zlacker

>>jimbob+(OP)
The older I get the more I hate gambling. When i was younger I tended to think "hey it's their choice" but i've realized how unfair our society is in terms of things like this.

Food, gambling, etc. are all backed by hordes of brilliant well paid people trying to get you to ruin your life so they make money. On the other side is just regular people like us stressed out trying to survive.

This isn't some "freedom" issue, it's an incredibly huge power asymmetry and I think "we the people" need protection from these forces

>>snapca+0M2
How shall we as a society decide who is to be denied agency in this way, because someone else determines they are to be infantilized, deemed incapable of exercising full responsibility for their own -- entirely voluntary -- actions?

Can you propose a universally acceptable formula or philosophy? Shall we just consult you on a case by case basis to determine when and where a putative power differential exists, and exactly when such a differnetial becomes large enough to verge into "unfair"?

>>pjlega+vc3
Why is that the standard? We're in the real world not magic libertarian logic automaton world. We have the ability to judge social harm and weigh it against the benefits and make nuanced decisions

edit: like how we've managed to do with literally every single other law?

>>snapca+Wc3
You mean the way we passed the current laws that allow such gambling, which you are now complaining about?

By that standard, we're done, the matter has already been concluded in favor of "allow gambling."

>>pjlega+ae3
>How shall we as a society decide who is to be denied agency in this way

By advocacy and persuasion and some level of agreement through democracy.

>By that standard, we're done

Laws can change, so we're never done.

Society is a never-ending churn of social forces. There will always be a matrix of people who are good and bad and indifferent, who think similar and different to one another. It will never settle.

To answer your question about sports gambling in particular (though you did not ask me): I think the bets on specific things happening in a game are more manipulable and thus damaging to sports in general, as well as to the addictive properties of gambling, than simply betting on an outcome of a game.

So yeah, some aspects of gambling are bad enough that, now that we've seen the impact it's having, we should consider some more guardrails.

Even the college kid libertarian I used to be would say that the government should enforce "an informed consumer": That people should know what mechanisms gambling companies use to entice and addict people.

[edited for tone]

>>unethi+wh3
Interesting. Do you then view the lawmaking process as nothing more than a chaotic and never-ending expression of the randomly changing emotions of the people?

No ongoing rational standards, logic, or objective argumentation is required or even relevant -- just might makes right, anything goes, whoever convinces the most people to agree through sophistic "advocacy" wins?

I suppose that such a system could exist in theory, but it seems to be heavily at odds with the constitutional legal system that the United States uses.