Broadly speaking I'm a "whatever goes" kind of person. Don't regulate too much, let people do what they want. But this recent rise in gambling is making me feel like a censorious pastor or something. It's so obviously damaging. I don't even know that anyone was really asking for it. But there was money to be made, so of course it had to be legalized. And countless lives will be ruined.
One stat that gives me hope: young people aged 18-29, one of the prime targets for this gambling push, were asked if legalized betting is bad for society. In 2022 only 22% did, in 2025 41% do:
As a similar minded person in regards to “whatever goes”, the way I square it is drawing the line at persuasion, as well as the “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” games they are playing with enticing kids to gamble via sweepstakes loopholes, lax identity verification, etc.
I don’t care about most vice industries, even ones that have harm and addiction. What I care deeply about is advertising and persuasion. Gambling should be allowed, however bookmakers should never be allowed to initiate contact to entice the behavior. No push notifications, no ads, no TV network, no tv sponsorships. If people want to engage in your vice, they should have to find you.
Also, severe penalties. If a kid somehow gets access to an account, the bookmaker should have to unwind and refund all bets that they can’t definitively prove were made by an adult in addition to paying fines, or something similarly draconian. The burden of proof and responsibility needs to be on the people providing something that is proven dangerous to society. If that means that we can’t have betting apps, that’s fine.
The proven societal harms of the sports gambling boom more than justify this level of regulation.
Whether or not gambling is damaging to society shouldn't be a philosophical or moral debate. And IMO "popular opinion" surveys should carry zero weight.
There are many places where gambling has been fully legal for decades. We should be able to look at data to make conclusions about whether something is good or bad.
(I do, however, wish people would shine a spotlight on scratch off tickets... mainly because the odds are so terrible compared to how they're advertised -- if it weren't state-sponsored, I don't think private companies would be able to get away with running ads for lottery tickets that pay out so incredibly poorly)
Gambling has been legal in those place, often limited in space, and/or in advertisements. In my country, betting is fully legal, but gambling ads can't be showed on TV to people under 18 (or is it 16?) since at least 2000. The law didn't target internet advertisement until more recently though.
And to be honest, i think lootboxes and "gambling" with fake (but real. but fake) money like on Roblox is worse.
[edit[ But it is absolutely a _moral_ debate. That's basically the only debate that is relevant.
How is it anything but a moral debate? The definition of "good" and "bad" are completely subjective and based on personal perspective, experience, and preferences.
On top of that, we don't have the granulatity of data you seem to think we do that would allow anyone to definitively determine that legalized gambling is the cause of any specific characteristic of a nation, state, or locality.
There's already a growing amount of smoke in almost every sport, it's not going to explode like it should because no one is actually interested in enforcement outside isolated players.
My theory is that it will turn pro sports, baseball especially, into something like boxing was decades ago, where "Johnny got paid to take a dive" was a common meme.
It's the commercials that get me. Depicting people playing the games constantly, while clearing the house, going to the bathroom, hanging out with friends. It shows them with their minds elsewhere, as if they're in a fancy casino surrounded by rich beautiful people wearing suits and glamourous clothes. Meanwhile they are in their dull ordinary life, craving for a dopamine hit the app gives them.
The commercials are a celebration of addiction, and its disgusting to those of us who have struggled with addiction and know, like you say, the damage is clear. And they tacitly admit it too at the end of the commercial where they hurriedly say "struggling with gambling addiction? call this number." As if that absolves anything.
And it's not just the gambling either. A typical commercial break these days consists of: gambling ads where they try to get you addicted, crypto ads where they try to bilk you, political ads where they lie to you, and then there's the omnipresent pharmaceutical ads. Now we've got AI ads on top of it all. Every one of those ad categories should be made illegal, like tobacco advertising.
I'd support fairly broad restrictions on advertising for things like that: gambling, alcohol/intoxicants, prescription medicines. Basically, if it's not available to everyone, it should not be advertised to everyone.
