Does being stupid give other people a license to exploit you?
How about if those “other people” are the government?
Here in Illinois, we have a state-run lottery, heavily advertised. Supposedly it pays for education. That’s the fiction, anyway; we all pretend the government has specific money for this, and for that, and the other thing, and that it’s not all the same money pilfered from our pockets. But let’s assume for a moment that’s actually true, and the lottery does pay for schools. If so, it amounts to a tax on the stupid to pay for education, which would be even more ironic than it already is if the schools actually educated kids enough so that they could see the foolishness of wasting your money on sucker-odds games with a hundred varieties of little scratch-off cards, or check-box forms that allow you to select your own numbers, as if this increased your chances of matching the next random drawing. Knowing we’ve been pouring all this money into the Illinois school system for 35 years now and it still spits out people dumb enough to play the lottery makes me think the money is being wasted anyway. But I digress.
Gambling against the house is always stupid. Everyone knows that. But there are some games that are dumber than others, and if you look at the odds, the lottery is far worse than just about any game at any casino, be it Vegas or Indian. Play regularly, and you will lose more than you would playing the same amounts at any casino game. By promoting the lottery as if habitual players had a chance of coming out ahead, the government is essentially taking advantage of people’s ignorance about math and statistics and chance. They’re manipulating people into paying an extra, voluntary tax. And of course, the dumber you are, the more likely you are to be manipulated; and since there is also a general correlation between intelligence and earnings, the dumber you are, the more likely you are to be poor. So here we have a predatory government program, designed to suck money out of the poor and stupid by raising their false hopes through misleading and manipulative advertising campaigns.
And people wonder why nobody trusts the government.
Why does this bother me, you might wonder? Well, there is the general injustice of the thing, as I’ve just described. And then there is the personal inconvenience. There are few things more annoying than being in a hurry at the gas station, just wanting to pay for your Slurpee and go, and finding yourself stuck in line behind someone whose cerebral gears are stripping and grinding with the effort of deciding which twelve shiny, bright-colored scratch-off cards he (or, often, she) wants the clerk to tear off the rolls. This is a major mental effort; it occupies the mind to such an extent that the sucker player becomes completely focused on the task – too focused to notice that there are fifteen people lined up behind him waiting for him to complete his utterly meaningless choices and flush his money down the government rathole.
There have been times when I have been tempted to tap the person on the shoulder, hand him $10, and say, “You won today. Now go home.” I’m sure that would backfire, though; either I’d get a punch in the nose, or else he’d take the $10, turn back to the counter, and slowly select ten more lottery tickets with it.
Really, though, what can you say about a world where the government claims a monopoly on running con games on its citizens? What is there to say?
The lottery signs around here actually say in small print “to call 1-800-XXX-XXXX [some number] if you have a gambling addiction”.