Casinos are bad, but gambling isn’t.

My buddy Jeff quotes an article about the expansion of legalized gambling around the country. I haven’t had time to read the full article yet, but I did start writing a reply for his blog, and decided instead that it was worthy of an entry here.
I can agree with a lot of what was quoted from the article, but I’m going to take a different view. Gambling is not the society-ruining evil that certain factions of society would like to make it out to be. Gambling, near as I can figure, has been a part of human society for as long as there’s been a human society. It’s definitely been alive and healthy since the early 16th century (my chosen time frame in the SCA). Casinos exist *because* the “moral” people thought gambling was a sin, and so they caused our government to write laws against it, which led to regulation of it, and now only a few powerful and rich entities (and the Native Americans) can offer gambling. Online gambling threatened that power structure, and so it was banned (again, at the behest of those who cry “immoral” and to the glee of the rich and powerful who run state-licensed casinos). Our society would have been best off if gambling had remained forever legal, and available at your local bar, and not controlled by the rich and powerful and made to look glamorous (thank you very much, James Bond).

Of course, our country would be in better shape if we’d never let the paper industry convince government to ban hemp (marijuana), too…But that’s another discussion.