In Defense Of Virtue, Gambling: Gambling Can Reward Virtue
To allow myself more time for gamming. I don't dissipate my energy thinking about the real world. I let Post columnist George Will do it for me. Whatever lie says about the Middle Past or inflation or traffic patterns at Chevy Chase Circle T assume to be the correct position, and adopt it as my own.</br></br>from Connecticut, which lie described as a veritable gambling hell, with legalized dog racing, jai-alai. lotteries and off-track betting, and he disapproved sternly. Gambling, he said, is an activity that debases our society and corrupts its citizens.</br></br>In Connecticut, money raised by gambling helps the state avoid instituting an income lax. but even that did not mollify the columnist. To Will, gambling is a regressive revenue-raising device Hint draws money disproportionately from "minority and poor populations that can ill afford to gamble. . . and have little understanding of the probability of losses.Û</br></br>This argument seems slightly out of character for the man who regularly chides government bureaucrats bent on protecting the masses from themselves, for the sake of their own good. Will displays this very sort of contemptuous paternalism in his view of gamblers, pitying the poor souls w.lio throw away their rent money on "lotteries in which more than 99.9 percent of all players are losers.Û</br></br>No matter that this indulgence buys a bit of entertainment, excitement and optimism for people with a 0.0 percent chance of working within Hie capitalist system to make a lot of money. Will disapproves of any ÛÏlust for sudden wealth. v The arguments about the dire social consequences of gambling, about the tots who must go barefoot because |v daddy blew his paycheck at the track, r; are old and familiar ones, with just åÇ Û¢ enough truth in them to provide ammunition for anti-gambling moralists. And Will acknowledges that this is what he is; he views gambling principally as a moral issue.