No, the late neoconservative pundit Irving Kristol was no clairvoyant. But a nearly 40-year-old essay included in his final book, 2011’s The Neoconservative Persuasion, makes an excellent case against a government-run lottery.
Kristol starts with the notion that “the most common argument in favor of legalizing gambling is that a lot of people gamble anyway, so why make it a criminal activity?”
Besides being unconvincing, this argument in favor of legalized gambling is disingenuous. Just how disingenuous may be discovered by asking the question: if we wish to legalize gambling, why not simply erase the prohibitions from the law books and leave the rest to private enterprise? The rejoinder will be either (a) that gambling under private enterprise will cheat the ordinary gambler more than the state will (which is not always true, as every horse-bettor in New York City knows), or (b) that profits from such a sinful activity as gambling ought not to line private pockets but should rather be directed into the public purse. That last proposition is clearly absurd in its moral logic; as George Will has pointed out, the fact that government cannot prevent people from being self-destructive is no reason for government to enter the self-destruction business on a grand scale. But morally absurd or not, this is the argument that counts. The case for legalized gambling is, at bottom, simply an argument in favor of the government raising revenues by swindling its citizens rather than by taxing them.
Whether gambling should be legal or not, the John Locke Foundation has offered its own arguments against the continued existence of a government-run North Carolina lottery.
