Good idea to impose piguouvian taxes, not a good idea to impose sale taxes as that's regressive.

Property tax's a mixed bag since it taxes both land and building when ideally you only want to tax land.

States that impose income taxes are choosing not to imposes taxes elsewhere like land, which is the ideal tax. Income taxes have negative consequences since you're taxing economic activity.

Yes but states provide the roads, EMS, schools, etc the commenter was talking about, not the autocratic regime.. and the corporations benefit from those services way more than gamblers do.

Sounds like a win to me, you can leave more for productive activity to grow and attract more, there less incentive for illegal gambling, and no one is forced to do it.

If there’s a massive burden with addicts, you can still impose that the gambling industry pays more to offset.

Taxing productive economic activity is bad

Damning which way, though? Are gambling taxes too high, or are corporate taxes too low? And since corporate income is surely higher than gambling income, I’m inclined to think that gambling taxes are too high AND corporate taxes are too low, creating this odd fact.

Edit: and I know it sounds weird to say that gambling taxes are too high, when one could argue that high taxes are meant to disincentivize a thing - but if that thing is highly addictive, and if no other state action is taken to disincentivize that thing, then it’s actually a really sticky income source for the government who now doesn’t want to get rid of their cash cow. Tobacco ads are outlawed, which did more than taxing tobacco. Gambling ads are absurdly common.

There are a lot more people than corporations.

We should ban heroin and crystal meth so nobody does it anymore.

Gambling is an addiction without physical substance, it is not clear if taxes reduce gambling.

Taxing the dopamine thing does not discourage the doing of the dopamine thing. Just penalizes the addict and worsens their position.

I think the author was more trying to say that to ban sports gambling you may need to ban legalized gambling altogether.

In one sense, winning bets. If you lose, you lose: your money is gone either way. If you win, the fact that the probabilities sum to about 1.05 means you win less than you would have in a fair game. The state just takes a cut of that extra 0.05.

Taxing they daylights out of the advertising is another option.

That should push the shadier operators out of the limelight, though it would likely leave large-pot gaming (sports, Powerball, etc.) standing, at least for a while.

(I'd very much like to hear criticisms of this approach.)

So this is sort of a gotcha question, but I don't mean it that way.

Is it advertising when the announcer for a game talks about gambling? There's statements that obviously would be advertising, so the interesting thing is where and how to draw the line.

Agree. Gambling, smoking, drugs, and possibly weed should be legal, but just barely more preferable to obtain legally than illegally.

Interesting, didn't know they do that. USA (mostly) doesn't do any to of that and alcohol consumption and its related social costs are declining.

> You can still get a beer if you want, but it takes a little bit of doing.

It takes a little bit of money but you can get a beer at the supermarket.

It's like this for liquor (But not beer or wine) in some US states.

Why is that good

Talk through it, how does that play out exactly?

Do they addicts have to self report to get treatment? Do we force them?

I wonder could this be expanded to other areas. Say you run a ski-resort. Any broken bones and other issues are fully on you. To unlimited liability, piercing any corporate setup. Could really work for any sports too.

Food, tobacco, alcohol get more interesting... As there is bit harder time to assign blame of each meal. Maybe in those cases the claimants should be able to fully list everything they have ingested over say past 10 years. So that liability can be fairly and exactly distributed.

Should we also make sugar companies, coca cola/pepsi pay for people that become obese?

Yeah but banning them is the right thing to do. Why would you have a state agency review gambling ads?

> Tax advertising

That move alone would make a big dent in many of the major problems of modern living.

> I'd argue sports ruined their own product with ad insertion at every available opportunity (and even creating new opportunities to shove ads at you).

Side remark: I love to ridicule that of all things producers of very unhealthy food and beverages (or to put it more directly: producers of foods and drinks that make you fat and thus unathletic) love to sponsor sports events. :-)

  > I'm fairly pro-market, but I agree with this. I think people should do what they want if they don't harm themselves or others.

