House Minority Leader Rep. Craig Ford (D) has declared that he intends to file a lottery bill that would create a state lottery in Alabama. Currently. lotteries, as well as almost every kind of gambling, is illegal here.

There are two issues I want to address here. 1) Rep. Ford’s proposal, and 2) The issue of a lottery in general.

1) Rep. Ford wants a “state lottery.” What this means is that the state government would run a lottery from start to finish, and the profit from the lottery would go into the state’s coffers. Under his proposal, the money would go to the school system to pay for “Resource Officers” (read: security) and to give financial assistance to those students that make the A-B Honor Roll. Forgive me for seeming cynical, but having the state run a lottery sounds about as ridiculous as having them run a chain of liquor stores. Oh, wait, we have that. Sometimes I really wonder exactly people were thinking when they voted on these things. We complain when our elected officials become alcoholics or gamble the taxpayer’s money away, but we want them to run a chain of liquor stores and a statewide lottery? I think not.

Government on any level but the local is consistently known for its inneficiency and incredible talent of wasting money. If the goal is to raise revenue, the venture should be turned over to the much more efficient and highly motivated private sector. Public sector employees and managers work based primarily on the workplace politics, especially if they are subject to appointment, government oversight, and/or election cycles. Private sector business owners have profit as their primary motivation, which is the expressed goal here, is it not? Leave profit to the people who actually make profit their number one priority.

So I oppose Rep. Ford’s bill as proposed, but I would love to see some compromise on the details of the bill towards a more private sector solution that I could get behind, which is outlined in Point 2.

2) There is a larger issue here – that of a state lottery, and gambling in general. Gambling was made illegal in 06_chipsAlabama due largely to the outside influence of the states around us. Many of them (particularly the Native Americans) cannot cross state lines to open their casinos here, at least not without very large expense. So they pumped a massive amount of money into our elections and in exchange, got gambling banned here so that they could (and do) simply bus Alabamians across the border to spend their money in their home state. It is hard to estimate how much money is leaving the state, but Rep. Ford claims that bringing that all back home would generate $250 million for the state, so I think that is a fair accounting of what we are seeing depleted from our state’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product) every year by not having legalized gambling.

I propose legalizing privatized gambling and lotteries. Allow the private sector to generate additional revenue, profit, and jobs by providing a service much wanted by the customer base that is currently being outsourced to the surrounding states. The irony here is that Alabama voters raise hell if a company moves their tech support overseas, because it is taking money out of the state, but they don’t have a problem with moving all of our gambling business next door.

I have a fundamental problem with making it illegal for someone to do something that causes no physical harm to others. The people gambling and playing the lottery are doing it anyway, and Alabama is losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and has lost hundreds if not thousands of jobs. I would establish a baseline revenue that the lottery would generate, offset that with other tax cuts, and put any excess into a reserve fund or distribute it equally in block grants towards a certain area (Rep. Ford recommends education, I would recommend roads. But that is a legitamite discussion that can take place amicably).
Fundamentally, I don’t think it is the government’s responsibility to criminalize bad spending habits. I don’t “support” the lottery in that I think it is a very bad financial choice personally, but I would vote to remove the ban on it simply because we need the money (that is already being spent) to stay here instead of going to surrounding states, and for the personal liberty issues at hand.

I often hear the argument that lotteries and gambling hurts children, because it siphons money from primarily poor families, and results in the children of those families being neglected. Criminal neglect of children is still criminal neglect of children, and making the lottery illegal here doesn’t magically make those parents spend their money better or treat their children better. Let’s not confuse cause and effect here. The lottery doesn’t hurt the children, bad parents hurt the children. That is a separate problem that needs to be addressed.

The fact is, the surrounding states bus countless people across state lines to play in their casinos every week, and tens of thousands more play the lotteries, sending both their money and our potential tax dollars out of state. You can buy lottery tickets anywhere in the country online, so even Central Alabama citizens have easy access to them. This has a very significant negative impact on our GDP as a state, and is a problem that is easily solved.

If you (I’m speaking to those who make a moral argument against gambling here) want to wage a war of public opinion and work to educate people on the problems of gambling and encourage them to spend their money better, I’m behind you 100%. But the fact is, we have made it a crime for people to spend their own money on something that is their personal choice, in a way that inherently brings no direct physical harm to anyone. We aren’t solving a societal problem by banning the lottery, we are merely shuffling it under the rug by passing it on to the surrounding states, and acting like it isn’t still going on. We need to address this issue, but first we need to acknowledge it. Alcoholics don’t stop drinking just because alcohol is illegal in a certain area, just as gamblers don’t stop gambling when it becomes illegal. What we have done is created a black market of underground poker games, casinos, and lotteries here in this state, where even more people are taken advantage of, because there is no protection whatsoever against fraud. The first step towards solving a problem is admitting that it exists.

I say bring it out of the shadows, protect the people choosing to do it from fraud and abuse, and begin to address the problem from the right perspective. Counsel those with addictions and educate those making bad decisions. Criminalizing it removes any protections whatsoever and allows those running the show to take whatever advantage they want over their victims. In a state with legalized gambling, if you get into debt, you work it out with the bank, protected by the law, and can get on a path to recovery with the appropriate help. If it is underground, no such protections exist, and you see people robbing stores and turning to prostitution to pay off their debts. If you owe an underground poker casino $10,000, you have to do whatever they tell you to, as there is no other recourse for you to pursue. For women, this usually means forced prostitution, from which there is almost never any escape, certainly none under the law, as they’d go to jail themselves if they sought help. Bring it out into the light, and these people have the law on their side to protect them from such abuses.

One of my first jobs was for a pizza delivery place that was owned by some people from a state where gambling was the norm, so they had no problem with it. I only worked there for two months, but in those two months I regularly delivered pizzas to underground poker games and other such places. If you think it isn’t going on, you live in a bubble. The instant you accrue any kind of debt, you have to keep playing to pay it off. If you can’t, or you accrue more debt, you become a slave to your debtor in whatever way they choose. You can’t go to the police, you can’t ask anyone for help, because what you did initially was illegal. Forcing the creation of black markets never helps anyone, they only serve to worsen the problem at hand. Making it a crime simply makes more criminals, and thus more victims.

I appreciate the moral argument for criminalizing gambling, and definitely understand where those people are coming from. But I think that their concerns are misguided, and that cause and effect have been confused. Legalizing these things actually helps more of those people than it hurts. By legalizing it, we would be empowering those victims to seek help and to be helped, at least those that want it. If they don’t want the help, that is their choice. If their problem is hurting others, that is a crime in and of itself, and can be remedied through the normal channels.

Shoving the mess under the rug is not the same as cleaning it up.



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