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Comment by consteval | Hacker News Reader

> The latent streak of puritanism, maybe

The main problem is that addiction kind of goes around people's interests and their better judgement.

Normally I agree, we don't need to be making 'moral' decisions for people. If they want to do something 'sinful' - like gambling - have at it.

But the people who promote gambling have lots of money. And gambling is basically smoking. So, it gets hairy. They can lie, they can cheat, and they can manipulate people's minds, tricking them into doing something bad for them. And then the addiction does the rest.

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Absolutely addiction does; so we're going to ban alcohol (and weed), and then maybe move onto video games and books and and and and?

Prohibition has generally been a lot less effective than regulation. The problem in the US, in my view, is much more the utterly-gutted effectiveness of the regulatory state than it is the existence of legal gambling.

There's a big slippery slope here.

Who says we need to keep going? That's not a hypothetical question - who says? Why would we do that?

I agree regulation is good, but prohibition is a type of regulation. There're also levels of prohibition - you don't need to prohibit all of it, maybe just the most obviously harmful.

Like you can ban online gambling but keep casinos if you want. I don't know, I don't have the analysis on which is worse.

Fine, but then the US has spent a terrifying amount of my money on sports and I want it all back if the point of their sophisticated pro-social spending (which strangely has to include private ventures getting handouts) is actually to extract wealth from the poor and the weak.

>Who says we need to keep going? That's not a hypothetical question - who says? Why would we do that?

Why wouldn't we? If we're legally precluding people from hobbies that could harm them, there's always going to be a worst legal one.

There's an ugliest painting in most galleries, but that doesn't mean we ban them. If the worst legal hobby is beneficial, why would anyone want to ban it? At some point before that, a threshold will be reached where people feel that the harms of a ban outweigh the harms of the practice. I really don't see how this slope is slippery.

Because we're reasonable humans and capable of saying "if that's the worst, we're fine"?

So then you must have a clear set of principles on how to regulate gambling to maintain it as a healthy activity with no degenerate pathways?

Sure, like we already do for other addictive industries like Tobacco and Alcohol. It doesn't have to be perfect because it's hard reduction - if half as many people get addicted that's still a big win.

If alcohol and tobacco were discovered tomorrow, they'd probably end up schedule 1, and rightly so. If cannabis was discovered tomorrow, it would probably be unscheduled, and rightly so.

We literally have a system of tiers of addiction versus potential value for addictive substances. A slippery slope argument is pretty silly when we literally already created a staircase.

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