I don’t gamble online. I’ve seen too many of my friends get so addicted to
poker that they’ve got no time left for Internet porn. And I’m not going to
let that happen to me. But I didn’t expect Congress to pass the Unlawful
Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, treating people who spend all day at
partypoker.com like criminals. Maybe I’m a traditionalist, but I think of
criminals as people who I can’t beat up and who do math slower than I do. It
breaks my heart when the greed our nation is famous for gets trumped by the
religious posturing we were founded on. It’s a horrible conundrum. Either we
give up the tax receipts on the US$6 billion that Americans spend gambling
online, or we let people do whatever they want with their own money. It’s
like making Poland choose between scowling and yelling.
So we’ve decided to forfeit all that income — almost enough to let us
invade a very small Middle Eastern country, or at least an emirate — to
foreign governments. Within 10 years, all the world’s great bridges to
nowhere will be on the Isle of Man. It’s kind of sweet that our government
wants to protect us from ourselves. It’s like it loves us. It has made it
clear that it wants us to stay away from drugs, gambling, prostitutes and
Janet Jackson, all of which it is right about. And I recognize that the
Internet is a particular danger because it makes sin too easy. How can our
economy grow when the machine you work on all day also lets you gamble, buy
OxyContin and watch porn? If moving your factory lever up built a car
engine, and moving it down let you see Little Egypt dance the
hootchy-kootchy, we’d be driving like Fred Flintstone. There’s a great sense
of American optimism in all this lawmaking. Sure, prohibition didn’t work,
and the drug laws have no effect, but, darn it, we really believe that we’re
going to stop the 23 million Americans who waste their money gambling
online. The cutest part is that Congress doesn’t see the irony in telling
people not to waste their money. But, of course, capitalism always sneaks
its way into morality. Because of strong lobbies, the new law makes an
exception, allowing Web sites for lotteries and horse racing. Because, as
anyone who’s been to a 7-Eleven or an OTB place knows, it’s online poker
that sets back the poor. Imagine the economic success Appalachia would be if
not for PlayBaccarat.com.

At a time when giving up free tax revenue seems particularly insane, the
Senate was smart enough to bury the new law in a bill aimed at enhancing
port security. Senators didn’t see the irony of linking legislation that
takes away some of our freedoms with legislation about protecting our
remaining freedoms from terrorist attack.

Legislating vice never works, mostly because vice is a lot of fun. The laws
wind up being weakened by so many inconsistencies — you can gamble on a
boat permanently docked a few feet off the riverbank as long as it pretends
to sail every 15 minutes; you can drink in public as long as it’s covered by
a brown bag; you can’t clone stem cells but you can clone Kelly LeBrock —
they make us lose respect for the law in general.

So, as more people gamble online, the government will eventually have to
find a way to back down without looking stupid. The obvious solution is to
borrow the Indian casino reparations idea and allow gambling sites to be run
by released Guantanamo Bay prisoners. Not only would the profits erase any
bad feelings, the former detainees would be great at running poker sites.
After all, four years of water-boarding is the perfect training for having
to listen to endless stories about bad beats.