hurt.

Meanwhile, conservatives seem divided on more gambling. Some, having understandably given up on government as a mechanism of improving social conditions, may welcome the chance to make taxation more voluntary, while others may oppose more gambling simply out of conservatism’s puritanical busybody streak.

Such conservatives may denounce the Obama administration for letting the Justice Department legalize Internet gambling, but as the developments in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York show, legalizing Indian casinos made national casino gambling inevitable.

As long as government is so big, ravenous and ineffectual, restricting gambling will be politically impossible and elevating the poor will become, even more, just the pretext for enlarging and sustaining the government itself and advancing the country not toward self-sufficiency and prosperity, but dependence and impoverishment, toward the day when everyone has his own social worker.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.