There seems to be some controversy over this for some reason. Maybe it needs a visual demonstration, so I made one.
(Stated estimates of SARS-CoV-2 transmissibility in the above are based on the September 10 update of https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html)
]]>A lot has been said today about the complete mess of the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses. Every news outlet is full of commentators sharing their own takes on how this massive flub is a disastrous beginning to the 2020 election season.
I don’t care to duplicate all the words already being said, so I’ll only offer the one thing I think hasn’t yet been said about this disaster: it isn’t a disaster at all.
Just for a second consider what has happened. Iowa voters have chosen their delegates to the national Democratic convention. The state’s party has taken the time to make sure the count is accurate. And what is the purpose of the Iowa caucuses? To choose Iowa’s delegates. That’s it. And that has happened. The delegate counts, whether released an hour after the caucuses end or a month after, are what Iowans have chosen for Iowa, and those delegates are going to the convention. Absolutely nothing important has failed.
In fact, I assert that the narrative assumed by most of the press coverage today has it completely backwards. What is the go-to story being told today? It is about how embarrassing it is that nobody knows the results yet, how it is another knock against Iowa’s position at the start of the race and against their unusual caucus system. Pundits have pointed out how it is likely even to doom Iowa’s results to far less relevance in today’s extremely short news cycle, because the results won’t be available until the nation’s attention has already moved on to the State of the Union, the Presidential impeachment vote, and the New Hampshire primary. Campaigns just have to keep on trucking without even knowing who won.
To which I ask: how is any of this a problem? Every other day of the year, commentators are wringing their hands about how just a few states, by virtue of calendar positioning, get absurdly disproportionate influence on the overall result. And today we are expected to think it a calamity that Iowa’s caucuses may mostly just decide Iowa’s own voter preferences and not everyone else’s, too? Is it really a tragedy if entire campaigns aren’t doomed by the very first voters before any of the rest of the nation arrives at the decision-making table? Wouldn’t it be better if every state’s voters decided only what their own position would be at the national convention, and nothing more?
Let Iowa give us its results when it is ready. And let them be accurate, and let Iowan delegates have no embarrassment about this, but proudly represent the people of their state who have made those decisions. And let the rest of us, whose votes come in the weeks and months ahead, make our own decisions, which may mirror Iowa’s and may not. And precisely because those decisions may or may not be the same or even similar, let us set aside the notion that this accidental pause is something gone wrong. It might be a great discovery. Maybe we should even delay results on purpose in years to come. Many people are committed to “slow food,” arguing that its intentionality and focus helps preserve local food traditions and enhance the economy of food. Maybe it’s time we should also consider “slow voting,” however counter it may be to the trajectory of our increasingly instantaneous culture, as a means of preserving all the local voices throughout the country, and thus as enhancement to democracy rather than misfortune.
I will interestedly await Iowa’s results. But I am in no particular hurry.
]]>There are a lot of people who are very concerned about what is taking place in the United States today, and about what will follow after.
I’m one of them.
And there are a lot of different things people are doing about it. And some people have no idea what to do at all.
But I’ll tell you what I’m doing.
I’m buying an American flag.
And I’m going to put it up somewhere.
Maybe you think that’s a strange response. There are a fair number of thoughtful people who care a lot about what goes on in America, who when they see things that disturb or worry them—things past, present, or on the horizon—sometimes get a little squeamish about overtly patriotic symbolism. And I understand the hesitation, but now is not the time for squeamishness. Now is the time for us to rally to the defense of the soul of our nation, to stand up and guard its sacred values, and to insistently claim our ownership stake in it.
This is my flag, and it stands for my country. And I refuse to yield them.
Let’s talk about this country and its symbols for a moment.
America is fairly unusual in the course of history so far. Unlike most nations that have ever risen on the stage of this world, this country isn’t just a particular band of people who share a place and a ruler. The United States of America is an idea that we’re trying to live out. The rare and ingenious act of the founders of this nation was that they did not just establish a form of government; they set up, enshrined in written word for all time, a purpose for that government.
