I think the anti-gambling proponents who said gambling legalization would degrade society have to some extent been proven correct.
TV, billboard, and other ads for gambling are rampant around here. I find it exploitative.
TV, billboard, and other ads for gambling are rampant around here. I find it exploitative.
And people keep finding new ways to gamble, some of which are difficult to make illegal. It's fairly clear the stock market is an elaborate gambling system to some people.
I wish they'd ban adverting of state lotteries too. Those ads are the worst, most insulting, most idiotic. A celebration of mindless materialism and short-term thinking. These ads celebrate the fact that most lottery winners blow it all on stupid shit then end up back at square one a few years later. It's flagrant exploitation of the dimwitted; the least they could do is not flaunt it on huge billboards all across town.
Illegal businesses tend to branch out into other crimes, and to corrupt law enforcement. Both of those can end up affecting those nowhere near a place of gambling.
Unfortunately the rampant ads have the same effect; kids growing up now will see this all as normal and probably be worse off for it. This is a way in which culture is downstream from law.
If you ask me, gambling isn't the problem here; advertising is. Sure, people will always find a way to engage in vices, but something about exploiting our monkey brains to make those vices seem like the be all and end all always seems to have some pretty bad effects on society. Tie all the ills of the 20th century psychology-infused advertising with modern targeted advertising and you have a real disaster on your hands -- just be glad Joe Camel never got to stroll around the social networks of the 21st century.
Regarding advertising you're spot on, although I'd go a step further and call for sweeping regulations in the entire advertising industry. Unless you move to a 21 souls settlement in Alaska and leave a hermit life, you literally can't spend five minutes without being bombarded by one or another ad.
It's really wonderful and when I go somewhere else and am bombarded by those ads I am reminded again how assaulting they are.
If you try sleeping on a pea-free mattress someday, perhaps you'll find that you appreciate the experience.
It's not obvious to me that all vices are created equal here. If forcing gambling underground creates a criminal empire or two but results in, say, 80% fewer gambling addicts who end up damaging their lives and those of their families, which is the larger harm? Fake numbers, obviously the benefits/harms would depend on several different factors, but I don't think a one size fits all approach makes sense because "illegal gambling gangs" didn't seem to cause the same sort of larger societal problems the last several decades that "illegal drug gangs" or prohibition-era alcohol gangs have. I would assume this is because the lack of a need for the same sort of supply chain that you could attempt to monopolize and dominate.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1088683/death-rate-rate-...
That's one disease. Booze causes all kinds of problems, and I wouldn't be surprised if (as another example) wife-beating sharply declined during prohibition.
(ED: Looking again at that graph, there's something a little dubious about it--but it was the first data I could find.)
My understanding is that drinking levels did not return to pre-Prohibition levels until the 1970s.
...and I'm fine with that.
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1275), "Whether it belongs to the human law to repress all vices?":
> […] Now possibility or faculty of action is due to an interior habit or disposition: since the same thing is not possible to one who has not a virtuous habit, as is possible to one who has. Thus the same is not possible to a child as to a full-grown man: for which reason the law for children is not the same as for adults, since many things are permitted to children, which in an adult are punished by law or at any rate are open to blame. In like manner many things are permissible to men not perfect in virtue, which would be intolerable in a virtuous man.
> Now human law is framed for a number of human beings, the majority of whom are not perfect in virtue. Wherefore human laws do not forbid all vices, from which the virtuous abstain, but only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained: thus human law prohibits murder, theft and such like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-to-consumer_advertising