THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, November 13, 1995 TAG: 9511100031
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Another View
SOURCE: By ROBERT R. DETLEFSEN
LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
At a time when no fewer than 36 states operate - and often vigorously promote - state-run lotteries, it has suddenly become fashionable among pundits and politicians to say that government ought to deny people the opportunity to frequent privately owned casinos. Curiously, much of the opposition to casino gambling is coming from people, like New York Times columnist William Safire and some congressional Republicans, who are otherwise staunch defenders of the proposition that people ought to be free to decide for themselves how to spend their hard-earned money and precious leisure time.
The evolving Zeitgeist is guaranteed to ensure a receptive audience for a new book, The Luck Business: The Devastating Consequences and Broken Promises of America's Gambling Explosion, in which author Robert Goodman called for a national moratorium on the expansion of ``gambling ventures.'' As the book's hyperbolic subtitle suggests, Goodman has written an unabashed polemic aimed as much at the commercial ``gambling industry'' as at the practice of legal gambling itself. His method is to make sweeping generalizations about ``gambling'' and ``the gambling industry'' on the basis of evidence and anecdotes drawn mainly from the experience of state lotteries.
The open-minded reader cannot help feeling that Goodman is playing him for a sucker. For example, Goodman chides public officials for spending huge sums to advertise and promote ``gambling,'' yet advertisements for casino gambling are tightly regulated - and in no way subsidized - by the government. Further eschewing distinctions between lotteries and casinos, Goodman insists that those who fall prey to gambling's siren song are disproportionately poor and uneducated. In fact, the demographic profile of frequent casino patrons differs markedly from that of frequent lottery players: The latter tend to be more affluent and better educated than the average American, the former less so.
Not until the book's penultimate paragraph does Goodman address the concerns of those who worry about the diminution of personal freedom that is necessarily entailed by government prohibitions, and his response that is characteristically dismissive: ``There is hardly much `free' choice when jobs are scarce or don't pay well, and when government and private casino companies spend hundreds of million of dollars on behavior and modification studies and advertising to tell people they can change their lives through gambling.''
But do people who patronize casinos really do so in the belief that gambling will make them rich? Goodman implies repeatedly that they do, yet he offers no evidence to substantiate this preposterous and insulting caricature. When he claims to have interviewed ``more than fifty'' people in the course of his research, apparently he did not think it important to talk with ordinary people who gamble; if he had, he might have been forced to offer a less tendentious account of why some people value this kind of entertainment. Like many who would restrict individual liberty and personal choice in the name of compassion for society's victims, Goodman appears to have paid scant attention to the actual sentiments of those he would protect.
It is axiomatic that whenever personal freedom is expanded, some people will end up harming themselves due to lack of self-discipline, poor decision-making or bad luck. Not surprisingly, then, Goodman's book is sprinkled with lurid tales of compulsive gamblers whose lives have been ruined. Such people, however, account for a tiny minority among the millions who enjoy the excitement and conviviality that casinos offer.
The challenge facing policy-makers in a nominally free society is to resist the temptation to curtail the freedom and personal responsibility of the many, in order to pre-empt the self-destructive tendencies of the few. Goodman and his disciples would err on the side of protective repression. In the end, legislating the preferences of a self-appointed guardian class does more than deny people the freedom to direct their own lives; it robs them of the dignity that can come only from exercising independent judgment and from being allowed to accept responsibility for their actions. MEMO: Mr. Detlefsen's writings on civil liberties and social policy have been
published in The New Republic as well as in numerous scholarly
journals.
by CNB