And they were ambitious about it. The goal they set for us when they founded this American experiment was, as Abraham Lincoln put it, that of “a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
The symbols of this country therefore stand not just for America as it is or has been. Even more than those things, they stand for America the ideal, America the democratic hope, for which dedicated Americans have striven and fought for over two centuries, shedding their own blood in trying to make this republic a more-perfect union.
Second, if you’re an American, the flag and other symbols of America inescapably, unavoidably represent you and me. When an American flag goes up somewhere, it represents you to the world whether you like it or not, and whether or not you choose to take any part in defining what connotations that flag may also carry.
Third, the symbols of America represent, well, America. All of it. Our next-door neighbors and the people living on the other side of the nation; the rich, the poor; they are all America.
And so if we choose not to respect those symbols, no matter what our reasons may be, it will always, unavoidably, also convey lack of respect for America—not just America the set of leaders or laws, but America the ideal, too; and America the people themselves.
So if you’re someone who inclines toward discomfort with open displays of national loyalty, this is a simple fact you need to understand and take into consideration: whenever any group of people intentionally avoids patriotic gestures, it sets up a visible, public contrast, between those who appear to respect and honor liberty and justice and their fellow Americans, and those who do not. This is a foolish and misguided contest you can never win and shouldn’t try.
Yes, a lot of people proudly put on an ignorant caricature of patriotism, one that’s about applauding themselves just for being born here. But real patriotism isn’t self-congratulation; it is aspiration. It is love of country, a love that combines a fiercely protective determination to watch over its well-being with a lofty desire to help it become the best possible version of itself.
So don’t let anybody ever be able to say you oppose your country just because you oppose certain people running it, or certain things taking place in it. You’re fighting for your country when you stand up, and speak up, for its betterment.
So my encouragement to you is this: don’t back away now from the outward signs of loyalty to this nation. Take them up with gusto. Don’t relinquish this country or the symbols which represent it—which represent you. If you surrender them, you are abdicating the opportunity to define what these things mean and the chance to declare your own love of country as real and legitimate, leaving the narrative of patriotism to people who would gladly define loyalty to country as loyalty to the present leaders and their policies.
But as long as you and I instead keep flying this flag in the name of freedom and equality, as long as we keep insisting, every time we pledge allegiance to it, that the republic for which this flag stands is one of liberty and justice for all, as long as we refuse to hand it over willingly, it cannot be taken from us. And as long as it remains ours, whoever flies it while working to undermine liberty and dismantle justice is foolishly waving the symbol of their own ultimate defeat.
So…I’m putting up a flag. And I’m going to fly one proudly these four years as a proclamation of what I stand for. I invite you, too, to consistently, openly, and unashamedly show your love of this country. It is, after all, your country.
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Yes, as a matter of fact, they should be. The question of whether or not to accept constant surveillance of private citizens is about making us safer. Only it is vital that we remember all the kinds of safety we need to preserve. There are many dangers in the world. We cannot allow ourselves to wear blinders and see only some of them. Here I talk a bit about what is really at stake when we give people the power to watch everything we do.
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But a few people out there, including, sadly, sitting United States Senators, apparently need to be reminded that giving people their Constitutional rights and a fair trial is not being soft on them. Rather, it is a chance to demonstrate publicly and incontrovertibly their guilt, and to serve out justice—which, in this case, could even include death—in a transparent way on behalf of and in view of the entire public, while keeping the actions of the government visibly and unquestionably above reproach.
Moreover, when it is “the public” who has been attacked, every one of us has a stake in seeing things done right, and in understanding and getting to experience the outcome as clear justice done.
And when people of many stripes, from conspiracy theorists to foreign governments, from opportunistic politicians to international terrorist movements are chomping at the bit to find opportunities to preach that things are being manipulated behind the scenes, to claim cover-ups, or to argue that the United States is not a free nation as it claims to be? This is not the time to offer them fodder. This is the time when the application of justice the American way is most important.
