Gambling is poison to both the individual and the sport. Gambling addiction is absolutely devastating. Gambling has the highest rate of suicide of any addiction [1]. Being able to gamble on your phone is way too accessible. Gambling of any sort is an awful industry but at least a physical casino has a higher barrier to entry than pulling your phone out.
Here's something else you may not know: if you win too much on these sports betting sites, you can get banned [2].
Now, you might be tempted to say "casinos ban card counters in Blackjack", which is true. But sports betting is more like poker where the house takes a cut of any action, so by winning you're taking money from other players, not the house.
So why do sportsbooks ban you for winning? Because it means other people lose and to create addiction you can't always lose. You have to sometimes win.
For me, this absolutely destroys any argument that it is a "game of skill" (which matters for the legislation that legalized it).
It’s a literal scam. We prohibit literal scamming and defraudation. Gambling apps should be wiped off the face of the earth, not made inconvenient to install. If they move to Tor like drug marketplaces have, that’s fine. That’s their place, approximately.
Sports gambling was prohibited in most US states during most of US history. It didn't "work" in the sense that it did not completely prevent sports gambling, but neither did it cause any major problems AFAICT.
The Italian mafia operated in my large New England town when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. There was a beefy Italian guy at the YMCA I frequented with a nose that had been horribly disfigured by some intentional violence. One of the Italian boys in my high school offered sports bets as a service to the other children. I'm guessing that that boy was mobbed up, but I never saw any sign of it that time I challenged him to a fight (to get him to stop talking trash to me).
Certainly everyone will agree with me that the mafia is a pale shadow of what it was on the East Coast of the US in the 1960s and 1970s? And do any of the non-mafia criminal gangs in the US even offer sports betting as a service? Sports betting is still illegal in many US states, including California: does anyone know of any gang offering sports betting to Californians?
I've spent many hours on Youtube learning about the mafia, which gave me the distinct impression that the worst effects of the mafia are when it "taxes" necessary society functions (like garbage collection and skyscraper construction) and that the mafia's offering services that are unequivocally illegal are less harmful. Certainly it was outright illegal for any party to offer betting of very-high-interest loans when I was growing up.
So, without someone's proving a decent amount of evidence to the contrary, I'm going to believe tentatively that "driving sports betting underground" does not in fact has a high societal cost. The mafia's making some regular money on this or that is not necessarily an unacceptable societal cost; the optimal amount of crime is not zero.
I’m unsure but I’ll be honest in that I find it hard to understand how online poker is illegal in most states yet sports betting and the lottery are fine.
Drugs are in fact banned for the public good (ostensibly).
And why aren't gambling advertisements "part of a free society"?
I'm all for being skeptical of the government and its (ab)use of power, but I must admit I struggle to find a good excuse to not ban gambling past "people should be allowed to ruin their own lives".
I'm personally leaning towards gambling ban, but I can give a few excuses not to:
* Gambling won't disappear completely, but will move underground (creating mafias), or at least people will gamble online illegally (depriving country of tax revenue)
* Not every gambling leads to ruin, just like alcohol drinking is not always alcoholism. At policing the way people have fun is indeed a complex issue.
* There are forms of gambling that can't be regulated easily. One (unfortunately) form of gambling common recently is making insane bets in the stock market (see WallStreetBets subreddit, for example). It's even tax advantaged, compared to regular gambling.
* Making gambling illegal may make it harder for gambling addicts to find the help they need.
Opiates and amphetamines seem like they obviously have a different risk profile (and resultant societal impact) than nicotine or caffeine.
Somewhat off topic, but I’ve always wondered if alcohol would still be legal if it wasn’t grandfathered in by, like, every single culture ever.
I don't necessarily disagree with your conclusion but I'd like to know how you arrived there. What makes gambling a part of free society but not gambling advertisements?
Gambling is extraordinarily harmful to others, I personally witnessed half a dozen families ruined completely by gambling when the country I lived in allowed slot machines everywhere.
“Legalize everything I can do to myself” is a wildly toxic and uneducated message that completely ignores all the knowledge we have accumulated about the weaknesses and loopholes of human nature.
Anecdata, I know a guy who is a chef. He's gambled it all away, it's just 30k$ (in debt) or so but considering the Swedish tax system it's actually a lot of money. Now kronofogden is after him, he's recently been handed divorce papers and the government takes half his paycheck.
He's got 3 kids (duh) so it immediately affects 4 people while straining even more, for what gain? Megaprofits for $megagamblingcorp?
1. Thats a criteria based on harm, not “free society”.
2. Gambling has massive harms on others. The family of the men who gamble (it’s usually men gambling on sports), including the minor kids who cannot leave the individual and are dependent on them, as well as broader society which now has to pick up the pieces for this individual and the people dependent on him.
That can't be the difference. Assuming parent poster is talking about gambling hurting people (and ignoring that gambling and most other addictions do hurt others, as siblings pointed out), then banning of hurting others you would mean banning bookmakers, not just their advertisements. Parent was specifically banning advertisements but seemed to be saying to leave gambling industry legal.
I could see the way to argue for banning advertising being along the lines of minimizing harm. You acknowledge that gambling does hurt gamblers but also people close to them and society more broadly, but that prohibition may not be very effective so you permit regulated legal gambling (but no ads). I just don't really see how you can make it a freedom argument.
I can't tell if this comment is really serious. In case it needs explanation, you don't ban gambling advertising by having a censor watch every ad and then decide which ones to allow. You pass a law that says "no advertising gambling" and then if someone does it, you prosecute them.
I can't tell whether you're trolling or serious...