What regulation would you propose? I'm personally against most regulation as well but more transparency (e.g. showing house favored odds) and advertising restrictions don't seem that harmful.
I think regulating too hard here would result in black markets and gamblers becoming more vulnerable to bad actors.
It seems very self evident to me (given what we now see with legalized gambling) that the harms of broadly legalizing it and creating an industry around it far outweigh any harms associated with black markets by a wide margin. Also, black markets for gambling still exist, so this kind of just feels additively worse. Just from a measure of utility, even if we went back to only having gambling performed with organized criminals breaking legs when people can't pay, that would still result in significantly fewer ruined lives, significantly better quality of life for the communities that are having wealth sucked out of them and into gambling syndicates. It's entirely unproductive destruction of wealth, robbing from the poor and giving to the rich. If gambling made anything better in net for society, gambling syndicates would never attempt to legalize it.
Not OP, but how about not being allowed to lose more than 1% of your net worth (or salary?) gambling in a year? (The gambling platforms would be required to monitor your losses)
Limiting sports betting to in person at licensed casinos seemed to work well enough for decades. Only a little akward when teams play in Vegas.
Yes, there was a fair amount of unlicensed sports betting, and of course a pro sports scandal every so often.
Alternatively, if you cap the amount of bets the bookies can retain, that might solve my immediate problem of I'm so tired of seeing the sports players with betting ads on their jerseys, the commentators yapping about bets, and then half of the commercials are sports betting ads. If they can't keep much, they won't have money to advertise.
Personally, I enjoyed the ads a lot more when the poker industry was advertising their no money .net sites and hoping people would just happen to go to their .com sites instead. That was at least a little amusing.
> A survey conducted in 2023 by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the governing body of college sport, found that 60% of college students have gambled on sport.
> I don't even know that anyone was really asking for it
Its generally the case that people didn't ask for it, most of the legalization of gambling in 21st century America was done by state legislatures, not referendums, and there's plenty of evidence that lobbying had a big role in this. However its also true that the public failed to reject it, most of the times it was put to referendum. Most people probably never asked for it, but when they were themselves asked most people took a libertarian position and said let people do as they want, even if it harms their kids by ruining their family finances...
It adds such a negative vibe to sports too. It's all gambling advertising now.
At least if the sponsor is a truck company, they're selling me a truck for money. Maybe I don't need a truck, but I give them money and I get a truck that I might get utility out of.
Gambling is purely to separate chumps from their money, as much as possible, and then we as a society have to deal with that shit.
Some sports star selling me shoes, whatever. Gambling? It's more like "hey dumb asses..."
It's a less than zero-sum, non-productive activity that damages people's finances.
The institutions that enable gambling receive the majority of the upside, while society receives all the negative externalities of people not being able to pay their bills, digging themselves into holes, not able to participate in the real economy.
The institutions enabling this use dark patterns and addictiveness to fuel a cycle of dependence.
I am also of the libertarian ideology that we should mostly let people do whatever they want so long as it doesn't hurt others. But lately I've been starting to think there are some habits (gambling) and some drugs (fentanyl) that are impossible to use responsibility and that destroy individuals and degrade society.
I think gambling should be regulated and taxed. This should not be such a lucrative or desirable industry to target.
At least gambling in the stock market, housing market, etc. is actually tied to real securities and derivatives. Betting on sports is useless. It pads the wallets of the gambling marketplaces and decreases the fitness, mental health, and security of the losers.
All forms of entertainment are considered useless by some, and there are millions upon millions of people who responsibly participate in gambling. See fantasy sports, March Madness bracket pools, and the vast majority of casino customers as examples.
It is already heavily regulated (which I think makes sense), and the regulators are the ones enabling this recent expansion because they want the tax revenue.
And I say this as someone who very, very rarely gambles outside of fantasy sports.
Like social media, there’s a whole nasty well-funded world of businesses behind it doing everything they can to harm people if it means an extra buck.
A lot of things that are basically ok when one dude with ordinary human liability does it become horrible when corporations enter the mix. IMO it’s not contrary to liberalism to tamp down on the use of corporations for these purposes. They’re creations of the state, after all.
