Howdy:
I was musing in my car about the Texas State Lottery and I found that I despise for many and varied reasons.
The Stupid Tax
The TSL is a tax on stupidity. The odds make a Vegas casino look like it runs about slinging cash at gamblers, wily-nilly. Lotto, scratch-offs, whatever. The return expected for the expenditure is something MS Excel would likely round off to zero, even in its memory space.
So, you'd have to be an idiot or have a momentary lapse of reason to buy a ticket.
I can see the libertoids coming out of the woodwork (I thought I sprayed for them last week?). "They make their own choices and spend their own money. What's the problem? You just want to control peoples' live, you statist."
Yeah, whatever. I am no advocate for the gooberment solving every one of life's problems, of which stupid folks have more than their fair share. I also don't think gooberment ought to actively work to make stupid folks' lives harder.
Extortion, Monopoly, and the State
If I tried to set up a numbers game along the lines of the lottery and guaranteed the profits would go to my kids education, I would still go to jail. The State will brook no competition in its bilking of the mouth-breathers.
It Helps Education
Right. The folks who make that argument have many misunderstandings or are just plain lying. One of many problems with that claim: the profit the lottery makes may go directly into the Dept Ed coffers, but that means only that that many dollars of general revenue can go someplace other than the Dept of Ed. No more (net) dollars for the Dept of Ed to (mis)spend.
Gas Station Decision-Makers
Every once in a while I actually go inside to pay so I can get a drink. It never fails that I get behind a lottery scratch-off player. It usually takes them quite a while to figure out how to toss thier money away. I must fight the urge to say, "Pick the one with the prettiest colors. That way, in a few years, you can paper your bathroom in them and have the world's most expensively papered bathroom."