And what if we discover that some foreign terrorist group was involved? Is that, then, reason to retract our legal system and make up a new set of rules? No, it is all the more reason to insistently maintain that legal system. Why? Because it means we can also show them that their acts will not defeat us as a nation of laws that apply equally to everyone. Because it means that we can, in an open courtroom whose proceedings will be reported everywhere, show the whole world the despicable and evil nature of the guilty parties and the moral bankruptcy of their outlook.
Things which take place in secret courts, behind closed doors, are disputable, arguable; people can believe whatever they like about them (not to mention we have, in that case, no way of keeping the system honest). Things which take place in the light of day in front of everyone cannot be disputed.
But one of the most disturbing things involved when men like Senator Lindsey Graham make foolish pronouncements about denying persons (American citizens, no less!) their Constitutional rights, is that it takes us down a weird, morally bizarre path to someplace where we are forced to argue against doing what is “fair.” Have we forgotten what “fair” means? The word is not a synonym for “nice.” When we take someone who is provably guilty of multiple murders and give him what he fairly deserves, what do you think that is? When you and I, and the Boston Marathon bomber, all get fair protection under the law, that does not mean we all get a nice pat on the back. It means you and I don’t get punished for crimes we didn’t commit (even if we are unlucky enough to be accused of them) whereas the bomber, if we know he did the crime with enough certainty to prove it, gets full punishment under the law.
To make this really clear: if we don’t think the Constitution works enough to stick to it when things matter, then deep down, we don’t really believe in the American way as defined by that Constitution. And if we say that rights don’t apply to everyone, then we have nothing to stand on when someone wants to deny them to us. Let’s put aside this dangerous nonsense about denying Constitutional rights to people, and start demonstrating that we can be a nation of freedoms and laws that remain unbowed.
We say that we do not negotiate with terrorists. If we mean it, then treating the Constitution as non-negotiable is most important of all.
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Chapter One
I was too young to remember the early part of the war except in hazy impressions. My first solid memories are of shortly after Berlin fell. I didn’t understand the politics, and the fear, and the destruction, but what did make an impression on me at that age was the candy that the American drones gave us. I remember catching glimpses of disapproving adults sometimes looking out from their windows, but my friends and I didn’t pay much attention to them. Those unmanned aerial vehicles from across the ocean were just so friendly, and so interesting. They had such a different atmosphere around them than the drab, determined sorrow I saw from everyone else around me, and they seemed to be just as happy to see me as I was curious to see them.
They’d fly in low from the horizon, and our little mob of children would look intently for our favorite UAV—each of us had particular drones we had become friends with—and we’d hope for a stick of gum, maybe. Sometimes they’d stick around for a while and chat. All of us briefly became fans of baseball. We didn’t really know how it was played, but most of the drones had favorite teams from exotic places like St. Louis, and some of them had brought their mitts with them. They’d toss the ball to us while idly flying their surveillance patterns at 40,000 feet, and grin as the youngest among us tried to throw it all the way back on the fly.
Some people told me the Americans were enemies of my country, that they were responsible for all the blown-up buildings and the fatherless children. I heard talk about the awful bombs they had dropped on our cities. But before I was old enough to understand what war was or what occupation was, I was old enough to comprehend what friendliness and kindness were, and to experience how nothing more than a simple smile and a wave engendered trust and connection, though I could never have put it in those words. So by the time I got old enough to understand the disparaging talk, my attitude toward them had already been pretty well formed just by their presence.
Even our parents couldn’t help but gradually grow into an unmentioned appreciation for American UAV’s. It was just that when they saw those drones, surely tired after flying all day from some distant base with multiple mid-air refuelings, still take a few moments to help one of us fix his bike, the human connection won out. It wasn’t anymore an enemy, occupying our formerly great city in our now demolished and broken nation. It was a fellow father, or brother. You knew it was so, because sometimes you could catch a glimpse of sadness under that enthusiastic American energy. The tiniest feeling of loneliness would show through the sensor pod, and you knew that behind that carefree smile on his face was a drone who probably had his own wife and child back home, far away and missed.
