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Comment by jeffrallen | Hacker News Reader

Lotteries are criminally stupid, and running them is criminally evil. Shame on all governments that do so, including mine.

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Alternative take: there's strong demand for numbers games, and the government, whose spending is at worst weakly correlated with social goods, and who is not profit-motivated and therefore will do less to encourage problem gambling, is better than the alternative in practice.

> and who is not profit-motivated and therefore will do less to encourage problem gambling, is better than the alternative in practice.

When a government taxes vice its now depending on those revenue streams. It creates an incentive system where the regulator for advancing social good is depending on tax income from the failure of regulating.

Illinois is doing this right now with their gambling industry. Those little gambling machines are in every restaurant and there are dedicated e-gambling buildings everywhere in Springfield. You see folks go in and dump their life savings into those machines. I know a restaurant owner who has customers park out back to hide their gambling from their spouse.

But gambling tax revenue is bailing out the failing state. At the end of the day, it seems like the government of Illinois is the true addict.

I just think it's ok for the government to run a lottery and not advertise it. Allowing gambling machines in restaurant is a whole different story. I think conflating the two is a slippery slope fallacy.

The government may not be profit-motivated (debatable), but it is still cash-motivated. Lottery money in many states go to a variety of services, like education and state parks and such. This does create a motive to encourage spending on the lottery as those services end up relying on the lottery earnings as much or more than conventional taxes and fees for their funding.

The ethical optimum seems to be:

1) Government run lotteries. Otherwise there will be shady illegal lotteries instead.

2) No skimming funds. 99.8% of what goes into the lottery tickets gets paid out to winners, taking only enough to fund the lottery itself. Otherwise you're taxing the poor, and their lives are hard enough.

3) No advertising. To prevent big stories about the "mega-billions" jackpot, cap and split jackpots. So if you have enough to do a 10 billion jackpot, instead offer 100 million jackpots for a while, until the funds are used up.

It would be nice to end the drug war and put lotteries under the same management as Portuguese-style state drug distribution.

Also nationalize coffee chains for same reason lol.

I used to think the same thing but I've come full circle to believe that any behavior humans take place in, regardless of the consequences, should be legal and regulated opposed to banned/illegal. Money just ends up flowing to cartels and much more unsavory/unethical organizations.

Drugs, prostitution and even gambling fall into this category. It's certainly the lesser of two evils and not perfect. As others have pointed out I'd much rather live in a world that treats prostitution like Amsterdam or drugs like Portugal than the current war on drugs, police militarization, security theater surveillance state we are in right now.

Or alternatively, they're the most ethical form of tax ever -- a voluntary tax.

They pay for college tuition and books in my state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOPE_Scholarship

Edit:

> As of 2006, more than $3 billion in scholarships had been awarded to more than 900,000 Georgia students. As of 2018, HOPE has already helped around 1.8 million students from Georgia enroll in college.

One negative externally that would happen anyway (eg. sports betting) turned into a positive one.

Thats typically how they get approved.

State argues they'll use it to fund education, people thinks thats a great idea so it has widespread approval. Later the state decides they'll change the rules to allocate the funds in more ways.

Would you prefer they just raise your tax by a dollar instead?

Except it hasn't kept up with rising tuition or many "fees" added since 2008.

Without state lotteries they’d still exist, and be far more likely to be crooked even with heavy regulation.

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