It's not about moderators being harmed or not. It's a preference of the wider community to not have the harmful content, and the moderators volunteering to help keep it that way.
With most harmful content, the effect of seeing a single instance is not significant. Being exposed to it constantly in places you frequent for other reason (your online communities, or advertisements everwhere), builds up much more of an effect. Now moderators being constantly exposed might also be affected, but they're choosing to do so, and may have coping strategies in place for the more extreme cases.
What's the deal with trying so hard to defend the advertising of an objectively harmful industry?
I think a good parallel here is Tobacco advertising. Smoking is harmful in every way, therefore I don't see any reason why advertising it to a broad audience (which will inadvertently also include children) is something we should allow.
What's the net benefit of allowing such advertising? I don't see it. Yo could argue something about rights to free speech or some variation, but societies still have a responsibility to look out for the health of their people, no?
Yeah that's true, random unrelated things did happen in the past, but that's not a credible argument against having slap on the wrist fines for advertising gambling.
> No. Gambling is a part of a free society, just like drugs are.
How do you square the harm that gambling does to unrelated parties?
It's really easy to lose a lot of money super fast with gambling such that suddenly your entire family is dire straits (losing the house, facing bankruptcy, etc.) before the non-gamblers have any ability to react.
There is no logically consistent world in which “Gambling is a part of a free society” and “Gambling advertisements…Don’t let it happen”.
If you’re taking a libertarian, its part of a free society therefore we are helpless and must allow it view, then banning the speech around it completely contradicts this view.
The constant pushing of sports gambling by leagues and broadcasters is well on the way to ruining sports themselves, so it might ban itself when there's nothing left to bet on.
Then how about daytrading, crypto trading, lottery, horse betting, etc. the list goes on. There are no shortage of ways to separate people from their money. It's like those school soda bans. As it turns out, people can get their soda from many places, not just school.
There are some forms of gambling that may arguably be a social good. For example, car insurance is a wager by the car insurance company that a driver won't get in a car accident during the coverage period. Commodity speculators may serve as a counterparty for farm insurance derivatives.
I’ve wondered if it could be possible to harness some of these "suboptimal" gambling behaviors into "socially good" gambling but I haven’t quite figured out how to do it. Maybe someone else here can do it.
You don't ban people from consuming sugar, you ban companies from mass-producing food with unhealthy amounts of it. It's about friction and incentives. If you want to buy a bag of sugar and bake a cake that's fine.
shades of grey and tradeoffs. gambling has a very clear and well studied negative effect on a small but sizeable percent of people and its not that great for everyone else. its my opinion were better off without it
Government bans on a thing are a question of "should we use guns to prevent people from doing $THING?"
Given that the use of violence is a rather extreme remedy to a perceived problem, there'd have to be a pretty compelling case to warrant pulling out a gun to stop people from doing something.
Except for the 300 layers of asking nicely, , formally giving warnings, issuing fines and citations, etc., yeah it basically is just guns threats violence and totalitarianism.
You don’t ban anything, you make more attractive whatever behavior you want to promote, the paper thinks stocks are better so then make index investing a better alternative.
Index investing isn't really gambling in the generally understood sense though, you just buy the whole haystack (or at least a haystack that's big enough) and ride it.
How about "Could sports betting be banned?" People are strongly motivated to do this and often spontaneously form networks to share bets. How exactly would the state put a stop to this? Even with really thorough access to all financial transactions it would be hard to prove what went on without direct testimony which is unlikely to be available.
Legalized gambling with big enterprises running it and ads visible to most people, many of whom wouldn't usually gamble, should be orders of magnitude worse than informal networks. One may not get rid of the latter, but stopping the former has a very great value.
Interesting question! Depends on how strong is your desire to ban it. The humanity has a long history of banning things, including certain plants, certain thoughts (for example, religious beliefs), certain ideas, certain symbols, certain pictures, and even certain numbers.
I have a few ideas. Criminal groups are often broken by having a police infiltrate the group and collect the evidence. We could have police officers joining the gambling groups (the groups need to accept some people, so they have someone they can make bets with) and catching the perpetrators. I also don't think that - at least right now - gamblers use tor or sufficiently anonymous proxies, so it would be easy to get most of them by just observing network traffic. Also, significant money transfers between random private people are uncommon. You can find sets of people who often do transfers like this, and find the "gambler networks".
There are countless activities that could be deemed "not socially valuable". That is far too broad and subjective a metric to determine whether something should be banned.
Just like the lottery, you can never really ban it. It just shifts to a shadowy, untaxed venue. The least bad law would be to put restrictions on advertising. I don't understand why people tolerate State-sponsored lotteries being able to advertise like they do.
Gambling is poison to both the individual and the sport. Gambling addiction is absolutely devastating. Gambling has the highest rate of suicide of any addiction [1]. Being able to gamble on your phone is way too accessible. Gambling of any sort is an awful industry but at least a physical casino has a higher barrier to entry than pulling your phone out.
Here's something else you may not know: if you win too much on these sports betting sites, you can get banned [2].
Now, you might be tempted to say "casinos ban card counters in Blackjack", which is true. But sports betting is more like poker where the house takes a cut of any action, so by winning you're taking money from other players, not the house.
So why do sportsbooks ban you for winning? Because it means other people lose and to create addiction you can't always lose. You have to sometimes win.
For me, this absolutely destroys any argument that it is a "game of skill" (which matters for the legislation that legalized it).
[1]: https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-news/problem-gambl...
[2]: https://www.elitepickz.com/blog/do-sportsbooks-ban-winners-a...