A path between puritanism and excess
From my desk in midtown Manhattan, I have plenty of opportunities to gamble legally. I can take the elevator to the news-stand in the lobby and buy New York lottery tickets for dozens of different instant, daily and jackpot games. To play the horses, I have only to walk a few blocks to one of more than 60 off-track betting facilities in the city. From the Port Authority terminal on Eighth Avenue, I can catch a bus to Atlantic City, where I can play blackjack, poker and roulette. It is an even shorter ride to the Foxwoods casino in Connecticut, home to the Mashantucket Pequot tribal nation and approximately 7,000 slot machines.
Various other forms of gambling are illegal, although prevalent and unlikely to get me in any trouble. It is technically against the law to participate in an office pool on the college basketball championship or to bet on a friendly round of golf, chess or billiards. I break the law when I play poker with friends, although if I am ever arrested I plan to point out that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia does it, too. There is ambiguity about whether it is illegal for individual Americans to play poker over the internet, but executives of foreign websites who allow Americans to wager may be arrested, as was David Carruthers of BetonSports, when he made the mistake of changing aircraft in Dallas. According to his lawyer, Mr?Carruthers now faces up to 20 years in prison. A bill before Congress, sponsored by Jim?Leach of Iowa (home to a dozen casinos, a gambling cruise ship, two dog tracks, a horse track and a lottery), would attempt to curtail internet gambling by creating criminal penalties for companies that process internet gambling transactions.
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What is the difference between the legal forms of gambling and the illegal ones? Some of the legal forms are less appealing, in part because the house take or “vig” tends to be much higher (lotteries return only 59 per cent of their take in prizes). Some of the legal forms convey the special grimness of state-sponsored vice, which those who have visited riverboat casinos in desperate Mississippi Delta towns will be familiar with. But morally and in terms of their social consequence, it
is hard to draw any distinction. All kinds of gambling, from bingo to baccarat, are benign entertainment for most people, dangerously addictive to a few and capable of breeding unwanted social side-effects.
Various pressures ensure that the American hypocrisy about gambling will only get worse in the near future. The hunger of state governments for new revenue streams means that the trend towards legalised gambling in more places is likely to continue. On the other hand, the vested power of established interests means that every new “gaming” venture faces resistance. More dollars are spent attempting to protect existing gambling monopolies from competition than to create new ones
