I’m always amazed at how otherwise-sane people on FR, who believe “MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS” should be our first words spoken when talking to the government, will howl about the sins of gambling.
Freedom means being free to do whatever the hell you want, so long as you don’t interfere with the rights and freedoms of others. People used to say, “Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose” before the Nanny State Mentality took hold. (And too many here suffer from that affliction.)
If I want to play online poker, then LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE! It’s my money and my choice. I don’t believe the games are rigged, but it’s none of YOUR DAMN BUSINESS if they are. If you don’t like it, don’t play. And don’t tell me what to do or what not to do.
If you want to physically visit Monte Carlo and blow a fortune and that floats your boat, well it does pose a puzzle with what happens with your dependents whose boat was torpedoed in the process. The US being the US, it will until it becomes politically/financially impossible put these dependents on various welfare program. Debtors prisons being gone with the Bill of Rights, it’s not like you will be stuck into one to try to make up the shortfall either.
But I see a more practical problem, and it’s one that a Republican administration and Congress can’t make go away. It’s the problem of money laundering. By gaming and losing to a storefront, one can transfer just about any amount of money in an unaccountable manner. OK, so you feel copacetic with drugs furnished under prescription quality supervision and arrangement (as I would too). I don’t feel so copacetic with funding Bubba Jihad’s violent little international mission mounted from Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. Nor do I feel that as long as Mexico still has drug cartels for whatever reason, we should feed them with guns.