Jack Kervorkian, a champion of personal freedom who helped people die the way they wanted to die, died two days ago of natural causes. John Delaney, an entrepeneur who ran an online current events betting site (www.intrade.com), died last week on the top of Mount Everest. Both of these men made careers out of helping people engage in harmless activities which were nonetheless illegal or legally restricted in the U.S. I hope that in my lifetime, both euthanasia and online betting will be declared legal. Both are activities that I might at some point want to engage in (I already do want to bet online), and I am bothered that the government wants to get in my way.
I am, however, more bothered by the legal obstructions to online gambling than by the illegality of suicide. Besides the fact that I am much more inclined towards gambling than assisted suicide, another key reason is that online gambling, unlike suicide, is an activity that I’d like to use to enhance my life on a continuous basis, from my own home in the U.S. If I were ever to decide I wanted a doctor to help me die peacefully, I’d just take a trip to the Netherlands and work with a doctor there (it would be somewhat of an inconvenience, but it could certainly be done).
Any law which bans one-off activities like suicide can be skirted through the marketplace of nations. (In order to take advantage of this marketplace, a person needs to have enough money for a plane ticket, and to live in a country that allows its citizens to travel abroad – which is just about everywhere.) A law, on the other hand, which bans lifestyle choices such as gambling, is truly oppressive.
In addition to euthenasia laws, other laws that can be rendered almost irrelevant through travel are laws banning certain types of surgery, laws banning abortion (although this one is time sensitive so it can’t always be gotten around quite as conveniently), laws restricting banking secrecy (you actually don’t even need to travel to take advantage of these I believe), laws banning torture by government (“extraordinary rendition” is the way to get around this), etc.
Online gambling on current events is of course not in this category, and it is something I really wish were unequivocally legal – the legality/convenience of online betting is one of the few political issues that are actually relevant to my day-to-day happiness (the other big one being taxes; almost all other political issues of today are not very relevant at all to my happiness level in concrete terms, i.e. they are only relevant to me insofar as it feels good to be subject to laws which conform to my ideology). However, the amazing thing to me is that, not only do other people not seem to care enough about this issue to pressure politicians to make it legal to operate online gambling sites (which is clearly illegal), the government doesn’t even bother to tell people whether the use of online gambling sites is legal or not! Delaney, the operator of the betting site who just died, asked the U.S. government whether it was legal or not, and apparently they simply ignored him! Barney Frank wrote a bill to clarify and loosen up laws around online gambling, and it just fizzled. If the stock market were banned, people would go crazy. People argue all day long about predictions about the future (much more than they argue about future stock prices) — why aren’t they bothered that they aren’t free to put there money where there mouth is on Intrade?
It is a shame that American state governments are opening up ever more gambling venues of the kind that are disproportionately used by poor people and by people who make irrational financial decisions (eg. slot machines and lotteries), when sites like Intrade remain (possibly) illegal. I am presuming that most Intrade users are savvier than most slotts players.
I suspect prediction markets aren’t clearly legal yet because there simply aren’t enough predication market website users (or people who desire to be users) to constitute a significant interest group. I suspect we are in a lag period between the advent of prediction markets and a time when many people will want to use them. Online gambling still seems scary to most people. In the early days of Amazon and eBay, I believe these sites were underused because people had security concerns about spending money by entering numbers and text in on a computer. And going back several decades, I believe there was a lag between credit card availability and widespread use. My theory is that people are wary about taking advantage of new ways of moving money around. And the pubic is taking an especially long time in getting its collective head around prediction markets for two reasons: 1) prediction markets are more complicated than credit cards or Amazon, and 2) People hesitate to use prediction markets because on the one hand, these markets are linked to the somewhat taboo activity of gambling and they therefore generate fear, but on the other hand, this fear doesn’t translate into the gambler’s thrill experienced in a casino floor when money is won or lost in minutes.
I’m not sure that most patrons of existing casinos are making irrational decisions. If you were to poll 100 people who were just arriving home after going to one of those casinos, how many do you think would say they wish they hadn’t gone? I’d guess less than half. Is there a better test for whether activity is irrational than that (which we’d be willing to apply across the board to determine which activities should be illegal)?
On your 2nd paragraph, I’d add one reason, which is that Intrade users are forced to use very old (and inconvenient) ways of moving money around, e.g. mailing checks to Ireland, because U.S. banks do not cooperate with Intrade. As long as that is true, Intrade will not be able to really take off I bet.
I know you are a libertarian and would like to protect the rights of people to make irrational decisions (I even suspect that little in the predatory lending economy bothers you). But beyond our broader political disagreement, I think I haven’t made my point about lotteries and casinos clear. When I say lottery and casinos are used disproportionately by people who make irrational decisions, I don’t mean irrational people necessarily make up more than half of the users (although in the case of lottery, I do suspect the majority of ticket buyers are irrational). I don’t like your test because I can imagine 30% of slot machine users are people I would consider highly irrational, getting themselves into serious financial trouble by using slots. I don’t necessarily want the government to intervene, although arguments for protecting sizable minorities of very irrational people through regulation is sometimes persuasive to me (e.g. the case in which a tall, view-obstructing railing was built on the Golden Gate Bridge in order to protect the minority of people who commit suicide impulsively).
Given that you are forced to live in a world that is not dominated by libertarians, do you agree that it is better for government to protect lottery ticket buyers from themselves than to protect Intrade users from themselves (on principle, not just because you are a potential Intrade user)?
Of the 30% of people who are getting themselves into trouble according to you, what % would say that they regret what they are doing? Even if you say what they are doing is getting them into trouble, they may not be acting irrationally in the usual sense of the word. If an investment banker decides to go off the grid and live in the Appalachian mountains for several years, would you forbid him from doing that because he is seriously damaging his financial position? You must be willing to consider a person’s actual stated belief about whether he is happy with his actions, not just its affect on his bank account, when you decide whether he is acting irrationally.
I agree with your 2nd statement because it is in an objective sense probably more constructive behavior to bet on intrade than gamble on slots (but i still wouldn’t say the latter is irrational).
The golden gate bridge example passes my test: of the people who jump from the golden gate bridge but find themselves landing in a pile of nerf footballs at the bottom, i bet most would say they are happy they landed in the footballs and wish they hadn’t jumped in the first place.