[stdbrouw]

> Do you see how your argument breaks down when you can substitute any potentially-addictive activity in place of [gambling]?

Ehm, well, yes, and governments ban or discourage destructive and addictive activities all the time.

Also, fighting symptoms isn't great, but if it's all you've got, it's often better than nothing. It's not entirely clear to me how banning gambling could make poor people any poorer.

I don't really have an opinion on whether or not gambling should be illegal, but I just don't find your argument against regulating harmful activities very convincing at all. It's very close to "just look at Stalin, how did that work out?"

[j42]

Perhaps it was too direct a rebuttal... in my perspective I view any proclivity to "vice" as intrinsic to the nature of societies & human curiosity. This is, thus far, corroborated by the behavioral sciences.

In that model there are two essential approaches (aside from negligence) one can take: enforcement or empathy. The former says "it is in the greater good for this to be restricted," without paying much mind to the individual. The latter focuses instead on the individual or condition and says "how can I help this individual transition from a destructive state to a healthy one and/or integrate them into society?"

I think we see the enforcement approach fail when banned activities can't be clearly demonstrated to cause acute harm. It's easy to stand behind a law designed to restrict a deadly substance, reduce drunk driving, et al. -- that gets harder when you start restricting abstract behaviors that don't have graphic or clearly-definable consequences (e.g. a drunk individual behind the wheel of a car is a simple and acute danger; I challenge you to quantify the impact of a generalized, individual "gambler" on society).

Regardless of your own value associations, we as humans are dynamic creatures and "laws" are static values -- that is to say they exist on a spectrum of opposing force that occasionally shifts dramatically in one direction. I think we're seeing that shift now through the lens of the failed "war on drugs," in how innate these behaviors are to our biology. You may feel better banning an activity that you feel is destructive, but you shouldn't be so naive as to assume your ban will have any effect on individual human motivation when dopamine is involved--it's deferring the problem, and distracting from the factors that predispose an individual to "destructive behavior" in the first place.

I do think enforcement is necessary (re: balance, the key to everything in society), but it's hard to argue that the "war on drugs" (as an example) has done anything other than establish a black market global economy, the supply chains of which bring instability and violence to much of South/Central America... not to mention the egregious legal precedents toward non-violent offenders we have set in our own country under the guise of reform and in the interest of subsidizing for-profit prisons.

If we're really interested in improving our quality of life as a society, maybe we shouldn't regulate "activities" so much as how we respond to them in terms of statute and precedent...