Imagine that you go to the grocery store and pick up a delicious
chocolate cake. A government officer tells you that eating cake is
bad for you and will make you fat. You tell him that you get
regular exercise and that eating the cake won’t affect your
health, and that he has no business telling you what you can or
can’t eat, but this falls on deaf ears because there’s
a law that bans bad eating habits.
Ridiculous, right? This is exactly what’s happening with
legal bans on gambling, such as bans on online gambling proposed by
Congressmen Bob Goodlatte and Jim Leach. I’m a mathematics
student, so I’m the first person to tell you that gambling
usually is not a profitable endeavor. But I’m also the first
person to recognize your prerogative to decide what is or
isn’t a good way to spend your money.
Laws such as the ones discussed in the article “Congress
bills attempt to ban online gambling” (April 11) are exactly
the opposite; they suppose you’re too stupid to know when you
should or shouldn’t gamble online. All people have the right
to choose how to spend their own money.
Supporters of laws limiting gambling might claim that gambling
tempts people to throw away their rent money; so do big-screen TVs,
and yet no one would request laws limiting Best Buy’s right
to sell 57-inch plasma screens. They might claim gambling leads to
an increase in crime; so do large banks, since without them there
is no vault to rob. But banning banks in order to reduce crime is
unthinkable; the answer is to punish criminals, not prevent private
individuals from possessing property.
They might claim that we must protect gambling addicts from
themselves. But the only way for obsessive gamblers like these to
learn anything is by letting them suffer the consequences of their
actions; coming home from Vegas to an empty bank account is a
powerful learning tool. But ultimately, no matter how little they
learn, they harm only themselves; it’s obscene to limit the
liberties of all men because some don’t know what to do with
them.
All proponents of bans on gambling adhere to one basic
principle: that you are too weak to control yourself, so the
government has to control you. We must stand vehemently against all
forms of government baby-sitting. We are rational adults who can
make decisions about gambling for ourselves.
The one thing we cannot afford to gamble is the freedom to
manage our own lives.
Hansen is a fourth-year mathematics student and vice
chairman of L.O.G.I.C.