Being immune to the allure of sports betting is a fringe benefit of being immune to sports – I don’t hate the idea of sports, but I’ve got a lot of stuff happening (including writing the 9th Kelly Turnbull/People’s Republic novel!) and don’t have time to care. But even someone outside of that world can see that legalized gambling has exploded. What used to be some parlays among friends or maybe some bets with a bookie have gone corporate and gotten huge. It’s everywhere, including popping up on the rare occasions I watch regular television – bet, bet, bet, on dozens of different platforms promising big winnings if you just keep playing. Of course, the house always wins, but hey – maybe you’ll get lucky? And maybe JB Pritzker will turn down seconds.
BTW, the tubby Illinois governor recently reported winning $1.4 million at the tables. Apparently, everything he does involving tables is to excess.
You used to have to go to Vegas or Atlantic City to drop the next mortgage payment; now, you can do it on your phone. The original idea of these gambling meccas was to channel the ancient vice of gambling into something less outright destructive. You make it an event, throw in Frankie and Dino and a $7 prime rib buffet, and mom and dad can feel a little naughty playing blackjack with no harm done. Sure, there were degenerate gamblers before, and they will never go away; the idea was not to make degenerate gamblers out of normal folks. Keep it classy, keep it controlled.
But then Elizabeth Warren’s people started opening up casinos everywhere, and we had Powerball lotteries imposing the idiot tax on people with $2 and a dream in all the states. Then, more states opened up online betting. Now, your iPhone is Caesar’s Palace. Eventually, most of the walls holding back unlimited gambling fell, and it’s everywhere. I’ve never seen a Warren kind of Indian in Los Angeles, but there are a dozen Indian casinos within ten miles, meaning an hour on the road.
Of course, now more people are getting hurt as their betting gets out of control. It’s not free money; it was never free money. The house always wins, and you always lose. eventually. Most folks can gamble responsibly, having some fun, then stopping before it gets out of control. But those warnings on every ad about the people who can’t gamble responsibly highlight the problem. There are lots of people who can’t gamble responsibly, and guess who will have to pick up the pieces? Us, including supporting their families when they go on the dole because daddy lost it all on a prop bet that Shohei Ohtani would hit a grand slam, then hook up with Sydney Sweeney.
Of course, vice invites corruption, and it’s now publicly infecting sports themselves (it has no doubt infected them for a while, with point shaving, thrown games, and the like). It is also resurrecting the mob – I guess when the FBI was busy hassling moms for being mad about sex offenders in their kids’ locker rooms, the Mafia took advantage of the opportunity. The recent busts will be just the tip of the iceberg. Mark my words and move over, Black Sox – this will be a disaster for professional sports.
Then there’s the vice of dope smoking. We stamped out regular smoking pretty effectively; I freak young people out with tales of the smoking section and theaters where you couldn’t see the screen through the haze of burning tobacco. But somehow pot is different. You walk down any urban street and it’s like a Cypress Hill concert; you’re lucky if you don’t wander off the sidewalk and into traffic from the contact high. Even in the most conservative states, you will find dispensaries passing out supercharged ganja with 10 times the THC of the old skunk weed that stoner guy in your dorm used to fire up. Medicinal my tush; the only things it’s treating are boredom and ambition. Really, the smart play would have been legalizing cocaine, since people would at least be motivated to do something useful, like clean up their condo, sell junk bonds, or greenlight “Caddyshack.” Just what America needed – a drug designed to make our citizens lazier, dumber, and less interesting.
Of course, the urge to effectively legalize things that we suppressed for eons of human history because we’re so much smarter than those ancients doesn’t stop at dice n’ dope. No, they have done it for prostitution, too. Oh, wait – that’s a judgmental word. I mean “sex work,” which we should totally pretend to respect lest we shame the people involved in it. Of course, shame is just what’s needed. You should be ashamed of serious gambling. You should be ashamed of serious dope smoking. And you should be ashamed of selling yourself or others for sex. Sorry/not sorry to get all John Lithgow in the original “Footloose” on you, but just because people want to do bad, harmful things to excess does not mean we should make it easy for them. The wrecked lives of the guys condemned by the Draft Kings testify to that. The dead people killed in DUIs, where the “I” came from cannabis, testify to that. And the women forced to march along dirty urban streets selling themselves to skeevy creeps with the cops forbidden from intervening, as is true in California, testify to that.
I used to buy the libertarian baloney about consenting adults and such. One of the key tenets of libertarianism – these nerds are so tiresome – is that people should be free to make judgments about their own lives. There’s a lot of truth to that, but there is also the truth that these vices make society as a whole worse. That’s why they were either controlled or banned. No one cares about a slot machine that did not ingest people’s college funds. No one cares about candy cigarettes. And no one cares if a girl and a guy decide to get it on without some pimp forcing her to do it and beating her to a pulp when she balks.
But we do care – and we have a right to care – when these vices, with the cuffs off, make our society worse. They will never be totally suppressed, and should not necessarily be, but total suppression was never the goal. Control of the vice was. People will gamble. It does not follow that we should make it easy to do in the most destructive way possible. People will take drugs. If it’s illegal and frowned upon, fewer will, and the ones who do will do it less often and out of our faces. And yes, there will always be hookers. But they don’t have to be walking our streets while sick thugs brutalize the women doing it. And we don’t have to lie to women that nuding up for a webcam gyno exam in exchange for a few bucks from online perverts is OK. It’s not OK. It’s awful and makes our society a worse place for everyone – especially the most vulnerable.
We are not wrong to want to live in a society where people are not empowered to easily bankrupt their families. We are not wrong to not want to smell the fumes of urban hopheads every time we step outdoors. And we are not wrong to want to stamp out the blight of unofficial red light zones by banning cops from keeping order, as well as the exploitation of dumb girls who mortgage their futures for a few bucks earned via Internet grossness.
We all have a right to a society that is not a cesspool of degeneracy. Rejecting it is not being uptight; it is being normal. I am not a libertarian. I am a conservative, and I would like to conserve at least a few elements of civilization.
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