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It's surprising that few people have pointed out that lotteries are essentially communist -- the government owning a for-profit business. If you believe in the
by csense 11y ago
It's surprising that few people have pointed out that lotteries are essentially communist -- the government owning a for-profit business.
If you believe in the free market, you can only have one of two logically consistent positions on any and all forms of gambling -- either (1) open up the market to any business that can prove it's adequately capitalized and the odds of the games are as represented (e.g. in card games, the deck is standard and not stacked; in lotteries, the winning tickets are randomly mixed in, not given out to shill redeemers in exchange for kickbacks), or (2) ban all for-profit gambling operations.
- threatofrain 11y agoI don't understand why someone who 'believes in the free market' must accept a binary position on 'free' market. In experimental design, you're supposed to produce tasteful granularity of measurement conditions to capture the breadth of a phenomena. Free vs. not-free is not very granular. And given the immaturity of the state of economics relative to other disciplines, I don't see why anyone should just have blanket faith in the free market. The "freeness" of a market is but one variable in what is possibly a million-factor model, a model that possibly won't ever be developed in our lifetime.
- mdpopescu 11y agoThe economics I know and love is not an experimental science.