Take alcohol. It is a drug, a poison, addictive, acute severe health problems are rare - although it can kill via the stupor it imposes but long term health and affects on productivity etc. Really bad.
So society may be better off without it. But then mind altering substances may be good even if they are bad for social cohesion and self medication. It is hard to be sober you have to take life as it actually is.
Make it illegal? Well that is almost orthogonal... why? What does it achieve to make it a moral outrage ... and who is the criminal? The brewer, the distributer or the drinker?
Then even if you decide that incarceration is a good think to do to people who do one of the 3 things - the prohibition shows that people will do it anyway. As a drug alcohol in particular is probably the easier to synthesize. You just need readily available pantry items and a jar. Other drugs need chenistry labs, precursor chemicals or plants. So that effects the affect of criminializing alcohol.
Then mix in its deep root in culture!
Now alcohols is discussed, what next... too much work...
That will have a different set of problems, solutions, unintended consequences of fixing the issue and so on.
So just treat gambling like its own thing. Even then casino poker vs. Slots vs. Lottery vs. Physical Bookie vs. Online booke vs. Crypto vs. Backstreet all have different subissues and may need to be legislated individually.
My uncle gambled away a successful business, a beautiful house, his family, his friends. In my early memory he was a giant who carried me in the ocean, flying just above the breaking waves. Later on, when I was in elementary school, he lived with us for a bit. Some time later he lived in his Buick. He died alone and with nothing.
In my mind, we all should not allow a man to do that.
Ban advertising for gambling, tax the hell out of gambling companies... possibly create some sort of regulation for actual gamblers, i.e. check their ID against a national database everytime they bet to ensure they're not over-doing it... seems more likely to fix the issue than outright prohibition, which, at least for other things like drugs and prostitution, doesn't really seem to solve much.
However people should know what regulating ethics to this degree looks like: the modern PRC. In the PRC you get a government mandated timer on your MMOs to ensure you don't spend too much time playing videogames. In the internet cafes there's 24/7 a CPC bureaucrat prowling around keeping an eye on your chats - plus automated mandated filters which depending on the implementation can auto kick you from a multiplayer match, hence the entirely viable strategy when playing against PRC players to spam "FREE HONG KONG REVOLUTION OF OUR TIMES CCP COMMITS GENOCIDE AGAINST UIGHUR MUSLIMS XINJIANG" into chat to get them kicked from the match.
There's industry level morality controls as well such as not being allowed to make a tv show featuring "feminine men" and the implicit ban on showing LGBT couples.
Personally I don't trust a State to choose the correct morals, be it aesthetically communist or aesthetically capitalist. We can look at America's history of moral laws to see another example, such as prohibition.
Banning addictive things isn't as straightforward as people love to believe. Even during the worst theocratic times, you could get alcohol in Saudi Arabia by asking the right people; and Saudi Arabia had way harsher means at its disposal than democratic countries do.
(For the complete picture, my grandpa drank himself to death at 57 and even though he used to have a good income, on the order of 3x as much as an average Czechoslovak worker of that time, he left almost nothing behind. All "liquefied". Other people were able to build family houses for their kids with less money.)
Surely the reason prohibition failed so badly was that it wasn't democratic. You can't mandate against vice unless you have the support of the majority.
The desired force vector varies in magntitude and orientation, but can, in the extreme include removal of independence / imprisonment or less extreme banning and fining etc
Because a single or group of people believe it, it must be for everyone, equally.
Absolutely not. I don't really have a solution, but in general it seems distributing power to more local level forms of governance works well for many things, so perhaps something along those lines?
That might be the best solution to gambling. At least in Canada, casinos are very well advertised and glamorized. They're often run by the government, but they still market themselves to attract customers in a way you wouldn't expect of say, a safe opioid consumption site. Their slot machines are just as addictive. Sure, there's lip service paid to preventing gambling addiction, eg a piece of paper on the wall instructing patrons to play responsibly. But if we took the same attitude towards it as we do to tobacco, it might just fade away without all the downsides of prohibition.
>CCP COMMITS GENOCIDE AGAINST UIGHUR MUSLIMS XINJIANG
wow, you seem to really know what you're talking about!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_Hard_Campaign_Against_V...
If that's not what you mean, can you help me understand what you're saying?
The morals of society is directed by culture. The state does not and never have a monopoly on culture, because culture is embedded.
If a culture is against gambling, you need no regulation/laws at all. The daoist would argue that the need to have strict laws on behaviour is due to a deviant culture. As an aside the legalist argues that humans are evil, fickle and morally corrupt by default and need strict laws.
I'm just making shit up, but perhaps an Abrahamic culture needs salvation, thus it needs outlets of sin so that it generates demand for people to be saved.
I think society can generally be against something, yet it succeed. Most people consider greed to be bad, but it's the foundation of capitalism. I'm not sure if most people would say gambling is wrong. (This survey, https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/blog/post/gambling-sur..., found only 41 of self-selected UK gamblers rated it positively.)
A democratic state should reflect the desired culture, if it doesn't it's not being democratic. Businesses can also do that, as can other organisations. Most businesses goals are aligned away from benefiting society in general; whilst a democratic state should be at least loosely aligned with that end (by definition).
Thanks for a thought provoking response.
The USA doesn't take it quite so far but it did strongly regulate the socio-economic imperialism of Communism, leveraging State resources to attempt to convince socialist leaders to kill themselves (MLK) or just by assassinating and imprisoning them (Black Panthers). The State protects people from ruining their lives with marijuana, or from ruining the justice system by telling people walking into a courthouse about Jury Nullification. These needs require the regulation of speech (can't tell people Communism is super awesome and you should unionize and strike) and business (can't open a casino in downtown LA).
For the record gay sex isn't harmful to the fertility of the state and shouldn't be regulated, nor should speech about Jury Nullification, I was just making a point about both nations.
Yes.
Your first paragraph is about motive, which isn't enough to make those two actions the same.
Your second paragraph is just bad things the US did? I don't see how it's relevant to the question.