I&#x27;m glad the article makes the <i>very</i> important distinction that: &quot;The lottery is not a tax. The inflated price of lottery tickets is.&quot;<p>I thought the article was going to be yet another claim that &quot;a tax on people who are bad a math&quot;, I was pleasingly surprised that it focused on the tax created by the state monopoly, not on the fact that lotteries have negative EV.<p>The main counter I would offer to the article is that it isn&#x27;t clear that there would be much of a &quot;social&quot; benefit in opening the lottery to competition. With the variance so high, and the players paying little attention to the odds, it&#x27;s likely that the result would simply be a tiny amount of people earning about 35% more when they hit large prizes, and the rest spending the same amount of money on lottery.