I think the intuition is that in a free society, a person should be free to make the choices they wish provided it doesn't interfere with another person's rights or safety. It's one thing being able to do whatever drugs you want, it's another thing to get behind the wheel of a car while doing so. Although, I agree it isn't black and white as to where the lines are on many things so there clearly needs to be regulation for things which have the potential to cause harm.

When it comes to informing people, yes the public should be educated on what the risks are regarding the choices they make but that is quite different to mandating how they spend their money. To give an example, the risk of consuming up to say two bottles of wine a week is negligible but behind that the risk to the person and society at large increases exponentially. If a government were to impose some type of quota system where its citizens were precluded from purchasing beyond X amount of alcohol a week, they would be laughed out of office. The only difference seems to be the attitude of the general public to gambling when compared to alcohol.

That is actively in place in the UK. If a bartender keeps on serving someone that is clearly too drunk, and some mishap happens as a direct result, the pub could lose their license. There are also minimum pricing laws on alcohol, we've removed all 'happy hour' promotions, and heavier taxes in order to pay for the societal harm (mostly health) that alcohol causes. That some people perceive an impingement on their absolute freedom to gamble as much as they want is not a reason to try to protect the most vulnerable in our society from predatory behaviour by, say, alcohol, tobacco or gambling companies.

More years ago than I care to reveal, I took a summer job in a bar. I had already replaced one bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream on the gantry and was looking to put another one up, all consumed by one customer. I asked the owner if I should keep on serving him. He said the customer was ok, presumably not wanting hassle as we were shutting in a few minutes.

So after closing up, we went outside to find said customer vomiting copiously over the owner's high end car


btw back on topic - bar staff don't ask customers if they can afford to buy drink and I would guess that there is just as much damage done by people spending "rent money" on drink as gambling.

That isn't an argument not to regulate gambling, it's an argument to regulate drinking further than we already do.

At least you now seem to realise that this approach to gambling is unique.

Quick bump here as it was the last post from the previous page.
Not sure if it's against the rules but since we keep discussing drunk people instead of what we can/should do about our actual situation seems relevant to bump it up.

It's unique in the sense that it's trying to apply the general principles of harm reduction to the specifics of the world of gambling, but the approach of harm reduction by creating barriers to entry is not exactly unique. Do they do affordability checks on, say, guns in the USA? I don't know, but they could, there's no particular reason why they shouldn't, unless you count 'muh freedom' as a good reason

but it isn't even doing a poor job of that.

Single mothers buying lottery scratchcards and people on benefits losing all their disposable income online will probably fly under the radar. I said above I don't object to credit checks to ID people in financial difficulty. And then source of funds checks apply to people betting larger amounts. So we are left with people who are spending their own money on what they choose and don't appear to be in financial difficulty.

The other problem is that businesses that have over the years been proven to ignore rules and act in an entirely self interested manner are being empowered to harvest extremely detailed financial information. The info that tells the business exactly how much the customer can "afford" to lose. And when he hasn't lost that amount, the promos and emails will be sent out. The staff employed and the data protection controls of these businesses are unlikely to meet the standards of fincos that normally hold this kind of info. And when the customer stops being a customer, or the business closes down, what happens to the detailed profiles of customers?

The result of this iniative will be mostly to deprive many people of a perfectly affordable recreational activity, put many others at increase of fraud due to their info being released, minimally reduce the pool of problem gamblers online and totally ignore damaging spending by low income gamblers in B&M outlets.

The system could probably stand to improve significantly.

But better they do a bad job than no job at all.

So a few people don't get to gamble as much as they would have liked, because we're not very good at the instrument, which is blunt at best. That is a harm I'm happy to trade off if it means even a handful of families are saved from bankruptcy by gambling addiction and don't live on the streets. It doesn't matter that it doesn't save every family from that ill, just that we save some. All these addictions come with their particular social harms, but if you don't place a cap on how much people can lose, they'll lose everything. That's a life destroyed, possibly more than one, including innocent victims who didn't ask their dad or husband to take their rent money down the bookies, would have preferred he come home straight from work and spend time with them, which maybe he does if the machines at the bookies tells him he's hit his limit for the week, or something. I don't think the freedom of even a larger number of well-off gamblers to have what to them is a little jolly is a more important freedom than the freedom to avoid addiction destroying lives.

Of course we should count freedom as a good reason. It's the best reason.

It is the end of high stakes in casinos due to the white paper from someone in Parliament who is just anti-gambling. Thus the rise in home games.

Totalitarian people like Wazz love to **** on everything they don't like other people doing and treating personal freedom like it doesn't matter because "social harm".

Yup, there will always be naive people.

"And then they come to get you next". The way of the world.

I'm literally a professional gambler. It's in my interests for people to gamble more and higher. I love drinking too. I'm not trying to tell people what they can and can't do, I'm not the sin police, I'm simply arguing that some freedoms are not worth the price, i.e. the freedom for everyone to gamble wantonly comes at the expense of families made destitute. If you think that the option to gamble as much money as you want is more important than the financial future of a family, or even 1/10th of a family, then I don't know, man. Freedom is not free.

Canadian provinces have pretty varied stances.

Why not ban alcohol too? Have you any idea how many deaths are caused to alcohol use, along with many family problems?

its such a nuanced subject it makes it almost impossible to police correctly?

What if the person in question has no children? no family?

do they take into account cost of living for that individual?

What if they smoke? surely they are allowed to gamble more because they will die sooner?

But you do want the government to act as the sin police. In this particular case that might well be a good thing in some utilitarian sense (I don’t think these particular proposed restrictions will do much good fwiw). There’s definitely a slippery slope though, it’s pretty easy to justify banning all kinds of things based on very similar reasoning. Ultimately I just think it’s better in the long run for people to make their own decisions. I accept that there are very legitimate arguments against that though.

Yes, I've got some idea. I'm trying to propose solutions that don't involve banning things.

If alcohol were invented today, it would very likely be banned as a Class A drug. That mostly just shows how incoherent our drug policy is though.

I want the government to do one of their main jobs: protection. I want them to protect us from shady and predatory corporations who want us addicted to their product, I want them to protect us from the propaganda that announces that it's an expression of your freedom to be addicted to their product. I want my dad to have spent less time at the bottom of his bottle of whiskey.

I have no problems with restrictions on propaganda/advertising from shady corporations where it is outright false. Eg I certainly don’t think cigarette companies should be allowed to claim that smoking has health benefits, as they used to claim.

The obvious solution here is to exempt anyone who has net withdrawals from an account. If they can just commit to this one caveat then people who gamble responsibly/profitably can continue unaffected.

The question is whether there's some nefarious motive for them just blanket making it difficult for everyone, whether they're doing it for behavioural science reasons, or it's just incompetence that no-one's realised how easy it could be to track the right things. Like an expanded version of Hanlon's Razor. And I don't really think the actual answer is very interesting

Where and when did people get this incredibly strange idea that the government's job is to protect them from themselves? That's such a 21st century sentiment that has no basis in history.

Its ironic that you would have to tell the British that the political theorists that came with the invaluable idea of Liberalism intended the state as an entity with a monopoly on violence, that exists merelely to protect individuals from other individuals. That's it. That's the sole purpose of the state.
Every step beyond that would be classified as an illiberal infringement on Human freedom.

We've come a long way since then unfortunately.


Let us not forget what Tocqueville wrote almost 200 years ago. It aged really really well: