Categories
free trade & free markets regulation

Bet on Rigging the Games

casino, online gambling, knowledge, certainty

Is the Maryland Lottery and Gaming Control Agency’s cronyism really “a little too obvious,” as Reason magazine ironically argues?

Both the casino group’s model letter and the Maryland agency’s nearly identical letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission speak of “our grave concerns regarding the introduction of so-called ‘sport events’ contracts,” how citizens are being put “at risk” by enabling avoidance of state regulations, etc.

Casinos compete with online prediction markets. One way to compete is just to compete. If some of your casino customers are drifting to online betting, find ways to make the in-person experience more appealing. Improve advertising. Jigger the odds ever-so-slightly more in favor of players. Increase the dollar value of wins. Etc. We might call this the economic means of competition.

The other way to compete? Deploy the political means: cajole government to bludgeon competitors. Thus the American Gaming Association, which represents casinos, would like the federal government to do something to impede online prediction markets — the trading of contracts about what’s going to happen in sports and otherwise on platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket.

Sean Maloney, who heads the competing lobby group Coalition for Prediction Markets, explains how prediction-market betting differs from casino betting.

“[A casino] wins when you lose. A sportsbook will kick you off if you win too much. An exchange has no such incentive. It just takes a small fee, and two equally situated counterparties can trade. That’s why consumers prefer prediction markets.”

My prediction? Industry foes of market competition won’t be persuaded.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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John L. O’Sullivan

Government should have as little as possible to do with the general business and interests of the people. If it once undertake these functions as its rightful province of action, it is impossible to say to it “thus far shalt thou go, and no farther.” It will be impossible to confine it to the public interests of the commonwealth. It will be perpetually tampering with private interests, and sending forth seeds of corruption which will result in the demoralization of the society. Its domestic action should be confined to the administration of justice, for the protection of the natural equal rights of the citizen, and the preservation of social order.

From the introductory essay in the first issue of The United States Democratic Review (1837), presumably written by the magazine’s editor and co-founder, John L. O’Sullivan, the man who coined the term “Manifest Destiny” eight years later. Image: O’Sullivan as he appeared, in sketch, on the cover of Harper’s Weekly in November 1874.

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Today

“Malaise”

On July 15, 1976, Jimmy Carter accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party to run for the presidency.

Three years later, as president, he gave his infamous “malaise” speech, in which he focused on energy but did not mention the one thing that actually helped turn the 1970s’ energy crisis around: the phased deregulation of oil prices that had started three months earlier, under his own directive. Instead of touting this deregulatory effort, Carter did the politic thing, promising a number of new government programs while extensively grinding a “crisis of confidence” message and vaguely speaking of a spiritual challenge.

The deregulation was startlingly effective, in the long run — though the immediate effect was a rocketing of prices. These high prices presented profit opportunities, and (lo and behold!) domestic production greatly increased, allowing for many, many years of lower prices. Those high prices would have worked better as market signals had not Carter and Congress also established “windfall profits” taxes, to take away those temporary gains to existing business.

Had Carter deregulated prices earlier, he would probably have been re-elected president. Had he emphasized deregulation, he probably would have beat back Ronald Reagan’s free market rhetoric — with actual action.

The price controls had been put in place earlier in the decade by the Republican president at the time, Richard M. Nixon, with the great help of his aides Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies partisanship too much government

Socialists to Seize Power?

socialism, Democratic Party, prison, authoritarianism, totalitarianism

Evan Barker isn’t surprised. 

“The democratic socialist surge of the past several weeks has stunned the nation,” this former Democratic operative wrote last week. “From left to right and everywhere in between, people are asking: How did we get here? What does it mean? And will the Democratic Party survive it? The prevailing reaction has been shock.”

She’s not shocked, though, because for half a decade she had worked for “a slew of progressive candidates” teaching “DSA-aligned staffers how to build a money machine for the left; coached progressive politicians on how to speak to donors; and collaborated with billionaires to create a robust fundraising network.” 

But after the big loss for Kamala “Salad Slinger” Harris and Tim “Cringe” Walz, Barker left the party. And wrote a book, Nothing Left, regaling us with how she became disillusioned with “a leadership class” that had drifted “further and further from the working-class Americans they purportedly represented.”

Barker’s not alone. Others in the rah-rah crowd for an older Democratic Party have also expressed their chagrin. On the First of July, well-known “liberal” journalist Jonathan Chait published in The Atlantic “There’s Nothing Democratic About These Socialists.”

Noting that the Democratic Socialists of America despise the Democratic Party, with many of DSA’s stalwarts veering off into communist advocacy without much nudging, the question becomes why Democrats with some sense don’t come to their alleged senses.

Chait observes that Michael Harrington, the socialist founder of DSA, placed into its bylaws “the expulsion of members who were ‘under the discipline of any self-defined democratic-centralist organization,’ a slightly jargonish way of describing communists.”

Yet, the Democratic Party isn’t as moderate as Harrington!

Truth is, “DSA supporters see internal division not as a risk but as a historic opportunity to seize power.”

And the “means of production.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Boccaccio

Le cose mal fatte e di gran tempo passate son
più agevoli a riprendere che ad emendare.

