While I in no way support habitual gambling, the second you push for something like that, you will have a sizable group of "freedom activists" up in arms. More likely, I see it being more-heavily taxed to make it less appealing.

▲

soraminazuki an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Even without the addiction problem, a business that allows you to bet on anything happening in society is bound to be the largest vehicle for corruption in the history of mankind. This is a threat to democracy and stability that actually undermines our freedom. Prediction markets should never have been allowed to exist, and if the US is willing to protect this industry, the rest of the free world should sanction it out of existence.

	▲	Atreiden an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I share this perspective and hate the straw-man from pro-prediction-marketists that those opposed are moralists and puritans who can't accept that people like to bet on sports. Prediction markets are a way of effectively placing a "bounty" on something you would like to happen. Or capitalizing on one of these existing bounties because you're able to affect the result. It's a way to commodify power (and information of course, which is what these platforms bill themselves for), converting it into money, which can you can build further power with.

▲

deepsun 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Any law or regulation has a freedom activists group against it. That's normal, any government has an oppression mechanism that enforces it's will. The whole "civilization" was born when people started restricting somebody's freedom in order to achieve some goals (e.g. water rationing in the Ancient Nile).

So it's not surprising someone would be against restricting gambling. The hard part is to how the gov should do it. But it's not government's job to please every single person.

	▲	satellites 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Easy for the gov to do it: make hosting a gambling website in the US illegal, make providing access to online gambling illegal, treat money earned from gambling services like money earned from narcotics trafficking, threaten to punish payment processors if they work with gambling providers, make gambling commercials illegal (like they did with tobacco) etc. Make it where you can't run a billion-dollar company like DraftKings in the US and watch it dry up overnight. Online gambling was literally illegal in most of the US a decade ago, even on the modern post-social-media internet. You could still do it by jumping through hoops like using a VPN to access foreign gambling sites, but you couldn't get it in the App Store on your iPhone, and you weren't spammed with ads for it every time you watch football. It's not hard to imagine going back to that world; it wasn't that long ago. I used to support legalizing online gambling back then, but we've run the experiment and seen the results and it's past time to shut it down.

▲

pasc1878 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The problem about more-heavily taxed is that the gambling companies have spotted this and are registered in off shore tax havens.