Few things are as American as laying down a few bucks on a football game. But, oddly enough, sports gambling is illegal in all but four states—Delaware, Montana, Nevada, and Oregon.
We already have state lotteries, horse tracks, and casinos. Betting can make sports more popular (when’s the last time you heard of someone going to a horse track just to watch the action?). The government could use some revenues, and more than half the country supports legalized sports gambling. Thus, when New Jersey legalized sports gambling, the only real case against it was existing federal law. There’s now a constitutional battle going on over whether people should be free to gamble, and The New Yorker’s James Suroweicki excellently makes the case in a recent piece:
The ban on sports betting does exactly what Prohibition did. It makes criminals rich. People still gamble, after all: the National Gambling Impact Study Commission estimates that more than three hundred billion dollars is bet on games annually. Legalized sports betting would bring in significant tax revenues for the states—Drazin estimates that Monmouth Park could take in a billion dollars in bets in its first year—and it would leave cops and prosecutors free to go after crimes with real victims. As for the concern that legalization would encourage shady behavior, the truth is that legal and regulated betting makes it easier, not harder, to spot things like point-shaving. One of the biggest college point-shaving scandals of the past twenty years was uncovered when Vegas bookies noted unusual betting activity on certain games and reported it to the authorities.
Rose says that the 1992 law is “plainly unconstitutional,” and Drazin expresses confidence that it will be overturned. But, even if it’s not, Congress should amend the law, and make it possible for states that want to legalize gambling to do so. As Rose notes, “Gambling has typically been a state issue, not a federal one.” And, while states’ rights has been used as an excuse to justify plenty of bad policies, the idea that certain matters are better handled at the state level remains an important one. Overriding states’ rights and insisting on national legislation makes sense in many circumstances—but not when one state’s decision has no obvious negative effects on other states or on the national economy. There’s an obvious parallel here with the current wrangling between the federal government and states that have legalized marijuana. If New Jerseyans want to be able to place the occasional bet on an N.F.L. game, or Coloradans want to be able to get high, the rest of us should let them. There’s no need to make a federal case out of it.
For the sake of fairness, it should be noted that there’s a definite downside to betting. In his most recent column, ESPN’s Rick Reilly shed light on the potential evils of gambling:
For millions of Americans, March Madness is not so much about March as it is madness.
Take a former stockbroker from New York we’ll call Fred (not his real name). For him, March Madness was about waking up, shirt soaked in sweat, already down $40,000 by Sunday morning of the first weekend. It was about taking 10 mg. of Ambien every night and still not being able to sleep. It was about tricking his parents into investing $30,000 into his “business,” when the money really was going to bookies.
I encourage you to read the rest of his story—it illustrates the dangerous downside of legalizing sports gambling. Nonetheless, the arguments against legalizing sports gambling seem a lot like government paternalism. The country is moving away from opposing issues on merely moral grounds (e.g., gay marriage, marijuana), and sports gambling seems like a domino soon to fall. A decent number of you reading this broke the law through a recent bracket pool or friendly Super Bowl wager, and I’m guessing you’re fine with others doing the same.