I grew older, and I learned to be sad about the turn of history my nation had taken. And once I was still older, I came, sometimes, to be very angry with the United States. But I have never thoroughly lost my good will toward them, or my sense that they should be ally rather than foe. They often are frustrating with how they use their power on the world stage. But I know they aren’t evil, they aren’t really malicious or out to destroy, because I met them, and they were the ones who showed me there was a different kind of future imaginable than the desperation I saw all around. I was friends with an American drone once, when I was a child, and he laughed with me, and he shared with me his candy and his hope.
Chapter 2
I still remember the first time I had a real conversation with a police surveillance camera that had the same skin color as me. I called him a traitor. I yelled it out; I was with a group of other 13-year-olds and impulsively trying to impress them. I was surprised and a little scared when the camera unexpectedly responded. He crossed the street and walked right up to me. “Oh, really?” he asked me. My friends disappeared quickly and I was left alone with the big box and its blinking light.
I had always been confused by cameras like him. I expected it from the white cameras, but why were these ones in here harassing their own people? Boldly, I asked him exactly that.
He asked me a question in return. He asked me if I knew how many people who looked like him and me got shot to death in this city every year. Over three hundred and fifty, he said. Did I know any of them? Of course I did. Did I like that? Did I know that it wasn’t like that everywhere? Did I know whose job it was to go after the killers?
You aren’t doing a very good job, I said. He told me people like me didn’t make it any easier when we called them names and refused to help them do their jobs. “But you guys look at us all like we’re murderers and drug dealers and harass us all the time. Why would we help you?”
The thing that really surprised me was that the camera agreed. He said there was more than one reason he had become a police camera. One was that he used to be a kid like me living on this very block and had had enough of how things were here. Another was that he wanted to make an example in the police, to be at least one small force against stereotypes and racism.
But he also pointed out that I had a choice. I could side with the guys who harassed my people a lot, or I could side with the guys who shot my people every single day. He made that choice the way he did because he was sick of his friends dying. He thought maybe by becoming a surveillance camera he could make the police better and make the neighborhood better at the same time.
I shrugged and said whatever, and walked away to show to anyone watching that he was just a stupid cop camera, but what he said kind of stuck with me. Later I remembered that I should have said that cops kill my people, too, but I was curious and looked it up with my teacher. Cops had killed about a dozen people last year in this city. Some of those guys had guns, though. And either way, that’s a lot less than three hundred and fifty.
I wasn’t as sure what to think anymore when my friends complained about cops. They still make me really mad when they pull me over and want to search my car for no reason. But I do tell them what I know now, if I know something about a crime. I’m sick of that stuff happening, too, especially since I’ve got a kid now. I don’t know who he was, but I’m thankful that one time a police camera actually stopped and talked with me. It made it feel like the cops weren’t just some government gang that descended from nowhere to bust down doors and haul people away to hassle and put fear in us. They were real people, some of them from this neighborhood who were trying to make it better. I wish they would put more of those cameras everywhere in the city, because they might make more of that kind of human connection between guys like me and the cops.
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Enforcement by remote control. What does it mean to have cameras on every corner and patrolling the sky above? One of the inescapable features of the exercise of power has always been that it requires ongoing, face-to-face encounter between the holders (or at least the agents) of that power, and those upon whom it is imposed. Very suddenly and very quickly, this is changing. It is now becoming possible to rule by lightning strike.
It is worth considering all the effects of this. Some are obvious: safe observation of unsafe places, knowledge of crimes where there are no police, successful military action where there are no soldiers. But these are all direct, immediate outcomes. When by modern technology we dramatically alter the nature of the interface between authority and the people subject to it, we should expect that there may well be changes more far-reaching than mere efficiency.
We should ask ourselves: In times and places where peace prevails, is this due altogether and completely to the swiftness of enforcement? Or are there other factors at work as well?