Wrongs committed in the distant past are far easier to condemn than to rectify.

Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (c. 1350), “Second Day,” Fifth Story (tr. G. H. McWilliam).

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Today

“Stormed!”

On July 14, 1789, Paris citizens stormed the Bastille.

The word “storm” in its various forms is almost invariably paired with “Bastille” in discussions of the event. It is one of the great clichés of historical chitchat.

On the same date nine years later, in America, the Sedition Act was signed into law, prohibiting the writing, publishing, or speaking false or malicious statements about the United States government.

The passage of this repressive law spurred the formation of the first opposition party in the United States, with Thomas Jefferson as its leader and figurehead.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights ideological culture

DEI“A” Directive Denied

DEI, first amendment, free speech, compelled speech, freedom, academia

Daymon Johnson has been fighting to speak freely.

A professor at Bakersfield College, a community college in California, Johnson has for years been bucking a mandate that he parrot the state’s “DEI” and “anti-racist” ideology — well, DEIA now: “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” — lest he face disciplinary action or receive the boot.

Community colleges, remember, are creations of the state, and Professor Johnson was being forced, by state directive, to mouth specific bureaucratic verbiage as if he were a mere functionary under a central planning board.

Alan Gura, the Institute for Free Speech’s lead counsel in the case, observed that Johnson’s fight has been for the First Amendment right to speak his mind, which American professors should be able to take for granted.

The settlement with Kern Community College District includes payment of $150,000 for attorneys’ fees. But it’s not perfect.

A permanent injunction against harassing Johnson for speech “in the classroom, in his scholarship, or as a private citizen” covers only five years. Government defendants “typically resist injunctions that are open forever,” making time limits in such settlements common, Gura explained. And five years “more than covers Johnson’s anticipated remaining time” at the school.

Nor does the decision address “whether the laws were constitutional as applied to anyone else.” But, said Gura, “the legal principles adopted by the court are persuasive authority that could lead to relief for other professors. . . .

“It’s easy for Sacramento officials to pass insane regulations . . . in their academic fantasy woke universe. . . . Something else entirely for local districts to try to defend them in a real courtroom where the First Amendment matters.”

So this imperfect ruling paves the way for further vindications.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Edward Dutton

All of the ideologies associated with Wokeness can be regard as “spiteful.” They promote fitness-reducing behavior and evolutionary mismatch. Advocates of multiculturalism imply that Europeans should feel guilty for being European and should accept mass immigration of non-Europeans into their countries. This clearly damages the genetic interests of Europeans, because it causes them to become a smaller and smaller group, controlling less and less land. It undermines social trust, because people tend to trust those who are genetically similar to themselves, resulting in people becoming increasingly isolated, friendless, and unhappy. This is worsened by the ethnic conflict that has been shown to almost inevitably occur in multiracial societies. It creates an evolutionary mismatch, as we are evolved to be with people who are genetically similar to ourselves, as evidenced in numerous studies that have shown that we cooperate more, prefer to be around, and are more trusting with people who are genetically similar to ourselves, including members of our own ethnic group and race.

Edward Dutton, Spiteful Mutants (2022), pp. 61–62.
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Today

The Watergate Tapes

On July 13, 1973, the minority (Republican) counsel on the Senate Watergate investigative committee, Donald Sanders, asked Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield if he knew of any recordings made in the Nixon White House, and Butterfield responded, “everything was taped” at least while Nixon was in attendance, and that “there was not so much as a hint that something should not be taped.”

This revelation of the Nixon Tapes transformed the Watergate scandal into a major legal (as well as political) event; with the court-forced disclosure of the tapes, it proved to be one of the most striking examples of “government transparency” in modern times.

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Update

The Fourth UFO Tranche

The latest batch of disclosed UFO documents has been released on war dot gov. In the first SIGN report, one hundred sightings were recorded and appraised, from July 1947 to January 1948. The persistent data of the most peculiar incidents were not easily explained:

This report from Air Materiel Command HQ, dated “23 APR 1948,” shows that eight decades ago the American military was taking the UFO subject seriously. The report shows military personnel and hired academics debating and tabulating witnesses’ reports and puzzling over the mysterious data with no small amount of seriousness.

On the Fourth of July a dozen UFO sightings were reported in the Pacific Northwest, and duly tabulated. Here are three from Oregon:

Note that these were reported 20 days before the “flying saucer” craze began further north, near Mount Rainier, in the most famous UFO sighting of all time (because much was made of it at the time; because we got the term “flying saucer” from a misunderstanding in the reportage; and because the event is often cited). Nineteen forty-seven was a busy year for UFO sightings, and the Kenneth Arnold observation and report of nine wobbly-but-super-fast craft while flying over the Cascades in Washington State made the national new. Here it is reported merely as sighting no. 17:

Towards the end of the report a determination on one incident was made that it was, indeed, a hoax. Appended to the report is a long article on “The Biology of the Flying Saucer,” which is not what you might suspect from the title.

There is a great deal more of interest in this fourth “tranche” of de-classified UFO documents, as well as a lot of dubious minor stuff that does not bear very much attention.

This is how governments disclose secrets?

Apparently.