Incredible that it's taken this long to arrive at the obvious.
Gambling takes advantage of the poor, under-educated, and addictive personalities and puts them into financial distress. This places burden on families, the state, and local municipalities. It creates strain on the workforce and deflects legitimate economic activity that would otherwise strengthen the economy.
We're a free society. I'm fine with gambling from a personal liberty perspective, but the companies that facilitate and profit need to pay 40-50% of their gross revenue to the government. That's comparable to tobacco.
Companies also need to be restricted in how they are able to advertise their vices. Never to children, and never targeted to at-risk personality types.
They also need to be tightly regulated and kept from using dark patterns and addictive gotcha mechanics to cause even greater harm to those most at risk.
taxing a vice is worth it on paper, but the second-order effects (nonstop alcohol ads, pervasive gambling app dark patterns) aren't worth it imo
Those second-order effects are easy to mitigate with sensible public policy. And it's not like we have to invent the solution from scratch — we've done it before, very effectively.
Seems like they can, or you mean they can't 'make laws' that you personally care about?
100 years ago, the 69th congress passed over 1500 laws, plus hundreds of continuing resolutions, treaties, etc https://www.loc.gov/collections/united-states-statutes-at-la...
Today at the gas station on the outside of the pump and the store door.
I'll bet you didn't see any cartoon camels or doctors recomending a brand though, because even where tobacco ads are legal, many tobacco ads are no longer legal.
Whether you see ads, and what kind of ads you see is highly regulated. That's the whole point,
We clearly don't live in the same states.
I live in a different country since we don't have states here.
Regrettably, sensible public policy seems to be in remarkably short supply these days.
biological organisms develop addiction much faster than political processes
legality itself never stopped a vice from being indulged :) it's the cost / benefit that brings back repeat customers and encourages addictive behaviors
It will either push them out of business, or they'll find a way to screw the player to increase margin through even more deceptive products.
If the legal entity can't operate because of a tax on revenue than illegal offshore entities will gladly take their place and do.
The only solution really is sharia law, a complete ban and harsh punsihments for all operators and customers. I say this ironically but it actually is really the only solution, and even this doesnt work entirely.
In all reality, the NASDAQ does the entire yearly turnover Klashi and Polymarket combined in a few minutes. It hasnt become as big of a problem as people make it out, but its still a problem.
But there's no going back to the status quo with 1990s methods of enforcement. Everyone knows how to use crypto and VPNs, you'd just be pushing people into shady offshore.
Not everyone who has placed a bet on Kalshi or Polymarket necessarily knows how to use these tools.
> you'd just be pushing people into shady offshore.
Hurdles help. Not everyone will know how to jump every hurdle. Not everyone will be willing to put forth the effort. Will some people? Sure. But hurdles do cut down on the overall participation.
That being said I still don’t think taxing on revenue is a good idea.
Few here would be a good politician or law maker.
Gambling in contrast is strictly zero sum at best and always negative sum in reality. A group of people puts in 1x capital, the house takes a cut of that, and then the <1x gets unevenly redistributed and that's it. Nothing is generated, the collective set of people is strictly worse off after the gamble, with a few making gains off the backs of loss distributed amongst everyone else. All while hacking dopamine reward centers that didn't evolve for that.
It appears to be the case that we can't perfectly stop 100% of all IRL gambling without a cost that exceeds the benefit. That's life. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be picking as much low hanging fruit as possible, same as with other negative sum brain hacks.
A drug is dangerous when it is toxic at an easily obtainable dose AND there is a clear incentive for people to consume it in that dose, such as addiction and tolerance. While acetaminophen is unusually toxic at doses only slightly higher than regular treatment doses, there is actually very little that compels people to use those doses, and acetaminophen toxicity is not an epidemic-level health problem the way many other drugs have become.
Either way, we don't have to assume, we can directly check the numbers. Per another commenter, Tylenol kills about 458 people in the USA every year. In contrast, death from overdose on illegal stimulants was estimated at ~33.000 people in the USA.
Now, is it fair to say that Tylenol is more dangerous than marijuana? Of course. But to say it's more dangerous than most illegal drugs? Obviously not.
I know that a lot of illegal drug overdoses are caused by people who thought they were taking a normal dose but got the wrong substance, wrong amount or wrong concentration from their dealer - who in many cases also didn't know about the discrepancy because of unreliable supply chains and difficulty of testing, both caused by illegality.
I have a very difficult time taking an argument plausibly that compares Tylenol (acetaminophen, an antipyretic analgesic) to illegal stimulant use (immediately following a discussion on fentanyl, which is an opioid - about as close to opposite a stimulant as possible) - i.e. generally amphetamines.
Or comparing Tylenol to marijuana in a very apples and oranges comparison - Tylenol's dangers come from very direct hepatotoxicity (i.e. liver damage), versus marijuana's most real risks coming from impairment and intoxication (driving, judgment, panic) and their effects than toxicity of the drug itself.
It's all mixing and matching in a way that doesn't make for a sensical argument.
Of course, most illegal drugs, even very light ones like marijuana, have other risks, like DUI or the general ills of addiction (money issues, increased criminality from the desperation of getting another hit, etc). But even ignoring those, I thought the death numbers make it very clear that Tylenol is nowhere near "less dangerous than most illegal drugs".
Doubling your meds on a bad pain day can put you way beyond the safe limits. People think it’s safe because basically every other OTC has a huge therapeutic band, and double dosing is not recommended but not really dangerous.