Don't let it take hold! They will absolutely dominate the political lobbying scene and you'll never get rid of it. Sports betting being allowed makes Australia's recent social media ban to U18s clear that the priority is to support traditional media rather than prevent harm to youth.
Sports betting ads and apps are everywhere in Australia with practically no restrictions. You cannot avoid it, every free to air channel is basically now sponsored by sports betting ads, every traditional newspaper is kept alive by sports betting ads and every second billboard and poster is for sports betting. Children are now exposed and normalised to it from birth.
Absolutely nothing is being done from a regulatory point of view. It enables traditional media and it seems traditional media still call the shots in Australia.
May be too late. First, several states allowed casinos because of increased tax revenue. Now the industry has gotten big and the model seems to be (as I saw from some random guy on X): "Let's grind up people's souls and see if money comes out"
It’s too late. I got a behind the scenes view of a company that was heavily into online gambling, lobbying for further gambling legalization… and was just one arm of a larger corporation that ran right wing media organizations and produced & distributed for right wing personalities that you have heard of if you’ve looked into that world much at all (one features in a meme-image that’s been popular for many years, for example). Like, they were coupled closely enough that work for the media side crossed over to the gambling side.
IDK if the left is as tied up in it as the right, but that was about a decade ago and I haven’t had more insight since, but judging from the effects I believe it must have gotten far worse. Those orgs pull in stupid money and that one, at least, was using it to boost both gambling legality and far-right politics generally. That had the ears of a lot of the public, and of a lot of politicians.
Couple that with post-Citizens-United “dark money”… yeah, we’re in a bad place and there’s hardly even any awareness of all this outside some politics-nerd circles.
Gambling is one of the worst things and the unfettered spread of gambling is a attempt to further squeeze the middle class. A16z and YC should be shamed for investing in them but line goes up so who cares.
I think it's both a cause of and a symptom of the middle class disappearing.
Part of the compulsion towards gambling and lotteries is this sense that there's no other viable path upwards from where you are.
If you can't even imagine a reasonable chance of success from starting a small business, finding a better job, going back to school, or some other healthy path towards security and prosperity, then literally rolling the dice starts to seem like the most tangible (if unlikely) path towards wealth.
People gamble when they believe they don't have any better opportunities to spend their meager amount of discretionary income on.
(Of course, there is a separate compulsion towards gambling that is more a direct mental illness like alcoholism. But if you see a large-scale rise in gambling, I think you need to look for societal causes.)
To me this is more about our reduced attention span than no upward mobility. People want instant returns now and cannot imagine building their wealth slowly. The middle class is at the top of this since they have the money to invest.
The advantage of betting on a horse is that the next race is in 10 minutes. You buy a call on the price of MSFT, for example, and you're going to be waiting a while before you can place another bet.
And there are notoriously betting groups around the world that have made fortunes off of betting on horse racing. I'd bet that they feel superior to people betting on commodities and productive assets when they could be betting on horses.
The sports gambling craze in the uk started after I managed to almost entirely exclude adverts from my life -- the main adverts I see are on the escalators on the tube and tend to be for shows. Even then I try to avoid the tube and walk instead.
I have been in pubs with sky sports on occasionally, and it just looks like wall-to-wall.
When I was a lad the local football team was sponsored by an international company with a large local factory. Manchester United were sponsored by a TV company. People did gambling, it tended to be old men in grubby bookies and fruit machines, middle-aged ladies doing social events like bingo, the grand national, and then along came Mystic Meg saying how someone with hair may be lucky tonight for their £1 weekly stake.
We managed to ban smoking adverts from things like snooker, but the replacement is just as bad, in a different way
I wouldn't be that opposed to an 'everything goes' style sports division. Not only would it be fun to watch, but it would partially solve the issue of trans people in sports (which as a trans person I'm passionate about)
>"Last month, Mansour, the C.E.O. of Kalshi, said that the “long-term vision” for the company “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.”