Is this still pro-market though? I have the same opinion and I often labeled as "anti-market" when I call regulations for gambling, social media, AI, etc.

Problem gamblers will find ways around this regulation. It’ll reduce by adding friction but problem gambling existed before gambling was legalized.

"If you want restrictions on gambling, on advertising it, on participating in it, on making money from it, you want to restrict individual liberty."

I grant that, but I never claimed the contrary. I never suggested that banning advertising reduces ALL harm or preserves ALL individual liberty. I just believe an ad ban is a good compromise position.

I'm a former smoker. I would have been outraged had the government tried to ban cigarettes while I was addicted to nicotine. But there's a difference between allowing people to have their vices and allowing people to spend hundreds of millions in multi-media advertising campaigns convincing others to pick up a new one.

As with many things, the degree matters. It is both an imposition on your liberty to require identification when boarding an airplane and an imposition on your liberty to ban everyone from flying altogether. But one clearly restricts your liberty more than another. I think when choosing between different solutions to a problem, choosing the one that limits your freedom the least is a reasonable rule of thumb.

Gambling vs advertising gambling are two different things.

Equating them as exactly the same doesn't serve your argument justice even if you do have a point with respect to the OP's "have their cake and eat it too" rhetorical flourish.

> If you want restrictions on gambling, on advertising it, on participating in it, on making money from it, you want to restrict individual liberty.

No.

An organization's liberty to advertise is not individual liberty.

Let individuals gamble. Do not let organizations advertise gambling services. Organizational liberty is not individual liberty.

I don't know, in the 90s a bunch of friends and I were into MtG and everyone bought packs. The idea of buying from a card dealer instead wasn't even on our radar. We weren't the most hardcore players but I think we were pretty typical; we went to Comic Con a few times in that era.

Consider who your peers were then. Were they likely to get addicted? I know my circle was elite--doing the probability calculations, circulating card lists on Usenet, and joking that gambling was taxes on stupid people.

Now as an adult, I see tweens with addictions to multiple things. Watch them beg to buy a Pokemon pack, open it, and lose interest. It's completely the dopamine expectation. And it takes years in recovery. But I think I was ignorant and unaware in the 90s of what other people were addicted to.

In the early to mid 2000s we used to do MTG booster drafts at the local game shop. Maybe the experience was different for different people.

> Again no one thought that was fun in the 90s, everyone hated that aspect of cards in the 90s

How old was everyone in the 1990s? Kids loved this kind of thing in the 2000s.

>> the move for card people back then was to wait for the card show and just buy the cards you actually want from a card dealer

That's still the move. Unless you want to gamble.

It's a collector's market, the value is in the demand and scarcity. Same as with all other collectibles like baseball cards and such. Or even wines, there are some that are so old they become undrinkable but cost like a car. In collectors market the price is detached from any kind of purpose of the item.

Also consider that most Magic cards are also valuable only because of their collector status. The valuable ones are mint first editions and nobody is buying them to play them.

So who fuels this collectors market? Nostalgic 30-something that have now disposable income and want to buy things they wanted as children. Same as with videogames collectors and such. You don't need an original copy of Supermario to play it, but people still spend thousands to buy it.

Pokémon TCG seems to have turned into a contest among opportunistic resellers to see who can buy up all of the cards and sell them to ... collectors? Other resellers? Who knows?

Which is a shame, since the game itself is actually fun. Or it would be if you could buy the cards easily and cheaply.

People in their 30s and 40s. It is the same thing with boomers and comic books. What was once in mass circulation in your childhood is now out of print and commanding real value among your nostalgic peers.

My guess is literally just the people who trade them - and maybe like, 10 13 year olds.

> Anyway, this is why I play MTG online

I think this depends on how you interact with your chosen game. To me, I play Yugioh as a hobby. If I'm "only" into the digital versions of the game, then it's no different to playing just about any other video game.