CDC estimates it at 56,000 ER visits a year, 26,000 hospitalizations, 458 deaths, about a hundred unintentional deaths per year. As a point of reference, it’s about 3 accidental overdose deaths per child that dies from being locked in a hot car.
Wait, no I didn't. That's absurd. Tylenol can cause long term health issues if used in excess (or death, for extreme overdoses), but most illegal drugs are illegal because they can cause immediate death even at normal usage amounts.
If cocaine was really a problem then C-suites and politicians would be regularly dieing.
No drug I'm aware of causes immediate death in normal usage, except perhaps those used for lethal injection. Would you like to elaborate on that? Tylenol, on the other hand, causes an unpreventable (no antidote) slow drawn out death over about a week, where your body will be slowly decaying and you have time to say goodbye to all your loved ones, if you take a few times the normal dose by mistake
Huh. The amount used on the street is not a "normal usage amount". Most fentanyl deaths are due to the fact that the medical usage amount is not something you can generally measure with your dealer's scale or the scale you bought at the local head shop (we, as paramedics, would typically administer 50-100 micrograms, and for anything more than 300 we needed to consult with a physician).
In those use cases, properly dosed, fentanyl is an exceptional, powerful, and short-lived, analgesic.
When people die from fentanyl ODs they're taking dozens, hundreds, or more, than the "normal usage amounts".
No, that is not a strict definition of gambling, that is your own loose, personal and casual definition. The strict definition of the gambling in question under Arizona law (the subject of this article) is I believe partly under 13-3301 [0] and has a number of criteria that clearly differentiate it from investment (whether it be stock, loan by a bank or any other entity/person, or whatever else). Other polities will have their own flavors, but all of them are aimed at a net negative, destructive social activity. That's the whole point of regulating it, it's not some metaphysical philosophy thing about life having uncertainty it's about long experienced concrete harm. Trying to argue that buying shares in a broad index fund is a "wager that a meteor will not hit the Earth" is uninteresting.
>Just because it (often) is positive sum doesn't mean it isn't an unknown that people are betting money on.
It does actually! Positive sum changes everything in terms of collective incentives, strategies available and how investors can hedge risk. You may not choose to make use of all the tools available, but that doesn't make investment the equivalent of gambling. Part of the whole point of markets is to manage changing risk and information discovery (including dead ends) such that we still continue to grow overall.
----
The stock market was so gambling that we had 'bucket shops' where people would just buy and sell fake stocks that tracked real stock prices.
Now we have public companies directly selling shares with no voting rights and no plans to ever pay dividends, which is the same thing.
Unlike sports gambling or casinos, the stock market actually does have some legitimate utility, as compared to being (at best) pure entertainment.
Theoretically, more gamblers should mean better price discovery because the payouts for correctly taking the opposing side of the trade are higher.
The market solution would be that the gambling will eventually solve itself. They’ll either learn enough to be trading on knowledge rather than vibes, fueling price discovery, or they’ll exit the market when they’ve lost too much or everything.
My sticking point is that a lot of brokers offer leverage to people they really shouldn’t. I could have sworn you had to be a qualified investor to get leverage, but if that isn’t law it should be. Show the brokerage your certification, or a pile of cash large enough to convince them you can afford to lose the whole thing.
My theory is mostly that "gambling" seems like it inherently means "buying stocks based on something other than their concrete value". More gambling means stocks drift further from their "true value", which means a higher payout for correcting them back to what their price should actually be.
The whole thing does get very fuzzy because of the "market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" aspect. It's not enough to know what the correct price is, you have to know when other people will realize that as well, or else convince people that your price is "correct".
gacha mechanics
That said, I recognize the broader point. Betting on everything, especially things that betters can directly influence is incredibly dangerous.
https://www.agweb.com/news/business/rain-robbers-how-four-fa...
The difficulty with taxing prediction markets is that encouraging gambling on some events incentivizes gamblers to try to influence those events in a way contrary to how people would want to influence them in the absence of gambling, which typically means gamblers are incentivized to influence events in a way that will increase societal harms. For some events, resolving one way or the other is inconsequential, but this is not true for many of the events I see people gambling on in prediction markets.
I view favored house-odds, on arbitrary games or not, as unethical and predatory. This is the classic casino slot machine and related. However, Poker doesn't have house odds, it is a fair game.
Move one level up: prediction markets don't have house-odds if implemented plainly. On non-game events, they also have a positive externality, which already contradicts your claim: prediction markets predict quite well.
Yet another level up: investing in the stock market. The same authentic gambler who burns money into a slot machine can play the stock market to similarly disastrous ends. But if you define this as gambling and want to outlaw or limit it to 'professionals' then you bar people from capital markets which is absurd.
This is often called "insider trading" instead of "house odds", but it is ultimately the same thing, the same moral hazard. And note that this is illegal, both in the stock market and in commodities trading - though enforcement varies, and is not very easy anyway.
I'd also note that there are significant problems with random reward games / gambling even when there is no house advantage. Gambling addiction is a real problem that destroys some people's lives, just like alcoholism. And people can become addicted and lose their houses by playing poker just as much as they can by betting on roulette.
These laws have profound effects and it takes people time to learn about what they pertain to, especially new technology or new ways of using it. It's good to have periods of feedback between the public, the courts, the legislature and the executive branch. The same things that slow down what we most want to happen quickly also slow down the things we desperately want to avoid.
"If only the law moved as quickly as an individual" is great until you get a guy like Trump in power.
The legal system tells itself this noble story of measured action without realizing it actually became the bad guy many decades ago.
My brief little opinion here is half informed from dating a lawyer for a few years.