THIS IS AGAINST CASINO GAMBLING

When Casinos collect a dollar in profit, less than thirty percent of the dollar reaches government coffers. Gambling simply creates an extra layer of bureaucracy in which corporations and gigantic chains skim money from the clutches of hard working citizens. The money that is brought in must be weighed with the ruined lives of small business owners and pathological gamblers alike. Tobacco and drug addiction have similar symptoms to pathological gambling. More people gamble casually than do smoke or drug and problem gambling is actually more prevalent than heavy smokers. All three of these leisure activities harm the general populace in order to line the pockets of corporations such as Marriott, Best western, and Harrah’s.

The major harm of casinos manifests itself not just in skyrocketing crime and therefore higher taxes but also in unemployment rates that actually rise as population booms without a corresponding increase in actual production. Following casinos’ arrival in St. Louis, Missouri unemployment rate jumped nearly one percent as commuting workers took the place of local restaurant workers, entertainment, and technology services. This translates into hundreds of thousands of lost jobs. These unemployed masses rely on government funds to support them. The unfortunate of these must resort to crime, requiring an excellent police force. The “prosperity” created by casinos often is only paying for the messes that it creates.

Casinos encourage sprawl that can result in big city drugs, sex, and crime entering small town at overwhelming levels. The environment that produced greats from Abe Lincoln to Bob Dylan to Emerson is destroyed by corporations and the strangling of local business. The forger of the declaration of independence, Thomas Jefferson, firmly held that even duties on imports were infringements upon the personal rights of the people and governmental presence should be kept to a minimum. How he might have spun in his grave had he known that one day the richest men of America would take the poorest man’s dollar and split it with a complacent government 70: 30.

It may well be pointed out that the small town culture isn’t realistic for competition in today’s high-tech world and a strong government is required to keep order in large metropolises that increase production. Here, too, government money is inefficiently collected through gambling. When only thirty percent of profit is going to the government, millions of citizens are rendered useless from pathological gambling, and tens of millions are employed in the industry that drove gamblers pathological society cannot sustain the huge harm inflicted by legalized casinos. I would enjoy seeing the venerable Alexander Hamilton humiliate those who suggested gambling as an efficient way of creating commerce. And daresay Thomas Jefferson’s outrage would be memorable at the very idea of obvious trickery involved in casinos. Suffice to say, however, that casino gambling is economically and morally wrong.