Economical and Financial News

Nothin’ But a GTech Thing

Of the different forms of legalized gambling permitted in the United States the most common is also the least-justifiable — the state-sponsored lottery. That industry, meanwhile, is dominated by a firm called GTech. A firm that, as Ken Silverstein details, has extensive ties to the McCain team.

What’s particularly infuriating about the lottery, to me, is when you consider what would happen if instead of a state monopoly you allowed lotteries, taxed them, and subjected them to some pretty basic regulations. It seems to me that market competition would drive the odds in favor of the customer. It would always need to be a bad bet for the ticket-buyer, of course, to work as a business. But in a competitive environment it ought to become a very low margin business since there’s no really good way to differentiate the product except by offering more favorable terms. But instead of doing that, or the other sensible alternative of banning lotteries, we’ve gone with this neither fish nor fowl system that seems to include the worst aspects of several different approaches to gambling regulation up to and including the horrible spectacle of quasi-public agencies spending money encouraging people to waste their money gambling.