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Comment by Pulcinella | Hacker News Reader

Interesting fact: As far as I am aware, it’s illegal to gamble at the casino in Monte Carlo unless you are a foreigner (I.e. it is not legal for citizens of Monaco to gamble there). Probably because the country isn’t actually bringing in any new money if locals gamble.

There really is no reason to legalize gambling casinos. It is just an inefficient way of moving money around. It doesn’t actually create new value for society as a whole. (Friendly poker games amongst friends and family with small pots are probably fine).

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Lots of places have such rules, either officially or unofficially.

In Korea, by law you have to prove you're a foreigner. In the Bahamas it is legal for the locals to bet, but the casinos kick them out. They've had enough experiences of a guy coming in on payday, losing his money, then his wife coming in the next day with a baseball bat to destroy the machine that took the money. Don't want any more.

In Singapore, local residents have to pay an expensive annual fee to the government in order to be allowed to gamble in casinos, while foreigners may do so for free.

The money collected from exclusion fees is quite large, 100s of millions in some cases in a year. The very fact that the collections are so big points to a possible fact that exclusion fees are not a deterrent or stop/reduce locals from gambling.

"There really is no reason to legalize gambling casinos."

When you make gambling illegal you just drive it underground and fund organized crime, with all the additional crime and corruption that brings with it.

The arguments against making gambling illegal are similar to many of the arguments against making drugs and prostitution illegal, such as consenting adults should be free to do what they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else.

I'd like if we could find a middle ground between gambling prohibition and ads for gambling right from your phone in every break of sports broadcasts as the situation we're quickly finding ourselves in.

Slightly off topic, but the profusion of weird prop bets on sports is a path toward quiet match fixing that we may never be able to roll back. I'm seeing this in e-sports already, where players can still try hard to win but also "accommodate" gamblers who are betting on odd metrics like over/under on total kills, etc.

I think banning of advertising on various things is entirely reasonable approach. Like in Europe prescription drugs can not be advertised to consumers. And I think that is sensible.

> Consenting adults should be free to do what they want as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else.

So long minimum wage and workplace safety laws, welcome back indentured servitude.

There's an argument that the casino provides entertainment/thrill in exchange for money. I think your argument could be applied to most money spent on entertainment if you don't consider it to be creating "new value for society as a whole"

> There really is no reason to legalize gambling casinos.

Why should the government outlaw my ability to give my money away however I want to? If I want to go put all my money on black because it's fun to me, why should that be illegal?

> Probably because the country isn’t actually bringing in any new money if locals gamble.

That's almost certainly not the reason. They want the revenue but not the societal ills from gamblers.

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