NYT Op-Ed bashing anti-poker legislation

[kleinstadt1]

It's mainly about how the GOP is [censored] things up, but it does point to the Frist bill as a good example. Thursday's paper. I'd post the entire article but I don't know if it's against 2p2 policy (it's a pay section of the website). Author plays online and mentions Party banning US players.

"The GOP's Bad Bet" by Charles Murray

[teddyFBI]

post it here please

or link.

[Blizzardbaum]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/opinion/19murray.html

I assume this is the same Charles Murray that co-authored "The Bell Curve." I think its kind of funny he plays internet poker.

[CCx]

LAST week President Bush signed a law that will try to impede online gambling by prohibiting American banks from transferring money to gambling sites. Most Americans probably didn’t notice or care, but it may do significant political damage to the Republicans this fall and long-term damage to Americans’ respect for the law.

So, a month before a major election, the Republicans have allied themselves with a scattering of voters who are upset by online gambling and have outraged the millions who love it. Furthermore, judging from many hours of online chat with Internet poker players, I am willing to bet (if you’ll pardon the expression) that the outraged millions are disproportionately electricians, insurance agents, police officers, mid-level managers, truck drivers, small-business owners — that is, disproportionately Republicans and Reagan Democrats.

In the short term, this law all by itself could add a few more Democratic Congressional seats in the fall elections. We are talking about a lot of people (an estimated 23 million Americans gamble online) who are angry enough to vote on the basis of this one issue, and they blame Republicans.

In the long term, something more ominous is at work. If a free society is to work, the vast majority of citizens must reflexively obey the law not because they fear punishment, but because they accept that the rule of law makes society possible. That reflexive law-abidingness is reinforced when the laws are limited to core objectives that enjoy consensus support, even though people may disagree on means.

Thus society is weakened every time a law is passed that large numbers of reasonable, responsible citizens think is stupid. Such laws invite good citizens to choose knowingly to break the law, confident that they are doing nothing morally wrong.

The reaction to Prohibition, the 20th century’s stupidest law, is the archetypal case. But the radical expansion of government throughout the last century has created many more.

For example, all employers are confronted with rules and regulations from Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that they regard with contempt — not because they cut into profits, but because they are, simply, stupid. They impede employers yet provide no collateral social benefit. And so employers treat the stupid regulations as obstructions to be fudged or ignored. When they have to comply, they do not see compliance as the right thing to do, but as placating an agency that will hurt them otherwise.

The same thing applies to lesser degrees to all of us who find ourselves doing things that we know are pointless (think of various aspects of tax law) only because we fear attracting a bureaucracy’s attention. For millions of Americans, our day-to-day relationship with government is increasingly like paying protection to the Mafia — keeping it off our backs while we get on with our lives.

The temptation for good citizens to ignore a stupid law is encouraged when it is unenforceable. In this, the attempt to ban Internet gambling is exemplary. One of the four sites where I play poker has blocked United States customers because of the law, but the other three are functioning as usual and are confident that they can continue to do so. They are not in America, and it is absurdly easy to devise ways of transferring money from American bank accounts to institutions abroad and thence to gambling sites.

And so the federal government once again has acted in a way that will fail to achieve its objective while alienating large numbers of citizens who see themselves as having done nothing wrong. The libertarian part of me is heartened by this, hoping that a new political coalition will start to return government to its proper functions. But the civic-minded part of me is apprehensive. Reflexive loyalty to the rule of law is an indispensable cultural asset. The more honest citizens who take for granted that they are breaking the law, the more their loyalty to the law, and to the government that creates it, is eroded.

[thermopyla]

what is most interesting is that this comes from the American Enterprise Institute and very conservative think tank. Amy Calistri has her own op-ed piece on this article.
http://www.pokernews.com/news/2006/1...ash-begins.htm

[danzasmack]

That article you pasted is very disappointing. He basically says "they're all gonna be angry" but then that not a lot of people even realized what happened.

The part that got me though was that the author himself plays on 4 sites. It'd be one thing if this was some random person but it really seems like whoever wrote this is stating what they want to believe.

[captZEEbo]

"23M americans gamble online", sounds like way too much. I'd like to see sources of the estimate.

[mikechops]

I think he made a pretty good case explaining why people who don't gamble online should give a damn. And these people need to be convinced before this can be overturned.

[Blizzardbaum]

[ QUOTE ]
That article you pasted is very disappointing. He basically says "they're all gonna be angry" but then that not a lot of people even realized what happened.

The part that got me though was that the author himself plays on 4 sites. It'd be one thing if this was some random person but it really seems like whoever wrote this is stating what they want to believe.

[/ QUOTE ]

By far the most interesting part of this op-ed is the author's identity. Charles Murray is the co-author of "The Bell Curve," which far and away the most contraversial non-fiction book written in the last 50 years. Based on his copious research of socioeconomic behavioral trends, he concluded that the #1 factor correlating with everything from income to one's likelihood to commit a crime to one's likelihood to get in a car accident is the intelligence quotient. Because of the obvious inference from his conclusions, he became a lightning rod.

I'm not sure this is the guy we want representing the poker community in the NYT. 50% of America is convinced he's a white supremacist.

[60Vauban]

23 million counting fantasy football, horseracing, lottery etc. Then again, Murray's been accused of messing up statistics previously (supra)