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And "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law", does not mean "you can do anything you want", it's much, much closer in meaning to the famous quote from the Upanishads (Crowley largely felt that much of esoterism was basically, as Dion Fortune put it "Yoga of the West"):

> “You are what your deepest desire is. As is your desire, so is your intention. As is your intention, so is your will. As is your will, so is your deed. As is your deed, so is your destiny.”

But HN has increasingly been about having vigorous, opinionated discussion on a surface level understanding of topics (plus a growing number of AI participants), so I'm not sure there's much benefit to pointing it out.

This entire discussion is ridiculous. We shouldn't be conflating the serious economic and philosophical work of someone like Adam Smith with the rantings of someone like Aleister Crowley. It's absurd.

> rantings of someone like Aleister Crowley

Crowley had a penchant for drama and provocation (which, hilariously, still seems effective today!), but writing off his work as "rantings" is really ignoring the scholarly work he did on Western esotericism (and he also did make a lot of progress bringing greater awareness of non-Western traditions as well), which has always been an important part of Western culture (even if commonly underplayed by mainstream academia).

Technology, science and the occult have always had an interesting relationship in the West. Pythagoras, in addition to his contributions mathematics, is famous for founding a Hermetic mystery cult. As I'm sure you know, inventing physics and calculus was basically a part of Isaac Newton's study of alchemy (which has long had a big of a mystical component pulling from the Hermetic tradition as it has a proto-chemical component), and even Jack Parsons followed in that tradition (being himself a student of Crowley).

It's completely understandable if you don't find Crowley work of interest, but plenty of people also don't find Adam Smith's work of much interest either. Dismissing the work of Western esotericism on the history of the West would be similar to dismissing Sufism on the history of the Middle East.

I’m only dismissing it in relation to the field of economics. I would trivially dismiss Sufism in the same context.

This discussion is ridiculous. We’re literally talking about the occult here.

> generally speaking, gambling more than a token sum (say, less than $100) should not be legal exactly because any benefits of gambling is far outweighed by the mountains of externalities it brings. Yes, this includes the obvious incentives to threaten random people. It's bad for society, so it should be effectively banned.

I agree with you in theory, but remember that people frequently do illegal things, just illegally. If we assume that people will in practice gamble whether or not it's legal, I'd rather the gambling not be run by organized crime free from the ability of everyone else to oversee and regulate. That would be the same thing which happened with alcohol during Prohibition and which happens now with the many illegal drugs fueling today's Mexican cartels and US gang networks.

> The only reason why it has suddenly become legal everywhere in the US is because many states have found themselves under mountains of deferred liabilities and are scrambling to raise revenues however they can without raising taxes.

And because of a SCOTUS ruling overturning a federal prohibition on states' ability to legalize sports betting, but otherwise yes.

>If we assume that people will in practice gamble whether or not it's legal, I'd rather the gambling not be run by organized crime free from the ability of everyone else to oversee and regulate.

I don't see why we should assume that. Making something annoying to engage in dramatically reduces the amount of people who engage in it. If illegal gambling rings operate, you'd have to 'know a guy' and the gambling ring would -- by definition -- have limited scope.

It's like saying "legalize fent" to protect people who use fentanyl. Like, yea, the problem isn't the addicts, it's that if you can sell the drug in a store, you're going to get 1000x the number of addicts. We need frictional barriers to prevent people from becoming addicted in the first place.

The previous system was fine. We had a couple highly regulated areas where you could travel to (Las Vegas, Reno, a few Indian casinos) for people who were obsessed with gambling. That meant the rest of us were mostly left alone, and not tempted to engage in the vice.

The approach of allowing a limited amount of some "vice" (or otherwise disfavored activity), highly regulated, combined with stiff penalties for illegal use is a pretty common approach to greatly reduce anti-social activity.

Yes... harm reduction approaches can be effective. The point is that they also need a "very annoying" frictional element to prevent harm reduction from creating worse outcomes than prohibition.

The existing Las Vegas & Indian casino system we had previously effectively achieved this goal by making any gambling habit include regular travel, which itself prevents the habit from becoming a daily or even weekly activity.

"Legalizing dangerous drugs" doesn't mean you can go to the store and buy meth. I mean we create a safe consumption site, where you have to go through harm reduction education, be offered alternatives, and likely have things like blood work done to check for potential disease spread and damage from the drugs themselves.

The point is that the harm reduction strategy has to be annoying enough where non-addicts would not engage in the process, whereas addicts would go through the process trivially.

> If we assume that people will in practice gamble whether or not it's legal

Except it's not the same gambling in both cases, they have qualitative differences beyond simply where they're happening. My unhinged neighbor who'd threaten a journalist probably doesn't have an invite to the Underground Gambling Den.

Even if he did, when a court case happens there's no presumption of normalcy. He can't say: "Pshaw, everybody legally gambles on all sorts of things there, the fact that I bet big on the journalist not having his fingers broken is just coincidence."

The immediate illegality of the gambling is also a check on corruption, since it's already disqualifying for Judge Stickyfingers McBriberson to be on the platform, let alone "betting" on the outcome of cases he presides over.

Excuse my ignorance if otherwise obvious—but how does legalized but untaxed gambling raise any public revenue? Bookie licensing?

Why on earth would you think it's untaxed? A legalized gambling business trivially creates taxable income.

Ah, right. These legalized bookies should be paying income tax to the jurisidictions they operate in (albeit probably happening as reliably as winning bettors are on their winnings).

Small nit but you probably don't mean to say that you are a "capitalist" here, even if you maybe own some significant capital. Not because its wrong, but it's not what your trying to appeal to (ideological commitment). A "capitalist" can believe in anything really, they are such by virtue of their relation to the overall economy. Its kinda like saying "I'm a digestor of food" instead of "a patron of restaurants."

You are, quite succintly, a liberal in your beliefs here. This is not liberal in the CNN/Fox News sense, in case this comes off offensive.

I'm a "capitalist" in the sense that I think markets that allow people to exchange private capital create the better outcomes for society for society than other types of economic systems.

I'm also a "liberal."

Ha! I see, well, I'm clearly in the wrong here then.

May all your capital provide the most good it can! Godspeed.

Pendantry -- unhelpful and qualitative particularly when we largely agree -- as you clearly reveal in your 2nd paragraph.

Clearing up the incorrect connections you made is helpful.

Someone largely agreeing doesn't mean they should ignore mistakes.

You're connection between an economic system with some kind of an amoral political view is a non sequitur. You could trivially operate gambling institutions in a socialist system. The gambling existing has nothing to do with the economic system itself. It has to do with the political climate.

Name one (1) human activity in your opinion that isn't bad for society

People taking care of cats have done large damage to bird populations and many people are infected with pathogens carried by cats. How many people are killed by dogs each year? Should we ban caring for animals too? There are no 0 harm activities.

Reasonably splitting activities up into subcategories and regulating those makes way more sense. Your $100 attitude is just a shitty, less enforceable and more harmful way to regulate it. Calling the behavior of a system "shameful" is a total copout. You know what else creates negative externalities? (besides everything) DEBT! Why not ban debt, besides a token $100, I'm sure states will function just fine!

Do you have a religion that works on systems/corporations/states? If so I'd love to see it, cause the past 2000 years has been dogshit failure after pathetic failure

We have a system. Free speech, public debate and democratic elections.