And even then, these live service TCGs (outside of unofficial simulators) can often have the same lootbox/pack gambling aspects as the real thing.

Personally that's not what I want. A good chunk of why I play paper is because of the physical community, in a space outside my home.

> I think there's a massive difference between card packs - which have been as you describe for decades - and the recent boom in sports betting.

There is, until there isn't. MTG has been leaning drastically into tiered and ultra-premium products. Increasingly, it feels like Magic design and product is focused on extracting money from the whales at the price of hollowing out their playerbase.

It's difficult to draw a hard line between wholesome collecting and lootbox gambling, but it's hard not to notice that even the bastions of the collectible industry have been aggressively moving in the direction of the latter.

> It’s no longer fun it’s just a grind.

Like most new games these days. I play only old games or few special ones like Baldur’s Gate anymore.

Why does drafting feel like that?

Labubus are much less about collectior value. They are more like a wearable luxury item that's sold via a gambling mechanic.

Their value is much less speculative and much more closely based on (blindbox price * distribution percentage of the rare variants) than most of the other items being dicussed here.

Who do you think was buying options 30 years ago? Institutional demand, particularly for non-OTC options, was zero. Countries which have legalized gambling tend not to have large options markets.

There is no convergence. They have always been the same thing. The difference is that you can provide a venue where harm is reduced or one where harm is maximised.

I still can't take him seriously, he's a long time crypto grifter exposing grifting, why should we enable him? I don't follow him very closely but he always positioned himself as a pick me saavy crypto investor not like the others (who were into shitcoins).

Also because the NBA is going through a gambling scandal with players being involved with the mafia.

What it comes down to I think is that historically, on average, stock traders come out ahead while "gamblers" do not. (Of course you can still go all-in on one company, or buy insane options, or use leverage, etc., and thereby gamble on stocks.)

Hmm perhaps you haven't been reading money stuff? He has pretty consistently noted that Robinhood is specifically a gambling app

Stock trades with sufficiently gambling-like payout structures do on occasion get regulated as gambling, see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_option

Know your customer laws are gambling regulation in disguise.

Because most people cannot define the difference between investing and gambling.

Also the stock market is NOT 0-sum. A buyer and seller can both "win".

Because stock trading isn't zero sum.

Because at the end of the day you are buying an asset. Whether that asset stays valuable or not will change.

Gambling is the chance to have nothing at the end.

There's a concept--"making more fun for people who aren't vulnerable to addiction isn't something they do".

I've thought of this often, seeing the state of mobile games. Not fun--they barely have strategy, little choice, and so much copy-cat gambling-machine mechanics.

These services make a relatively smaller piece of their profit from "responsible" people with a lot of self-control. In many cases, the business is probably not viable without problem gamblers. Problem gamblers account for anywhere from 51% of revenue for sports betting apps, to 90% in the case of casinos [1,2] and the numbers seem to be getting worse.

[1] https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/DMHAS/Publications/2023-CT-FIN... [2] https://www.umass.edu/seigma/media/583/download

> You're saying every last one is a degenerate gambler somehow concealing it totally from me?

A person can be generally responsible while still making decisions that are irresponsible. Gambling has a negative expected value, and so is generally considered to be irresponsible. Gamblers will often counter that they expect to lose their money and consider it to be a form of entertainment, but the whole of the entertainment is in believing that you might get lucky; this is indistinguishable from the motivation of a gambling addict. You don’t see these people taking out $500 in 1s and setting them on fire for fun, even though this is the aggregate outcome of habitual gambling.

Some might protest that all forms of entertainment are like this: You take the $500, take it to a movie theater, and 16 hours later your money is gone and you’ve seen 10 movies. So far as I know, the identification of casual gambling with vice dates back to the Victorian Period. I suspect (but cannot confirm) that the reason gambling was identified as a vice where other forms of comparatively frivolous entertainment were not is due to gambling’s (false) promise of providing money for nothing.

