I want to be pedantic about this, because words matter. No one is forcing anyone to buy a lottery ticket. No one's being threatened with jail time if they don

I want to be pedantic about this, because words matter. No one is forcing anyone to buy a lottery ticket. No one's being threatened with jail time if they don't buy a lottery ticket. No one's being dragged into a legal process where they are presumed guilty until proven innocent if they don't buy a lottery ticket. There are not tens of thousands of enforcers out there looking for people who didn't buy their lottery ticket. There are no hotlines to anonymously report those who didn't buy a lottery ticket. Politicians do not regularly buy voter approval by messing around at the margins with lottery ticket payouts. There is no organized industry - hundreds of thousands of people - lobbying Congress to keep the purchase of lottery tickets as complicated as possible so they can keep their jobs. You may not like the lottery. You may never play the lottery. But don't mistake it for a tax. That makes it too easy to forget the sheer tonnage of force, coercion and political strongarming a real tax involves.