Comment by camgunz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by camgunz | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> If you look back at the history of the lottery, it started out as black market, unregulated gambling that led to violence and other crime as the people running the often-fixed games fought over the right to fleece people.

I think a game (quoting Powerball here) where your odds are 1:292,201,338 is by definition a fleece. All that happened here is the state is reserving that right for itself, justifying it as taxing a vice. This is a common theme -- look at cigarettes and alcohol -- but in basically every case it's lower income people who are shelling out.

> The modern, state-run lotteries just provide an outlet for gambling that would happen anyways.

This is a common policy argument (see cigarettes/alcohol above or legalizing drugs), but does this even make sense? White collar crime is pretty rampant, so what if we legalize it and make an embezzling tax? Or human trafficking is a persistent scourge, what if we legalize it and tax it?

Furthermore, these vice taxes are regressive flat taxes. If we start legalizing things and replacing the criminality with a tax, really that only opens it up to people with means. It's still ruinous for lower income people to engage with it. Which is -- you probably won't be surprised to hear -- another reason the lottery preys on lower income people.

I think we should just admit that this stuff is discriminatory -- a lot on class but at least a little on race.

There's a clear difference between gambling/drinking/smoking/drug abuse and the crimes you mentioned like embezzling and human trafficking. The former are self victimizing while the latter directly victimize others. That's the rationale behind legalization and why nobody would suggest it for regular crimes. Essentially it's giving people the freedom to make their own mistakes as long as they aren't hurting anyone but themselves. Instead we tailor the laws to protect others from being hurt by collateral effects (no smoking in public buildings, no stealing for drug money, no advertising cigarettes to kids, etc) and we raise money, often to support programs to educate people about the risks of those behaviors and help those who want to recover.

From what I've seen from places that have legalized various vices, it seems to always end up doing more good than criminalization.

There's really no such thing as a victimless crime, because there's no such thing as an act that affects only the actor. Drinking alcohol has an impact on others, smoking cigarettes has an impact on others, same with gambling and so on. You can separate based on "collateral effects", but the whole thing is a continuum and we draw the lines arbitrarily.

I dislike this line of reasoning because it leads us naturally to the conclusion that vice taxes (etc.) are the best we can do because some people are very incorrigible and many people are a little incorrigible. While I think we'll never eradicate "vices", I do think most of them have root causes and the most effective thing would be to treat those. If we think Behavior X is unhealthy to the self or societally damaging, sure taxing it is a way to balance out the damage to society, but that does nothing for the person. If we spent time fixing smoking, for example, we'd save so many lives and so much money that it's kind of bewildering that we haven't done it.

I do think legalization in general is better than criminalization -- but only because the US criminal justice system is deeply harmful. It would be better if we treated the more serious users of vices instead of imprisoning or aggressively taxing them.

Ok, but who gets to decide where to draw the line between harmful behaviors and nonharmful ones. One could argue that just about everything we do has some degree of risk, some more than others. As you say it's a continuum. Should we ban unhealthy foods? Should we ban contact sports? How about extramarital sex? The values of the person you ask will dictate whether any given thing is a vice or a pastime.

What right do you have to say whether the enjoyment someone finds in a vice is offset by the damage it does to their health or finances or social life? And for any given vice, usually the ill effects are a function of how heavily one uses the vice. So does a full ban to save the few who overindulge balance against depriving the rest of the option to make small trades against their own lives for some pleasure? Should we ban alcohol to save the alcoholics at the cost of everyone else being able to unwind with a beer? We tried that and it didn't go very well.

Evidence seems to point to education and access to treatment being far more effective than bans. And it's very difficult to get any kind of long term results by involuntarily treating someone, so I'm not sure there's much to be gained by criminalization with enforced treatment instead of just punishment.

At the end, you pretty much have to let people make their own informed decisions. Anything else sounds like a step toward an authoritarian state dictating everything you do.

> Ok, but who gets to decide where to draw the line between harmful behaviors and nonharmful ones.

You're right, this is tricky. But consider China's opium epidemic in the late 19th century. A lot of legalization advocates argue that drug use is a victimless crime, but in that epidemic 13.5 million people were addicted to opium. That has a huge social cost. Or US prohibition in the early 20th century: alcohol was leading to awful domestic abuse and it caused women to be the strongest supporters of the 18th amendment.

In fact the prohibition case is interesting because I think we went about it entirely the wrong way, which was the point of my parent post. If we simply criminalize the act then we're essentially saying whomever commits the "vice" is incorrigible and has to be separated from polite society. One step better is to tax the act so society can in some ways be reimbursed for the cost of the behavior. But the best step would be to discover why so many people are abusing alcohol in the first place and solve that problem. We'll only have the justification to do that though, if we recognize that the people who fall victim to those vices deserve our support, rather than just being abandoned as morally weak or fundamentally lower than us.

The cool thing about that is then we don't need to have some weird arbitrary line between, "oh 2 drinks is OK, 4 drinks you're going to jail". And we help people who fall victim to alcoholism or whichever vice we're talking about. It's a win-win, if only we can get over our preening moralism.

But in general you're right, there's not a lot of daylight between an act and a crime because not everything we regulate has a moral underpinning. But that doesn't mean those regulations can't do good, and it certainly doesn't mean that just because we enact some regulations we're inevitably headed towards totalitarianism. That's just a slippery slope fallacy.

> I think a game (quoting Powerball here) where your odds are 1:292,201,338 is by definition a fleece

No, it isn't. The odds from an individual ticket are irrelevant. Only the ratio of expected value to price matters when if you want to call it a fleece. The state lotteries offer many different variance options with Powerball being among the largest. And while the lottery is, in nearly all cases (there have been some exceptions), negative EV, it's not so much so that you'd call it fleecing.

Remember, the original lotteries were unregulated and those selling tickets would pick the winning numbers based on the numbers that gamblers had chosen to minimize the number of payouts. That was a fleece. It wasn't until they developed a system where the winning numbers were determined by the results of horse races that there was some semblance of fairness to the system, but operators still found ways to minimize winners winninga.

> I think a game (quoting Powerball here) where your odds are 1:292,201,338 is by definition a fleece.

Nah. If it paid off at a billion to 1, I would buy some tickets ;-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com