Both advocates and opponents of online gambling expansion have been employing what I’ll call the kitchen sink approach when they try to make their case. Both sides are more than happy to riff on the many advantages or ills of the industry and segue from one argument to another faster than a comedian doing their set at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner.

The Arguments Against Online Gambling. Whether people should be permitted to gamble online, or gamble at all actually, is an issue that many people are passionate about, on both sides of the fence. In spite of gambling becoming much more accepted in the 21st Century than in the past, there still are a lot of people that are against it, to the.

Sometimes this is done because they have a very strong case and have a lot of good talking points to get to, but other times this riffing is more strategic; meant to confuse, overwhelm, and misdirect the audience, and forcing their opponent to have to defend against a litany of attacks – and doing the defending takes far longer and requires far more nuance than doing the accusing.

In this article I’ll take a look at the most often used arguments from both sides and see if they pass the smell test – and yes, I basically ripped off the true-false scale from Politifact.com.

The arguments FOR legal online gambling

It’s a Revenue Generator

Somewhat true.

Online gambling will certainly bring money into a state’s coffers. As we have seen however, the amount of money the industry is going to contribute is negligible; we’re talking fractions of a percent of states’ total budgets here.

The potential revenue is a quaint argument for online gambling, and one that can provide the average Joe with a tangible figure of the industry’s net worth, but it’s certainly not an argument that should be central to the debate, and it’s turning into a harder and harder sell to wary lawmakers who are now armed with real-world data thanks to NJ, Nevada, and Delaware.

It Provides Strong Consumer Protections

Licensed and regulated online poker isn’t going to stop cheating, or prevent every single underage player from hopping on an online gambling site, but it will do a hell of a lot more than the current unregulated market is doing on this front.

This is one argument that every online gambling advocate should know inside and out, as it resonates with just about everyone.

Poker is a game of skill

Half true.

First of all, this is a poker-only argument and therefore doesn’t fit into the larger storyline that online gambling should be legalized – if your argument is poker should be legal because it’s a game of skill than you’re also saying other forms of gambling are not skillful and should be banned.

Poker is certainly a skill game, but making the case for poker as a skill game requires a lot of patience. The winner of any given hand is based entirely on random luck, and it isn’t until you start approaching a significant number of hands that skill takes over. So poker is a game of skill… depending on how much poker we are talking about.

Furthermore, if you’re not a good player it is indeed luck when relying on lucky cards to beat superior opponents. For these people, poker is most certainly a luck-based game and offers among the worst odds in the house.

The arguments AGAINST legal online gambling

It will increase the number of problem gamblers

This is a powerful argument because it makes sense that new, readily available gambling options would increase the number of problem gamblers – after all, how could more equal less?

That being said, the data simply doesn’t back this up at this point, one way or the other.

It’s unclear if online gambling creates problem gamblers or if some problem gamblers are simply drawn to the Internet, as of now the jury is still out.

Then there is the not so small elephant in the room that iGaming critics gloss over; online gambling has already been around for 15 years in the form of unregulated sites.

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Despite what the Andy Abboud’s and Sheldon Adelson’s of the world would have you believe, adding regulated online gambling sites to the mix isn’t really an addition to the gambling pantheon.

It Will Increase the Amount of Underage Gambling

Regulated online gambling will not eliminate underage gambling, but it will make it much harder for children to get online and start gambling. Right now, at unregulated sites, the only safeguard in place is a box asking you if you are over 18.

The technology doesn’t exist to enforce regulations

Mostly false.

The technology certainly isn’t perfect, but by anyone’s measure the geolocation and Know Your Customer (KYC) technology is working extremely well.

What makes this argument all the more misleading is the fact that online gambling opponents are essentially saying that the technology for online banking or credit cards doesn’t exist either, because it’s the same technology.

It will cannibalize land-based casinos

Mostly false.

I would have given this argument the full “pants on fire” treatment but we simply don’t have enough data at this time to say with absolute certainty that online gambling doesn’t cannibalize live gaming.

We do have quite a bit of evidence though: here, here, and here.

We can ban offshore online sites

This is a new line of attack that has been used by Andy Abboud recently, as the Las Vegas Sands point-man for online gaming opposition has held up lists of the illegal providers and used anecdotal evidence to show that if the government wanted to it could “easily” shutdown these operators.

Whether this is true or not (or what the cost would be to do so) is unknown at this point, and while it makes for a nice talking point it doesn’t seem like a feasible option to those of us living in a little place called reality.

