Ed Brayton is a freelance writer and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Radley Balko has posted the full text of his testimony before Barney Frank's committee from Friday. Here is the bottom line as he eloquently states it:
Yes, it's possible a parent could bet away their family's savings, or their child's education fund in an online poker game. They could also fritter that money away on eBay. Or on booze. Or fancy cars and exotic travel.These are all personal decisions, of course. And if a free society means anything, it means we should have the freedom to make bad choices, in addition to good ones. The ban on Internet gambling punishes the millions of Americans who were wagering online responsibly due to anecdotal evidence of a few who may do so irresponsibly. It's an affront to personal responsibility, and symptomatic of a Nanny Statist government that treats its citizens like children.
Hear hear.
Comments
And by treating us like children, they force us to act like criminals to do what we want with our money in our own homes.
Posted by: Rasputin | June 12, 2007 11:26 AM
He should have included stock options and other highly leverage market derivatives in his list. It takes time to lose all your money on eBay, booze, fancy cars, and exotic travel, but you can lose your entire life savings in less than 24 hours with nothing more than an online brokerage account and a couple of injudicious stock option trades.
Playing the market in this way can be one of the purest forms of gambling there is, and has no safety net, no safeguards, no limits (save the size of your bank account), and can be every bit as addictive as poker and casino gambling. Yet it is legal to "play" in 45 of 50 states from the age of 18 (all 50 by the age of 21), and requires nothing more than opening a margin account with any number of online brokerage houses.
Posted by: tacitus | June 12, 2007 11:30 AM
Yes, but stocks, fast cars, and eBay don't perk up the ears and open the contributing wallets of the Authoritarian Christian Right that the UIGEA was written to please.
Idiots.
Posted by: Wil | June 12, 2007 7:58 PM
Hey Wil, good to see you here again. And you're spot on with that comment.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | June 12, 2007 8:51 PM
What Rasputin said, with this addition:
The problem with law is that it is a last ditch effort to curb behavior that is universal. An attempt to first postulate, then legislate against, behavior that might discommode someone (if the initial shakedown ("debates") of the current Presidential candidates and their groupies and media acolytes are taken seriously). Imagine, someone pushing someone else off the pot, not because someone needs to shit, but because someone else doesn't shit correctly, or not to someone's sensitivities. Imagine. In the "land of the free and the home of the brave" it is now fashionable to be bound and afraid. Oh, shit. Selah. (My God! It's affecting me!)
Hope I didn't cause any offense. I would feel so badly if I did . . .
Posted by: Crudely Wrott | June 13, 2007 1:16 AM
To me this smacks of morality as cover for cash... Sell the bill to the moralists, and then how long is it before state lotteries and other money making forms of gambling are sanctioned (with proceeds probably at least in part, if indirectly, to Wil's aforementioned ACR.)
Problem is, morality cannot be legislated, and while certain "protection laws" might easily be argued successfully (homicide leaps to mind as the most obvious) no law truly supports the morality of the issue. Just because I cannot gamble, (or burn a flag, etc.) doesn't mean that I suddenly understand the (supposed) moral implications of gambling or flag burning due to a legal clause, any more than it forces me to agree with it. Morality is only morality by personal belief and choice, not by mandate.
I have no interest in online gambling; I have every interest in personal freedom. I just wish that all these self-proclaimed gatekeepers of morality, values and mores would try leading by example instead of by force, because either way I need to (and will continue to) march to the beat of my own drum.
Posted by: PK | June 13, 2007 2:26 AM