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My state, like many others, is considering further expanding gambling. Since the state is in awful financial shape, this is not surprising. Unfortunately, it is also not wise. Perhaps it is astonishing to hear the assertion that something promising to deliver massive piles of free cash might not, in fact, live up to its claims. So let us take a good look at what gambling is, and what more of it really means.
First, one thing we should recognize that it is not, is a productive industry. What I mean by this is that, unlike most other industries, gambling does not produce anything, does not create anything, does not add any value or wealth to the economy. Whereas a factory, a restaurant, a farm, a building contractor, a software development firm, or any number of other businesses take resources and labor and construct something new, actually increasing the total amount of value or wealth in the economy, a casino creates no wealth whatsoever. It simply shuffles around existing wealth.
At a time of high unemployment and massive government deficits, what we clearly and desperately need is economic growth. At such a time, shifting significant resources toward, and pinning our hopes on, something that brings about zero real economic growth is exactly the wrong way to go.
“But wait,” you might ask, “how can we say casinos create no economic growth, when we can point to examples of local areas whose financial situation and jobless rates have clearly improved after building casinos?”
The key word here is “local”. There is nothing surprising at all about the fact that opening up a gigantic, well-marketed entertainment complex somewhere will result in a few more local jobs. But casino cash can only come from two places: area residents and visitors. Only one of those sources, the out-of-town guests, grows the area’s economy. What this means is that if you open a casino in one town, that town’s jobs and tax revenues do increase—at the expense of all the other towns. Allow gambling in every town, and suddenly nobody is attracting out-of-town revenue anymore, and you’re back to where you started…except that now a larger proportion of the state’s businesses are doing nothing of any real wealth-producing value. States and cities all trying to rescue themselves from massive debt through gambling is just an inward spiral, retreating from the growth of productive enterprise into a “solution” of spending our existing wealth and energy trying to shuffle around the leftover scraps that were generated some other way, deceiving ourselves into believing that if we shift the money over here, or over there, somehow it will add up to more total money.
Will it at least mean more money going to the state? Maybe, but simply sucking a greater share of money out of people’s pockets and into the government’s hands, while the economy remains stagnant, is not a helpful goal in the long term. Economically speaking, it is no different than simply taxing more, because that’s exactly what it is. Building new casinos specifically so that we can tax them is not a clever way of avoiding more taxation.
“But at least,” suggests one commonly-voiced opinion, “patronizing a casino is voluntary, which makes this a less objectionable way for the state to raise money.” It is true, gambling is voluntary, and this takes us into one of the most problematic aspects of such a plan: a state whose income depends in any significant way on the gambling industry is one whose financial well-being depends on its citizens making poor financial choices.
Put more bluntly, for the state to win, its people have to lose. The more they lose, the more revenue comes in. If we plan to cover our deficit with this kind of thing, then the one thing the state can’t afford is its citizens getting wise and failing to gamble away much of their money. For the interests of the state and those of its own people to be so directly at odds is a dramatically disturbing proposition. This conflict of interest is a major problem for every version of expanding or maintaining gambling, but it can become even more severe depending on the form things take.
One of the recurring proposals in the state of Illinois is the idea of a city-owned casino in Chicago. Surprisingly, in all the arguments over gambling expansion, this particular notion has stirred up relatively little controversy, even though it is the most problematic piece of all in the various expansion plans. Perhaps this is because, on the surface, it simply sounds like a more efficient means of raising government revenue from casino operations. Eliminate the middle man (the owner), and then all the house’s winnings go straight to covering budget shortfalls. But taking the time to consider what this really means should leave us horrified.
What it means is that our government would be directly in the business of marketing and selling get-rich-quick schemes to its own citizens. It means that our tax dollars would support—in a city government that is supposed to be there for our benefit— entire departments devoted to convincing us of the make-believe universe in which winning large sums of money is common. It means we would be paying to feed ourselves, our neighbors, and our children a continuous diet of radio and television imagery designed to make stupid financial decisions look as sexy, as exciting, and as appealing as possible.
