Going back to our roots, there is simply nothing in our Constitution that allows the federal government to pre-empt any state from governing gambling within its own boundaries. (As has been asked before in this series – show of hands – how many of you believe that the federal government has all of the answers?) In addition, all studies, as well as common sense, show that fans who bet on a sports event are more engaged if they have placed a bet on the outcome. As a result, betting is rampant and normal virtually everywhere, and illegal betting has pushed tens of billions of dollars into the shadow economy – all of which is uncontrolled and untaxed. So bringing gambling back under the law would take away lots of money from the criminal element, provide tax money for local governments, and allow investigators the heightened ability to detect fraud in sports. Thus Liberty in allowing adults to engage in legal gambling would once again provide greater benefits to society at large than government restrictions and prohibitions.
Judge Jim Gray (Ret.)
2012 Libertarian candidate for Vice President,
along with Governor Gary Johnson as the candidate for President
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As I said in the first sentence of the introduction of my book on judging*, “the best decision I ever made in my life was choosing my parents.” And, of course, I have been the beneficiary of that so-called choice ever since. Obviously, I could have been born to a single mother with AIDS in Nigeria. But I believe that my good fortune has given me the moral obligation to help those people who did not “choose” quite so well. So all of this gets me around to one of my favorite reminders, which is “Who says life is fair?” My children were raised on that saying (just ask them!). Socrates was forced to drink hemlock. Tchaikovsky was forced to commit suicide when it was discovered publicly that he was gay. Many more innocent men, women and children are also randomly killed and otherwise harmed by terrorists, hurricanes, earthquakes or diseases. Sometimes a baseball player hits a sharp line drive that is caught for an out, and other times he duffs one that falls for a double. No, life simply is not always fair.
The whole issue of the minimum wage brings in a conundrum: we see people working for wages that would not provide enough revenue to pay for an apartment, and think it wrong. But we also see that the more laws we pass to rectify that situation, the deeper the problems become. So what’s to be done? The answer is to listen to Dr. Milton Friedman, who said that we should judge programs by their results instead of their intentions. In that regard, the fact is that when the government mandates that workers’ wages be increased, it obviously makes that labor more expensive. And the result of that is for many employers to lay off some employees and replace them by automation (think self check-out machines at stores like Home Depot and self-ordering kiosks at fast food stores like McDonald’s). For example, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that nationally increasing the minimum wages even to the level of $10.10 per hour would cause 500,000 workers to lose their jobs. And for the employees that remain, employers will also try to reduce their number of hours of work – particularly for overtime. As a result, minimum wage laws actually result in victories for robots and defeats for most employees. (Sorry, the callous fact is that in today’s world some workers are simply not worth $10.10 per hour.) And these are only just some of the problems that result. Thus, almost literally, the only good thing that results from minimum wage laws is that legislators get to feel better about themselves.
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