This was a plot playing out in the background of the film Rat Race. I seem to recall a scene where foreign businessmen were wagering on how long maids could dangle from curtain rods or something.
Legalized gambling is fine. It takes away a revenue stream from criminals.
Gambling advertising is an awful, terrible, no-good idea. Gambling is a zero-sum activity that doesn't increase productivity or happiness. There's no reason to create demand for it.
Gambling apps, or any kind of online gambling for that matter, is the same. Allowing online gambling is like piping whisky into every alcoholic's home.
Keep all gambling in meatspace. Don't allow it to be advertised.
Legalized gambling is one of the biggest gifts for criminals. It's basically money launderers gift to heaven. All you have to explain is how you came up with the amount for a winning bet, rather than having to explain how you came up with the winnings plus how much you lost to the house.
Not that I think it should be outlawed. But I think it makes more sense to not make money laundering a crime, and allow criminals to put the money straight in the bank rather than having to do this dance where we pretend it is going to gambling or houses or whatever and meanwhile legally enriching even further a bunch of people who otherwise are generating far less 'value' for society.
I don't think it's quite that simple to launder ill-gotten money as "gambling winnings". I'm pretty sure I've seen somewhere (maybe a TV show) that legal gambling establishments have to report winnings to the government. So you need someone on the inside to make false reports.
I don't know the IRS's stance on money claimed to have been won in unauthorized, backroom card games.
I'm starting to feel like I'm living in some weird simulation...
It isn't just about the money or whether some corporation rakes in a few more dollars... It's about the way this stuff rewires people's brains. I read a piece about sports betting apps driving anxiety and depression in young men recently. And there was another report pointing out that kids as young as eleven are tempted to gamble when their favourite influencers promote betting codes...
These little hits of dopamine condition people early... It's not enough to say 'buyer beware' if the buyer is twelve. The normalization of gambling as just another entertainment product is insidious. I REALLY worry that we'll look back at this moment like we do with tobacco ads. People knew something was off, BUT it took decades for the laws to catch up.
ALSO the pressure for growth means the industry will keep pushing into new spaces... There are serious public health consequences here and some countries are starting to treat it like that. I hope we don't wait until the damage is everywhere before acting.
I didn't realize how bad it is until the Emmanuel Clase case. People are betting on niche stuff like "first pitch is ball or strike" and the volume is enough to make bribery profitable?
I can't find the link now but I read an interesting article recently interviewing athletes. They get so much abuse in their Instagram direct messages ("you messed up my parlay! I'm coming for you!")... I don't mean to sound hysterical but there's going to be some horrible high profile crime one of these days.
> Overall, between 2023 and 2025, the Bettors won at least $400,000 from the Betting Platforms on pitches thrown by the defendant EMMANUEL CLASE DE LA CRUZ.
Readit News
One stat that gives me hope: young people aged 18-29, one of the prime targets for this gambling push, were asked if legalized betting is bad for society. In 2022 only 22% did, in 2025 41% do:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/02/americans...
The damage is clear, everyone sees it. Only question is whether anyone will actually do anything about it now that the cat is out of the bag.
I don’t care about most vice industries, even ones that have harm and addiction. What I care deeply about is advertising and persuasion. Gambling should be allowed, however bookmakers should never be allowed to initiate contact to entice the behavior. No push notifications, no ads, no TV network, no tv sponsorships. If people want to engage in your vice, they should have to find you.
Also, severe penalties. If a kid somehow gets access to an account, the bookmaker should have to unwind and refund all bets that they can’t definitively prove were made by an adult in addition to paying fines, or something similarly draconian. The burden of proof and responsibility needs to be on the people providing something that is proven dangerous to society. If that means that we can’t have betting apps, that’s fine.
The proven societal harms of the sports gambling boom more than justify this level of regulation.
There are many places where gambling has been fully legal for decades. We should be able to look at data to make conclusions about whether something is good or bad.
