Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 From Religion to Risk Management: What to Do When Facing Uncertainty?
- 2 Anything Wrong with Gambling as a Pastime?
- 3 Are You Rich? Risk-Taking and Gambling, or the Leapfrogging Instinct
- 4 Betting on Futures and Creating Prices
- 5 Gambling as Banking: Poker, Junk Bonds, and Central Banks
- 6 Lottery Is a Taxation, and Heav'n Be Prais'd, It Is Easily Rais'd
- 7 Politics and Prohibitions; or, What's a Good Tax Anyway?
- 8 How Gamblers and Risk-Takers Correct the Future
- Appendix 1 Gambling and Risk-Taking: The Leapfrogging Instinct
- Appendix 2 Human Nature and the Civilizing Process
- Appendix 3 A Statistical Profile of Gamblers
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Name Index
- Subject Index
6 - Lottery Is a Taxation, and Heav'n Be Prais'd, It Is Easily Rais'd
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 From Religion to Risk Management: What to Do When Facing Uncertainty?
- 2 Anything Wrong with Gambling as a Pastime?
- 3 Are You Rich? Risk-Taking and Gambling, or the Leapfrogging Instinct
- 4 Betting on Futures and Creating Prices
- 5 Gambling as Banking: Poker, Junk Bonds, and Central Banks
- 6 Lottery Is a Taxation, and Heav'n Be Prais'd, It Is Easily Rais'd
- 7 Politics and Prohibitions; or, What's a Good Tax Anyway?
- 8 How Gamblers and Risk-Takers Correct the Future
- Appendix 1 Gambling and Risk-Taking: The Leapfrogging Instinct
- Appendix 2 Human Nature and the Civilizing Process
- Appendix 3 A Statistical Profile of Gamblers
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Name Index
- Subject Index
Summary
Which shows how gambling has been part of public finance, how lottery finance led to investment banks, how lottery bonds have been a major savings vehicle for the past few decades, and how lotteries financed major western museums, universities, monuments, and wars.
It's not the money. It's not the money.
It's the money.
The title of this chapter is part of a song in Henry Fielding's 1732 farce The Lottery. There is not much new under our sun, except words we use to help disguise what we are talking about.
Indeed, only by looking at governments' attempts to protect their monopolies on lotteries and casinos in various parts of the world can we understand the present gambling landscape, especially the passage of the myopic and ill-advised 2006 UIGEA. The U.S. Congress attached the act at the last minute as section 7 of the Port Security Bill. Go figure. With terrorism and Islamic fascism on the horizon, Congress had nothing better to do than allocate resources to prevent millions of U.S. citizens from gambling online.
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- A World of ChanceBetting on Religion, Games, Wall Street, pp. 124 - 149Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
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