Why make it illegal or regulate it? So what if half of men have gambled on sports? How many people throw away money on casino games, lotteries, raffles, loot boxes, et cetera? It's not my business how they throw away their money.
I don't personally agree with gambling, as I just don't understand how someone could possibly enjoy it; but, I sure as fuck believe that every human being can spend their hard-earned money however they see fit.
Churches, retailers, bars, strip clubs, restaurants, etc. All of these allow people to spend their hard-earned money in questionable ways and many folks go WAY overboard w/them. But, my guess is, you don't really want to regulate all of those; just the ones you disagree with.
Why? Do these people not live in society next to you? Don’t you subsidize their healthcare, the education of their kids, etc?
> But, my guess is, you don't really want to regulate all of those; just the ones you disagree with.
The only one of those I wouldn’t regulate is churches, and that’s because study after study shows that people who participate in organized religion are happier and healthier, and communities with healthy churches do better in social metrics than ones that don’t. E.g. Mormons live 5-10 years longer than white Americans generally: https://www.deseret.com/2010/4/13/20375744/ucla-study-proves.... (I suspect New England Congregationalists have similarly superlative outcomes, but I don’t have the data.) Imagine how much lower our healthcare costs would be if you could take the social magic Mormons do and apply it to the whole country.
Maybe we don’t have to ban coffee. But is the alternative really for society to suffer the negative externalities of every individual choice with no power to regulate those choices?
https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Smoking-and-th...
For example, the study above shows that smokers *are actually a net benefit* to the government's bottom line since they pay taxes throughout their lifetime on tobacco and then they die faster (therefore spending less money in the form of healthcare/ aged pensions).
I'm really not comfortable with the idea that we should only permit activities that are purely harmless. 30-50 people die each year in skiing accidents in the US alone. Those people have families too. Where do you want to draw the line?
Gambling and Social media do exactly that. In fact social media has purposely adopted the exact same patterns of gambling to make it so that "scrolling" IS gambling, but it's time and enjoyment instead of money. They don't just show you what you want all the time, they induce FOMO by only occasionally offering rewarding content, which results in compulsive usage.
I don't like these modern temperance movements. Leave people alone.
Have you noticed how things are going? Do you genuinely believe these are non-factors?
On the supermajority bit, in more and more countries there's already a supermajority for banning phones from schools, more and more for banning it for children altogether, and so on. I think that's a clear sign people would actually be in favour of quite a lot of measures to tone things down, like the one I mentioned. Total bans I wouldn't vouch for.
John Adams said: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He was making an important point that has nothing to do with theology. Society can have extensive individual freedoms when people are socialized to mostly to make the right decisions without government coercion. If we loosen the social guardrails, as we have done, more government coercion becomes necessary to suppress anti-social behavior.
Separately from that, I don't think that the original US constitution - you know, the document that explicitly protected the interests of slave owners, i.e. the vilest kind of filth - could be meaningfully said to be made for "a moral and religious People". Or, if we take that at face value, then that tells us volumes about the value of said morals and said religion, and it's deeply negative.
It’s interesting that you think freedom is only “meaningful” if people actually engage in the anti-social conduct which they’re free to do. I would say the point of freedom is to eliminate the apparatus of control because you can trust nearly all people to do the right thing without it. That’s the highest form of society.
That slavery existed is not some trump card that negates everything else. It’s also a particularly uneducated comment to level at John Adams of all people. The idea that slavery is intolerable, which you easily hold in your head in 2025 without having worked for it—was bequeathed to you by John Adams and his ilk. In 1789, you would have looked the other way at slavery, just like you look the other way at everything you tolerate today. You probably would’ve even called John Adams a religious nut for believing everyone was created equal in the eyes of god, and demanded scientific proof of that.
That's a rather US centric point of view. Slavery was considered intolerable in many places, the US was different in that it actually allowed it for as long as it did. Of course there are many guises for slavery that are practiced in other places but on a moral level lots of people realize it is wrong and John Adams had absolutely nothing to do with that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
You could spend a good chunk of a lifetime studying this subject and still not have the complete picture. The main difference is not the 'opposition to slavery with the moral fervor of the Anglos' as much as the resistance to getting rid of slavery.
That is what sets the US apart, the stark division between the pro and the con side and the fact that the South figured out that this was the thing that they could not give up. And their roots were just the same as the side that opposed them, they just had an economic interest.
Not quite. It means, individuals have to have the freedom to make their own choices, because nobody can be trusted to know what the "right" choices are and dictate them to others.
By "a moral and religious People", John Adams did not mean that every one of those people must agree on exactly what the right thing to do is. He meant that the people have to have the concept of right and wrong as things they are supposed to discern, things outside themselves that aren't dictated by any other authority (or at least not any human one), and to understand that they have a duty to do their best to make the right choices. The problem with our society today is that that concept of "right" has been discarded; instead there is a different concept of "right" that revolves around adherence to whatever political ideology is favored by those in power.
> more government coercion becomes necessary to suppress anti-social behavior
The problem is that the government can't be trusted to do that job. That's what "freedom" means in the American context. That's why the US Constitution doesn't give the Federal government the power to do it. The fact that our government does it anyway is a bug, not a feature.
I certainly enjoy mainstream social media platforms but find it frustrating that the company is motivated to show me what I don't want to see and make it difficult to find the content I prefer. Simultaneously this is done while creating walled gardens to limit open access to information that is only the property of the platform by virtue of anti-competitive user agreements.
First and for most user generated content should be openly accessible.
So now what if my hobby is betting on sports? I don't see a difference.
their activity funds it - where taxed - and their activity doesn't strain it either
Also, because their gambling asses smart wifes divorced get lonely and somehow it becomes contribution to male loneliness epidemic and then we have right wing using them as argument to stop "no fault divorce" and restrict women so they have no choice.
We as a society should get to decide what "freedoms" and what "constraints" make for a better society as a whole, don't we?
They are a harm to others. People with gambling addictions don't just hurt themselves - they hurt families, friends, and also the society at large as they come to be dependent on the safety net for substeance.
I think you dont need to make it illegal to keep it in check. A simple rule saying: IF a person spends more than 20% of the overall W2 or 1099 income on gambling, then the gambling house is liable for every 95 cents of every subsequent dollar paid out. We transfer liability for selling alcohol to irresponsible bartenders - casinos should also take the heat for the malaise they inflict.
You'd see very quickly how things get real.
Simply put, if a gambler shows up in court with a W2 and payouts to a gambling house, they get summary judgement against the house.
This works well because once codified ("no gambler shall owe more than 20% of their annual income to any gambling house, individually or in the aggregate") it triggers an unrecorded liability on the gambling house's clientele. In other words, the stock becomes radioactive , unless the gambling house has strong controls around client onboarding and monitoring. Auditors are never going to sign off on financials that have a huge liability unless it is proven there are strict controls in place to not let degenerate gambling continue.
The same principle could be applied to universities as well.
Basically, you have to shift the risk to the party abusing the system (in this case, not the system, but the addiction).