Jacob Sollum has an excellent article at Reason about Rep. Goodlatte's misguided and authoritarian bill to ban internet gambling. That bill passed the House recently, but has not come up in the Senate. Sollum points out the many ways in which Goodlatte's arguments for the bill are incoherent and hypocritical. For instance, he complains about internet gaming companies being offshore and unregulated while passing a law that insures that very result:
"These offshore, fly-by-night Internet gambling operators," Goodlatte complains, "are unlicensed, untaxed and unregulated and are sucking billions of dollars out of the United States." He fails to mention that the U.S. Justice Department has driven these businesses offshore by threatening to prosecute their owners under the Wire Act of 1961, which prohibits using "a wire communication facility" for betting on sports.
Far from being fly-by-night operators, many gambling sites are licensed, taxed, and regulated by foreign governments that have less of a hangup about letting people use the Internet to play poker. But if Goodlatte wants the licensing, taxing, and regulating to occur in the U.S., banning the whole $12-billion-a-year industry, which draws about half its customers from this country, may not be the best way to go about it.
Indeed. The gaming companies would love to have online gambling legal and regulated in the US. If it was legal and regulated, American casino companies would move into the business in droves. You think MGM/Mirage wouldn't love to have an online site that mirrors their real properties, allowing them to advertise to thousands of people every day while earning money from their play online? That's a no-brainer. A ban on internet gambling only insures that the operations all be overseas, where the money that Americans bet goes out of the country and other nations get taxes paid on the revenue.
You can't even give Goodlatte credit for being a consistent moralistic busybody. His bill, co-authored by Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa), makes exceptions for lucrative state lotteries and the politically influential horse racing industry.
It seems government sponsorship renders what would otherwise be a "scourge" as wholesome as the Postal Service, Amtrak, and the Interstate Highway System. And horses are so beautiful and majestic that naturally you can bet on them, online or off. But not on dogs; that would be crazy.
Goodlatte's bill likewise leaves untouched gambling on riverboats, on Indian reservations, and in cities such as Las Vegas and Atlantic City. It's one thing to engage in this distasteful activity out in the open, quite another to do so in the privacy of one's home.
One of the early paragraphs in the article provides a perfect conclusion:
The online gambling ban, which dictates what adults may do with their own money on their own computers in their own homes, is part of what Republicans proudly call their "American Values Agenda." Evidently those values do not include privacy, freedom of choice, individual responsibility, or free markets.
Is there a more empty word than "values" these days? I cringe every time I hear it - values voter, values agenda, family values. All of these are merely a veneer draped over the top of the desire to control others.
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It's Sullum.
Isn't that the definition of a politician, "incoherent and hypocritical".
Is there a more empty word than "values" these days?
Well, I value a "good latte" every now and then. (Was that too easy?)
>>You can't even give Goodlatte credit for being a consistent moralistic busybody. His bill, co-authored by Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa), makes exceptions for lucrative state lotteries and the politically influential horse racing industry.
If he's really making exceptions for these, because that's his goal is to have them exempt, then he's definately inconsistent.
However I see nothing inconsistent about putting an exception here, for political expediency reasons, to get the bill passed, (when it might not if the exception wasn't there). And then go after these other types of gambling afterwards, because it will be a much harder fight.
In either case though I disagree with Goodlatte.
It seems government sponsorship renders what would otherwise be a "scourge" as wholesome as the Postal Service, Amtrak, and the Interstate Highway System.
Rev. Lovejoy: Once the government approves something, it's no longer immoral!
I don't see how something like that can be seriously regulated. As an American living abroad I would be able to gamble all I want. But once I go back to the states what would prevent me from going back to the same sites and gambling more. Is the government going to set up some big firewall like in China? Are they going to monitor the IPs I visit?
That is what really pisses me off about this. Not the inconsistancies or the hypocracy but just the idea of passing laws that are impossable to regulate simply to satisfy some imagined "value" or to show off as more moral than others.