This blog contains posts and comments written by students in Dr. Tufte's economics classes at Southern Utah University.
11/30/2005
Online Gambling
Should the government make online gambling illegal. This could cause a slew of problems especially if small countries and foreign states try to take advantage of the opportunity to make some US dollars. The government thinks that it should be illegal because many state laws prohibit gambling. Countries like Antigua are ready to talk to the World Trade Organization about restrictions. Billions of dollars each year are spent on internet gaming.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
-1 on Maddy's post for grammatical errors.
Whether gambling is desirable or not, the issue here is that our old laws were not updated sufficiently quickly to deal with changing technology (gee - the government was too slow ... do you think?). I think existing laws come down fairly clearly on the side of Antigua.
Thanks for commenting.
I agree - except for the whole part about the negative externalities of gambling. I think the government has a role to help internalize those costs, and I'm not sure that out moves to "decriminalize" gambling are helping to do that.
Dr. Tufte mentioned that the old laws are not sufficient to our changing technology. I completely agree with this. We can see that with technology and all the benefits which we receive, comes a cost. The costs are these negative issues which we sometimes do not see. These may take years to fix and it seems as though we can never catch up to makes things right.
Perhaps the problem then is our proclivity for making rules and laws.
I think the only way they will ever be ok with online gambling is if they are making money too.
Post a Comment