Do we really want to create this state of affairs? Will we now spend our state dollars supposedly educating students in their math classes about the truths of odds and statistics, in their home economics courses about wise budgeting and careful saving…and yet every moment they are out of school submerge them in likewise-taxpayer-funded advertising persuading them, through much more alluring, emotional appeals, of the exact opposite notions of what is a good idea? Are we going to encourage adults to keep trying and working hard, to go to the employment agencies, to sign up for college courses or earn their G.E.D.’s at the cost of much time and long effort on their part, in order to be productive and earn for themselves a living…and also make them look, every day as they walk out of those agencies and classes, at billboards on which we tell them there’s a faster, easier way, that they can change their lives in an instant simply by winning big over at the casino?
Which one of those conflicting messages do you think will be more attractive and successful? You and I will be paying to employ experts whose job will be to make sure it is the latter, that the artificial glamour of paying people to take your money away from you is enhanced enough to outweigh whatever sensible ideas people might have absorbed from their high school teachers. It has to. This entire scheme of paying our way with gambling revenue depends on it.
In fact, sadly, we already have started down that road. The state lottery is an excellent demonstration of why covering our costs with gambling is a terrible idea. If you let your opinions about it be formed mainly by advertising paid for by the lottery itself, you might think it is a beneficent institution whose only effects are making people rich and paying for schools. But do you know where that money comes from?
Have you ever walked into a convenience store and seen who is buying most of those lottery tickets? I don’t mean the person who buys a single ticket occasionally, I mean the one who comes in every day or two and drops $10, $15 or more. It isn’t the rich guy who has a BMW out in the parking lot, blowing a little extra cash on some fun. It’s the guy who is clearly down on his luck, taken in by the belief—the belief we’re devoting huge marketing budgets to convince him of—that luck will be his way out, and so he’s in there spending what amounts to a sizeable portion of what he likely earned that day on a few worthless, scratch-off pieces of paper that will be in the garbage within minutes. This isn’t just my personal, anecdotal observation. If you sort lottery sales figures in Illinois by ZIP code, you find that the top sales are consistently in low-income areas.
This reveals that whatever we may be trying to fund this way, we’re doing it on the backs of the people least able to afford it. This breaks my heart to see, and we should be eliminating the government’s involvement in that business, not expanding it. There are a lot of people who believe the state should be taking steps to redistribute wealth, from the hands of the few rich into the hands of the many who are not as well off. Whether or not one agrees with this notion, I think it is safe to say that the government certainly should not be working to redistribute wealth from the many poor into the hands of a few rich. And that is practically the definition of gambling: few winners, many losers. It can’t be otherwise; if it were, a casino or other gambling operation wouldn’t be profitable at all.
We also need to recognize that, though gambling is not a productive industry, it is a transformative one. I am proud of being from a state like Illinois, and from a region like Chicagoland, from a place that works for a living, rather than predicating its entire economic existence on people trying to get something for nothing. I’m glad that the ethos of this place is largely one of making things happen, of doing real things, where the dominant mentality is not the pursuit of the easy money and endless dreams of winning it big. Where people say, “Working this overtime is going to pay for my new deck,” not, “I came here to win the cash to pay for a new deck, and if I stay here for just a few more hours, I think I can make back all the money I lost.” Chicago isn’t a gambling type of town, nor Illinois a gambling type of state, and I don’t want to see them become so.
I don’t want to see us give up on productive investment and labor, and start putting all our eggs in the basket of feasting on existing wealth rather than creating new wealth.
I don’t want to see the state become addicted—because we all know that once a source of revenue is established, it is more or less forever—to money that comes to a disturbing extent from already impoverished people, or to spend our tax dollars giving personal financial foolishness a sexy image.
I don’t want the “gaming” mentality to become dominant here as an everyday way of thinking about life.
I don’t want the type of sleazy businesses and people that sprout up around centers of gambling to take root here.
