Gambling takes advantage of the poor, under-educated, and addictive personalities and puts them into financial distress. This places burden on families, the state, and local municipalities. It creates strain on the workforce and deflects legitimate economic activity that would otherwise strengthen the economy.
We're a free society. I'm fine with gambling from a personal liberty perspective, but the companies that facilitate and profit need to pay 40-50% of their gross revenue to the government. That's comparable to tobacco.
Companies also need to be restricted in how they are able to advertise their vices. Never to children, and never targeted to at-risk personality types.
They also need to be tightly regulated and kept from using dark patterns and addictive gotcha mechanics to cause even greater harm to those most at risk.
taxing a vice is worth it on paper, but the second-order effects (nonstop alcohol ads, pervasive gambling app dark patterns) aren't worth it imo
Those second-order effects are easy to mitigate with sensible public policy. And it's not like we have to invent the solution from scratch — we've done it before, very effectively.
Today at the gas station on the outside of the pump and the store door.
I'll bet you didn't see any cartoon camels or doctors recomending a brand though, because even where tobacco ads are legal, many tobacco ads are no longer legal.
Whether you see ads, and what kind of ads you see is highly regulated. That's the whole point,
We clearly don't live in the same states.
I live in a different country since we don't have states here.
It will either push them out of business, or they'll find a way to screw the player to increase margin through even more deceptive products.
If the legal entity can't operate because of a tax on revenue than illegal offshore entities will gladly take their place and do.
The only solution really is sharia law, a complete ban and harsh punsihments for all operators and customers. I say this ironically but it actually is really the only solution, and even this doesnt work entirely.
That said, I recognize the broader point. Betting on everything, especially things that betters can directly influence is incredibly dangerous.
Gambling in contrast is strictly zero sum at best and always negative sum in reality. A group of people puts in 1x capital, the house takes a cut of that, and then the <1x gets unevenly redistributed and that's it. Nothing is generated, the collective set of people is strictly worse off after the gamble, with a few making gains off the backs of loss distributed amongst everyone else. All while hacking dopamine reward centers that didn't evolve for that.
It appears to be the case that we can't perfectly stop 100% of all IRL gambling without a cost that exceeds the benefit. That's life. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be picking as much low hanging fruit as possible, same as with other negative sum brain hacks.
The stock market was so gambling that we had 'bucket shops' where people would just buy and sell fake stocks that tracked real stock prices.
Now we have public companies directly selling shares with no voting rights and no plans to ever pay dividends, which is the same thing.
No, that is not a strict definition of gambling, that is your own loose, personal and casual definition. The strict definition of the gambling in question under Arizona law (the subject of this article) is I believe partly under 13-3301 [0] and has a number of criteria that clearly differentiate it from investment (whether it be stock, loan by a bank or any other entity/person, or whatever else). Other polities will have their own flavors, but all of them are aimed at a net negative, destructive social activity. That's the whole point of regulating it, it's not some metaphysical philosophy thing about life having uncertainty it's about long experienced concrete harm. Trying to argue that buying shares in a broad index fund is a "wager that a meteor will not hit the Earth" is uninteresting.
>Just because it (often) is positive sum doesn't mean it isn't an unknown that people are betting money on.
It does actually! Positive sum changes everything in terms of collective incentives, strategies available and how investors can hedge risk. You may not choose to make use of all the tools available, but that doesn't make investment the equivalent of gambling. Part of the whole point of markets is to manage changing risk and information discovery (including dead ends) such that we still continue to grow overall.
----
Unlike sports gambling or casinos, the stock market actually does have some legitimate utility, as compared to being (at best) pure entertainment.
gacha mechanics
The difficulty with taxing prediction markets is that encouraging gambling on some events incentivizes gamblers to try to influence those events in a way contrary to how people would want to influence them in the absence of gambling, which typically means gamblers are incentivized to influence events in a way that will increase societal harms. For some events, resolving one way or the other is inconsequential, but this is not true for many of the events I see people gambling on in prediction markets.
These laws have profound effects and it takes people time to learn about what they pertain to, especially new technology or new ways of using it. It's good to have periods of feedback between the public, the courts, the legislature and the executive branch. The same things that slow down what we most want to happen quickly also slow down the things we desperately want to avoid.
"If only the law moved as quickly as an individual" is great until you get a guy like Trump in power.
The legal system tells itself this noble story of measured action without realizing it actually became the bad guy many decades ago.
My brief little opinion here is half informed from dating a lawyer for a few years.