(I do, however, wish people would shine a spotlight on scratch off tickets... mainly because the odds are so terrible compared to how they're advertised -- if it weren't state-sponsored, I don't think private companies would be able to get away with running ads for lottery tickets that pay out so incredibly poorly)
And to be honest, i think lootboxes and "gambling" with fake (but real. but fake) money like on Roblox is worse.
[edit[ But it is absolutely a _moral_ debate. That's basically the only debate that is relevant.
On top of that, we don't have the granulatity of data you seem to think we do that would allow anyone to definitively determine that legalized gambling is the cause of any specific characteristic of a nation, state, or locality.
The commercials are a celebration of addiction, and its disgusting to those of us who have struggled with addiction and know, like you say, the damage is clear. And they tacitly admit it too at the end of the commercial where they hurriedly say "struggling with gambling addiction? call this number." As if that absolves anything.
And it's not just the gambling either. A typical commercial break these days consists of: gambling ads where they try to get you addicted, crypto ads where they try to bilk you, political ads where they lie to you, and then there's the omnipresent pharmaceutical ads. Now we've got AI ads on top of it all. Every one of those ad categories should be made illegal, like tobacco advertising.
I think regulating too hard here would result in black markets and gamblers becoming more vulnerable to bad actors.
Treat gambling like tobacco or alcohol, basically.
Yes, there was a fair amount of unlicensed sports betting, and of course a pro sports scandal every so often.
Alternatively, if you cap the amount of bets the bookies can retain, that might solve my immediate problem of I'm so tired of seeing the sports players with betting ads on their jerseys, the commentators yapping about bets, and then half of the commercials are sports betting ads. If they can't keep much, they won't have money to advertise.
Personally, I enjoyed the ads a lot more when the poker industry was advertising their no money .net sites and hoping people would just happen to go to their .com sites instead. That was at least a little amusing.
Deleted Comment
> A survey conducted in 2023 by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the governing body of college sport, found that 60% of college students have gambled on sport.
Its generally the case that people didn't ask for it, most of the legalization of gambling in 21st century America was done by state legislatures, not referendums, and there's plenty of evidence that lobbying had a big role in this. However its also true that the public failed to reject it, most of the times it was put to referendum. Most people probably never asked for it, but when they were themselves asked most people took a libertarian position and said let people do as they want, even if it harms their kids by ruining their family finances...
“Except in Nebraska!” (Sorry I mean Pokerstars New Jersey.)
At least if the sponsor is a truck company, they're selling me a truck for money. Maybe I don't need a truck, but I give them money and I get a truck that I might get utility out of.
Gambling is purely to separate chumps from their money, as much as possible, and then we as a society have to deal with that shit.
Some sports star selling me shoes, whatever. Gambling? It's more like "hey dumb asses..."
The institutions that enable gambling receive the majority of the upside, while society receives all the negative externalities of people not being able to pay their bills, digging themselves into holes, not able to participate in the real economy.
The institutions enabling this use dark patterns and addictiveness to fuel a cycle of dependence.
I am also of the libertarian ideology that we should mostly let people do whatever they want so long as it doesn't hurt others. But lately I've been starting to think there are some habits (gambling) and some drugs (fentanyl) that are impossible to use responsibility and that destroy individuals and degrade society.
I think gambling should be regulated and taxed. This should not be such a lucrative or desirable industry to target.
At least gambling in the stock market, housing market, etc. is actually tied to real securities and derivatives. Betting on sports is useless. It pads the wallets of the gambling marketplaces and decreases the fitness, mental health, and security of the losers.
It is already heavily regulated (which I think makes sense), and the regulators are the ones enabling this recent expansion because they want the tax revenue.
And I say this as someone who very, very rarely gambles outside of fantasy sports.
A lot of things that are basically ok when one dude with ordinary human liability does it become horrible when corporations enter the mix. IMO it’s not contrary to liberalism to tamp down on the use of corporations for these purposes. They’re creations of the state, after all.
It's very easy to see why it's such a tempting business model.