I don’t want our economy transformed into the sort that is excessively dependent on secondary economic activity, like gambling and tourism, rather than primary activity such as producing things and ideas, thereby attaching the financial health of our schools and infrastructure to the extreme boom and bust cycles you see in places where all the income is based on people’s luxury spending, which dries up in hard times. (Remembering, of course, that the only countering force, any extent to which gambling doesn’t dry up in difficult times, relies entirely on the fact that people undergoing financial hardship will turn to desperate, far-fetched solutions.)
Why would we want this? There really is only one reason we are thinking of going down that road at all: revenue. But is revenue really to be treated as a trump card, so to speak, which instantly defeats all other considerations? But it will bring in money! Anything, if it will bring in money!
I think not. If I get myself into some personal financial difficulty, is an okay way of solving that for me to go into all the poorest neighborhoods and do my best to talk people into putting their money into shady investments I’ve come up with, selling them on a tempting visions of profits, but with a near-zero chance of actually even making their original money back? If this is sketchy, unethical behavior for an individual, is it somehow less sketchy and unethical for us to do this as a state? Does it become a less shameful way of making money when we turn the practice from an individual hustle into a systematic one, throwing the official weight of the state behind those too-good-to-be-true promises and making them into an industry, then making the financial survival of the state dependent on that industry?
I cannot support that use of my government. I cannot support the state being in a business where its success is, quite literally, its own citizens’ losses. The state should be looking out for the interests of people in tough situations; it should be protecting them from those who want to take their money from them with nothing except false hope to deliver in return. It should certainly not be jumping in and taking part itself, not only offering, but actively promoting the idea that they can get a leg up by risking their money in the hopes of striking it big.
We should be looking to reduce and eventually eliminate gambling as an industry, not expand it. The whole idea is a disaster. Gambling does not build economic wealth, it just rearranges it. People buy less of some other form of entertainment, or save less, or put fewer of their dollars in investments that return something. The jobs a casino “creates” in one town are just replacing the other jobs it destroys, when the restaurants and theaters and bowling alleys in the other towns lose their customers to the flashy new casino. In fact, once you get enough of them, a significant portion of the revenue of additional casinos simply comes from taking away business from existing ones. I know some people hope to go really big, and draw all kinds of revenue from other states, but this is just a race to the bottom, each state undermining its own future, by drawing investment away from fruitful industries and toward gaming, just to try and make sure other states don’t get there first.
These decisions are being made now. Many of our representatives in government are, right this very moment, seeking to approve more and more casinos, authorize online gaming, add slot machines in numerous locations, and put video poker machines everywhere, thereby massively enlarging the portion of our economy devoted to gambling. But a state that already has substantial problems with public corruption really does not need to get further in bed with an industry with a shady history, one whose very business is selling false promise. It is up to us to decide whether that is what we will be about. Will we let mistaken notions of gaming as a magic source of endless money at no cost override our desire for ethical and fair government behavior, take priority over our concerns about transforming our local culture and identity, and prevail over wiser choices for long-term statewide economic health?
If we want to do otherwise, then we need to share these very real concerns with our communities, with our legislators and governor. We need to make it known that there are very good reasons for opposing the expansion of gambling, and especially any version of this that includes the morally appalling idea of government-owned casinos. As I write this, there is yet another effort underway to push more gambling through the Illinois legislature in a big rush in the next few days, something which recurs regularly. Deficits inspire panic, and panic inspires ill-considered action.
Gambling sounds, on the surface, like an easy way out, but like most easy ways out, it doesn’t stand up under scrutiny, and turning our state into one whose economy relies upon it to any appreciable level would be short-sighted and damaging. We need to move toward a sane, honest, straightforward way of taxation that matches our spending, and spending that matches our taxation, not jump on board tempting, but ultimately harmful, “free money” schemes to fund our annual budget. We have accumulated enormous debts, from years of foolish decision-making. We should not expect that there is an easy way out. Let us not make yet more foolish decisions in a gullible pursuit of instant, magic solutions.
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