The problem is this: the house always wins. Casinos, online sports books, the lottery, all of it is designed such that all but quite literally a lucky few will lose money. If you understand this properly, then, yes, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it being a form of entertainment, but that means you need to go in thinking about cost per hour instead of any notion of leaving with more than you began with.

This is why I have a huge problem with the recent development of online gambling outlets that you can access via your smartphone. In the past you had to go somewhere to gamble, it was a physical act that provided a barrier to entry. Now? You don't even need to think about it, your bank account is already linked, just spend away!

Personally, I'd rather states loosen laws and allow physical casinos be built and properly regulated than be in the current situation we have with these poorly regulated online money-siphons.

>every one is a degenerate

Not at all. First, yes, people should be free to make their own choices. But that means making free choices. Just as we don’t allow advertising for cigarettes, we shouldn’t allow advertising for gambling.

Second, there’s a world of difference between “hey, let’s go have a crazy weekend in Vegas” and “I have a blackjack dealer live on my phone 24x7.”

‘Responsible’ gambling is still morally irresponsible. People are walking adverts for their hobbies whether they like it or not, so people who engage with gambling will be indirectly encouraging other people to take up the hobby, many of which will ruin their lives. (Also some fraction of their losses will fund advertising that will similarly attract problem gamblers.) The low stakes recreational gamblers keep the system looking friendly and approachable. This is also almost certainly by design.

Bob and Alice and the eavesdropper is Eve …

What name do we give “the guy who says it’s fine to tear down Chestertons fence” ?

He is saying the reponsible reasonable choice is not to gamble. These people are making unreasonable choices.

It was you who brought "degenerate" into it, as if throwing an insult or not made difference in facts.

Also, yes, gamblers hide their addiction. That is normal for gambler and you wont know it. They can be likable people and calling them "degenerate" just makes seeking help harder.

You can't let society keep inventing new vices for profit in an uninhibited way.

It feels like a bell curve topic, where the most naive people think you should just ban all vices and have a strictly better world, the middle of the road thinks it's all down to personal fortitude, and then people who know how the sausage is made realize the level of asymmetry that exists.

Weed isn't just weed anymore, it's fruity pebbles flavored.

Porn isn't just porn anymore, it tries to talk like a person and build a parasocial relationship.

Video games aren't just video games anymore, they start embedding gambling mechanics and spending 2 years designing the "End of Match" screen in a way that funnels you into the next game or lootbox pull.

You need to stop somewhere. Tech + profit motives create an asymmetric war for people's attention and money that results in new forms of old vices that are superficially the same, but realistically much much worse.

Gambling specifically online might just be giving tech companies too many knobs that are too easy to tune under the umbrella of engagement and retention.

That's like saying drunk gave alcohol a bad name.

It's a net negative for society but we can't simply get rid of it because of the side effect of doing so, particularly since it's so easy to brew alcohol.

Ah yes, let’s blame it all on the weak-willed addicts… That hasn’t been tried before, and would certainly help.

Funny you say that as any level of alcohol consumption is bad for your body.

The ads and apps are very much targetted at men. I have seen "some and few" gambling apps targetted at women. Traditionally too, gambling was more of a "male" issue.

Also, the people loosing money on crypto, MtG and games with gambling mechanics tend to be more of men. It is kind of a gendered issue.

I mean, in my little part of the world if you go up to any sub 24 year old male and say: " What's the line?" you'll get the betting numbers for the 'largest' local team playing that day.

It's a bit different today in particular though as we're in equinox season (when many major sports leagues play on the same day). So your local college football team is playing today, the world series game 7 is today, and there are NBA and NHL on today, and NFL is tomorrow.

This is true. Growing up, there was always this ideal that the West was superior ingrained in us (colonial hangover as some put it), and it takes a lot of unlearning to see past it.