Dead Comment
Sports betting ads and apps are everywhere in Australia with practically no restrictions. You cannot avoid it, every free to air channel is basically now sponsored by sports betting ads, every traditional newspaper is kept alive by sports betting ads and every second billboard and poster is for sports betting. Children are now exposed and normalised to it from birth.
Absolutely nothing is being done from a regulatory point of view. It enables traditional media and it seems traditional media still call the shots in Australia.
https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/12/pro-teen-social-media-b...
IDK if the left is as tied up in it as the right, but that was about a decade ago and I haven’t had more insight since, but judging from the effects I believe it must have gotten far worse. Those orgs pull in stupid money and that one, at least, was using it to boost both gambling legality and far-right politics generally. That had the ears of a lot of the public, and of a lot of politicians.
Couple that with post-Citizens-United “dark money”… yeah, we’re in a bad place and there’s hardly even any awareness of all this outside some politics-nerd circles.
Democrats dominate the legislature in California, and they are deep in the pocket of Indian gaming.
I think it's both a cause of and a symptom of the middle class disappearing.
Part of the compulsion towards gambling and lotteries is this sense that there's no other viable path upwards from where you are.
If you can't even imagine a reasonable chance of success from starting a small business, finding a better job, going back to school, or some other healthy path towards security and prosperity, then literally rolling the dice starts to seem like the most tangible (if unlikely) path towards wealth.
People gamble when they believe they don't have any better opportunities to spend their meager amount of discretionary income on.
(Of course, there is a separate compulsion towards gambling that is more a direct mental illness like alcoholism. But if you see a large-scale rise in gambling, I think you need to look for societal causes.)
And there are notoriously betting groups around the world that have made fortunes off of betting on horse racing. I'd bet that they feel superior to people betting on commodities and productive assets when they could be betting on horses.
Deleted Comment
Legalized sports betting has broken the deal! Now we get the worst of both worlds.
I have been in pubs with sky sports on occasionally, and it just looks like wall-to-wall.
When I was a lad the local football team was sponsored by an international company with a large local factory. Manchester United were sponsored by a TV company. People did gambling, it tended to be old men in grubby bookies and fruit machines, middle-aged ladies doing social events like bingo, the grand national, and then along came Mystic Meg saying how someone with hair may be lucky tonight for their £1 weekly stake.
We managed to ban smoking adverts from things like snooker, but the replacement is just as bad, in a different way
https://rg.org/guides/regulations
Sounds wonderful...
Gambling advertising is an awful, terrible, no-good idea. Gambling is a zero-sum activity that doesn't increase productivity or happiness. There's no reason to create demand for it.
Gambling apps, or any kind of online gambling for that matter, is the same. Allowing online gambling is like piping whisky into every alcoholic's home.
Keep all gambling in meatspace. Don't allow it to be advertised.
Not that I think it should be outlawed. But I think it makes more sense to not make money laundering a crime, and allow criminals to put the money straight in the bank rather than having to do this dance where we pretend it is going to gambling or houses or whatever and meanwhile legally enriching even further a bunch of people who otherwise are generating far less 'value' for society.
I don't know the IRS's stance on money claimed to have been won in unauthorized, backroom card games.
It isn't just about the money or whether some corporation rakes in a few more dollars... It's about the way this stuff rewires people's brains. I read a piece about sports betting apps driving anxiety and depression in young men recently. And there was another report pointing out that kids as young as eleven are tempted to gamble when their favourite influencers promote betting codes...
These little hits of dopamine condition people early... It's not enough to say 'buyer beware' if the buyer is twelve. The normalization of gambling as just another entertainment product is insidious. I REALLY worry that we'll look back at this moment like we do with tobacco ads. People knew something was off, BUT it took decades for the laws to catch up.
ALSO the pressure for growth means the industry will keep pushing into new spaces... There are serious public health consequences here and some countries are starting to treat it like that. I hope we don't wait until the damage is everywhere before acting.
Allegedly, per the indictment:
> Overall, between 2023 and 2025, the Bettors won at least $400,000 from the Betting Platforms on pitches thrown by the defendant EMMANUEL CLASE DE LA CRUZ.