What makes the seat belt analogy shaky is that society pays for the people who don&#x27;t wear their seat belts in the form of 1. increased insurance premiums and 2. increased health care costs, both of which are spread over the entire population, those who wear and don&#x27;t wear seat belts. If you don&#x27;t wear your seat belt, and hurt yourself, that comes out of my pocket. Society has the right to keep those costs down and collectively decided the best way is to ban this costly behavior.<p>It&#x27;s a bit harder to argue that there is a great cost of gambling that is spread across society, however I&#x27;m a poker player myself so a bit biased.<p>A problem with that argument, of course, is that it leads down the path of banning everything that&#x27;s risky and where society shares the downside. We don&#x27;t want to do that, so society picks and chooses the highest risk (or worst downside) activities to ban.