Very often, someone being opposed to something involves an emotional reaction that is for the most part unexamined, they are just against it, they will often come up with some reasons behind it but these tend to be more explanations rather than reasons.

So the first question we need to ask here is why shouldn’t we have online gambling, or given that it already persists, why should we seek to stop it?

The onus is actually on those who wish to prohibit behavior, especially those who are looking to criminalize it, to show just cause for doing so. All acts are permitted unless they are prohibited, that’s the way the law works anyway, and you have to show why they should be, or at least you are supposed to if you want to justify actions against them.

Justify is a form of the word just, and we should at least wish that our laws and our use of political power be just, and this is something that the law is supposed to seek anyway, although in the world of politics the will behind things is unfortunately often more than sufficient.

So if enough people oppose something, like online gambling, then their political power can be enough to have it banned, and who cares if the reasons given are sound or even make any kind of real sense.

So those who are in favor of online gambling can just start with the fact that we need good reasons to ban it or try to stop it, and then look at the reasons opponents give to see if they are sound.

There are a lot of things we can spend our money on, and people generally don’t have a say in this, because it is our money, our property, and the basis of the concept of property is that one owns it and spend it as one sees fit, with only certain restrictions.

In order to justify placing restrictions on this, we need some very good reasons indeed, or we should need some very good reasons if justify our actions matters. It doesn’t always matter, but it should.

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Overcoming Common Objections To Gambling

Objections to gambling has its roots in beliefs of certain religions, involving people believing that gambling is a sin and one may fall out of favor to some degree with God by gambling.

The main reason that religion and law are not a good mix is that we should not be legislating one person’s religious beliefs over another. There may be some good reasons behind some of these beliefs, for instance that people should not kill one another without just cause, but the reasons that this is not acceptable isn’t just that we may believe God would disapprove, or their religious leaders do not favor it.

If one follows this or that religion, to the degree that they choose to abstain, that’s fine, but should this not be the case, this is not a reason in itself to compel anyone to obey, or even that the action is wrong independent of simply believing it is so.

So we can cast off any religious arguments right off the bat, this isn’t the sort of thing we ever want influencing the law, although it still does to a certain degree even in countries where it is not supposed to, like the United States.

Arguments Against Online Gambling

While gambling is normally thought to fall under the category of liberty, to freely choose how to conduct one’s life provided it does not infringe upon the similar rights of others to conduct theirs, many people feel that we should look the other way for people’s own good.

So we may want to take a paternalistic approach, we’re telling you not to do it because we think it’s bad for you, like a parent might. Now this indeed may be bad for some people, what we would call problem gamblers, but most gamblers do not have a problem with it and it actually contributes to their net happiness, so this argument is not a sound one.

This also includes claims that people’s families are harmed by someone’s gambling addiction. This can be a real problem in some cases, but this does not provide justification for looking to ban something because it is a problem for a small percentage of people. There are other ways to deal with that but prohibition is never a suitable or sensible one.

As for gambling increasing crime, well that’s really only the case if you give gambling over to the criminals, and this is not even an issue really with online gambling, which is well regulated already and involves reputable sites for the most part. Those who are not need to be the ones we’re looking to fix, and if something does not involve crime, you certainly can’t maintain that eliminating it would cut down on crime.

Gambling Is A Fundamental Liberty

The goal with all these specious claims is to look to provide justification to infringe upon personal liberty, and personal liberty doesn’t get much more basic than deciding how to spend one’s entertainment dollars.

Arguments For And Against Online Gambling Sites

There’s lots of ways people entertain themselves, and spend money on this, and you need very good and sound reasons indeed to tell someone how they can spend their money. This is at least as fundamental as things such as the right to freedom of expression or free speech, one must be able to speak up but one certainly also needs to have the right to allocate one’s property as well, and we cannot just pick and choose on what we let them spend it on.

The main argument though in favor of online gambling is that we not only have the rightful liberty to partake in it, we have the practical liberty as well, as this is not an activity that any government can effectively stop us from doing, so long as we have access to the internet.

So given that online gambling is already pervasive, decisions to regulate or prohibit it merely involve whether governments want to seek to have a say in most of it that goes on among its residents, and whether or not they want to benefit economically by taxing it.

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This is not how it’s generally seen by politicians and lawmakers though, they instead think they have the power to give a thumbs up or down on this and think this will decide matters, but the truth is, if they don’t want to play, there are plenty of people in other countries who are more than happy to accommodate those they hope to deny access to.

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So online gambling is here to stay, there aren’t any good reasons why it shouldn’t be, there are indeed some very good reasons why it should, but in any case it doesn’t matter because no one can really stop it.