BET ON IT
Edward Cone
News & Record
4-22-99
There is a sense of inevitability about the coming of a lottery to North Carolina, but just because something is inevitable doesn't make it right. No matter how flimsy I find most of the arguments against the lottery to be, and no matter how practical I find the arguments in its favor, I am somehow still uncomfortable with the concept of a state-sponsored gambling scheme.
Certainly the lottery is a wise political bet, one that's been staked by Lieutenant Governor Dennis Wicker in his campaign to remove the word "lieutenant" from his job description. Embracing the lottery was a major factor in the surprising victories of Democratic gubernatorial candidates in South Carolina and Alabama last year, and only one statewide referendum on a lottery has failed in the modern era.
But I don't like it. I can't really tell you why -- indeed, I'm about to offer you all manner of reasons why we should have a lottery while picking apart the case against one -- I just know that it doesn't work for me.
It's not the concept of legalized gambling that gives me pause, although I'm happy to keep the casinos at a distance in other states. Adults should be allowed to make their own dumb decisions whenever possible, whether it's smoking dope or driving SUVs or playing the numbers. I'm too cheap to be much of a gambler myself, but that shouldn't keep you from wasting your own money.
And I don't buy the argument that the lottery is a tax on the poor. How patronizing, to suppose that people who buy lottery tickets are all (a) poor and (b) unaware of the long odds. If there's a correlation between common sense and annual income, why do rich people buy Internet stocks, or hoard food for Y2K like the Irving Park lady cited in last Sunday's edition of this newspaper? Anyway, a self-imposed tax is surely more palatable than a mandatory one.
Another position against the lottery that I can't really get behind: the gradual decline in interest and subsequent need for larger ad budgets that seems to be the rule for these things. Settling for a lot of money down the road after starting out with a whole lot of money for the first few years doesn't sound like such a bad deal.
And yes, those common-sense arguments in support of the lottery appeal to me, too. It's surely not doing North Carolina any good to have North Carolinians continue to pour money into the Virginia lottery. We teach our children that "everybody else is doing it'" is not an acceptable excuse for bad behavior, but then again our kids don't keep handing their allowance to neighbors every week.
The big promise of the lottery is that we can do great things with the money, creating scholarships and programs and generally boosting the level of educational opportunity to the place we need it to be if we're going to compete in the knowledge economy. Again, the arguments that such good intentions have been undercut by budgetary legerdemain in other states don't do much for me -- a sensible plan would be modeled after the success of Georgia's lottery, which puts every dollar into new programs, and we could even improve on that.
And yet at its core the whole thing seems shady, the idea that this enterprise would be sponsored (if not actually administered) by the government. Yes, the government runs our liquor stores, too, but it doesn't make the liquor and it didn't establish the practice of drinking alcohol in this state.
So I'm left with the squishiest of arguments against a lottery that I can't oppose on the facts -- a feeling that it's just wrong for the state to lure its citizens into a sucker's game, even if that's what the people say they want.
At least I'm in good company. Conservative columnist William Safire, who has been a lonely voice in opposition to gambling for years, wrote recently that he's giving up preaching against legalized games of chance but still draws the line at state-sponsored games. I think he has a point, though I don't think that point will carry the day in North Carolina.
Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.
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