Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Our right to gamble on sports does not come from government

What follows is my May 24, 2018 opinion piece in The Orlando Sentinel
 
On Sept. 26, 1981, I was lying on the living room floor of my parent’s home watching the University of Southern California play Oklahoma in a much-anticipated college football game. In the week leading up to the game I made several bets with friends and school mates that USC would beat OU. As a 15-year old kid living in Oklahoma, I found it easy to find people who were willing to place a bet.
 
USC won and I spent the next few days collecting my cash.
John Locke would have been quite proud of me.
Almost 200 years earlier, in his second treatise on government, John Locke — one of the philosophical architects of American politics — wrote, “A liberty to follow my own will in all things where that rule prescribes not, not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man, as freedom of nature is to be under no other restraint but the law of Nature.”
 
There should have never been the need for Las Vegas casinos, offshore booking or black-market gambling sites if our government had stayed out of our business to begin with.
Sports gambling in America — even with its limited options — is a nearly $5 billion industry even with the near unanimity among state legislatures in banning this market.
 
Of course, as politicians always discover, no law that man or woman writes ever triumphs over the laws of supply and demand. From the era of Prohibition to the current war on drugs, time and time again we see that as long as profits can be earned and consumers are available, someone will find a way to enter the market and supply us with what we want.
 
Now that the Supreme Court has opened the door to legal gambling, we should all celebrate what is going to unfold.
 
First, in a recent interview, NBA owner Mark Cuban commented that legalized sports gambling will double the value of professional sports franchises.
 
Cuban is a smart guy who sees the potential for a vast new market to open up.
 
Imagine the changes that could take place in the arenas and stadiums across the country. You can expect to see gambling kiosks throughout stadium concourses. It will also make sense to retrofit stadium seats to provide touch pad technology that allows people to gamble from their seats on everything from the score at halftime to whether a player will make his next free throw. Of course it also makes sense for teams to make cellphone apps available to gamble remotely on everything people want to gamble on.
 
Politicians should be celebrating as well. First, among people who are passionate about gambling on sports, the overall demand for sports-book services is somewhat to very inelastic. This gives state governments the opportunity to impose taxes on a per-wager basis or on the winnings of gamblers and sports-booking agents. The newfound tax revenue would allow state governments to shore up their budgets and spend on initiatives they deem necessary.
 
The state of Florida already does this with our version of legalized gambling known as the lottery. If gambling tax revenue would be added to lottery money, we might hear a lot less about critical shortages of revenue for everything from heightened school security to our over-burdened infrastructure.
 
Critics, of course will charge that legalized sports gambling will promote addiction, financially decimate families and ruin people’s lives.
 
What the economic moralizers always miss is the fact that there is already a thriving black market from which addiction can form. Las Vegas — and the chance to financially ruin your life — is a flight away. Moreover — and perhaps most important — it is also a fact that we have, as free citizens, the natural right to be stupid with our money.
 
If the government has the right to decide whether we should gamble on NFL games, why doesn’t it — in the name of protecting society and families — have the right to ban foods high in sugar and fat, or ban suggestive music or magazines that degrade women?
 
In 1849, French economist Frederic Bastiat summed up this whole gambling argument this way:
 
“If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?”
 
Let the gambling begin.
 
 
              

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