Government Delays New Ban On Internet Gambling

The Installer writes with this quote from the Associated Press: "The Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve are giving US financial institutions an additional six months to comply with regulations designed to ban Internet gambling. ... The delayed rules would curb online gambling by prohibiting financial institutions from accepting payments from credit cards, checks or electronic fund transfers to settle online wagers. The financial industry complained that the new rules would be difficult to enforce because they did not offer a clear definition of what constitutes Internet gambling. They had sought a 12-month delay in implementing provisions of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act that Congress had passed in 2006. ... US bettors have been estimated to supply at least half the revenue of the $16 billion Internet gambling industry, which is largely hosted overseas."

Comments

Re:Nothing escapes the web

[causality]

This situation aside, I don't believe the prohibition failure is a universally applicable example that can be cited every time the government wants to regulate something that's inherently hard to regulate. It's a balance between the cost associated with enforcement and the cost of allowing the activity to occur unregulated.

Prohibition is a great example because drugs and gambling have two things in common: there's no victim. Someone can gamble away their last cent if that's really how they want to spend their mortal life; this doesn't force you or me to do anything. As I view the protection of civil rights to be the main reason why government has law enforcement powers, and no one is using force or fraud to infringe anyone's civil rights here, I am having a hard time understanding why government is even involved. This is exactly like Prohibition, during which some people wanted to drink alcohol, didn't force anyone else to drink if they didn't want to, and still the government felt a need to create a victimless crime. Just like with alcohol, this seems to be based on some kind of Puritannical outrage and has little to do with logic and reason.

If you don't apply the calculus correctly then you could argue that murder is hard to prosecute, therefore we should just allow it. After all, prohibition failed. Ditto for all hard drugs. Should we allow unrestricted use of heroin and cocaine? There may be some callous people who would argue that banning drugs is interfering with Darwinian mechanisms, but the reality is that many youth don't know what's good for them, and need to have access to hard drugs removed to protect themselves from making poor decisions in the period they are still learning to evaluate choices maturely.

If you think drug prohibition has removed the street availability of drugs, it's because you frankly haven't done the slightest research on it. For many youths, alcohol is actually more difficult to obtain than illegal drugs for the simple reason that the store clerk wants to see ID but the drug dealer doesn't. People might go into drug withdrawals because they cannot afford heroin and cocaine, but not because they don't know where to find them. The War on Drugs has been a total failure in this regard, just like alcohol Prohibition was a total failure. A total failure unless, of course, your goal was to expand the police powers of government, in which case it has been quite successful.