It's been said of the stubborn Bourbon kings of France that: "They learned nothing, and they forgot nothing." As a result of their obtuse blindness to reality, France no longer has kings.
This week their majesties in the U.S. House of Representatives, by a wide margin, seemed to have forgotten something important when they voted to ban Internet gambling by Americans. This moralistic action has about the same force as spitting into a hurricane. It also ignores the ugly lessons produced by the disastrous national prohibition of alcoholic beverages in the U.S. (1920-1933).
Prohibition was before my time, but this so-called "noble experiment," was touted by its backers as the solution to reduce crime and corruption, solve social problems, lower the tax burden created by prisons and poorhouses, and improve health and hygiene in America. This ambitiously wrongheaded experiment clearly failed miserably on all counts. Alcohol became more dangerous to consume; organized crime was born; the court and prison systems were overloaded; and corruption of police and public officials was rampant. (Sounds like the infamous, failed "war on drugs," doesn't it?)
Oblivious of history, the technical power and reach of the Internet -- and of human nature -- our brilliant lawmakers took it upon themselves to make it illegal for any credit card company, or other financial institution, to allow payment to any Internet betting site. There are exceptions - betting on horse races is allowed. Net betting on 28 state lotteries is also allowed. Apparently, in the view of Congress, some gambling is okay, but personal Internet gambling isn't. (You can bet all those campaign contributions from Atlantic City and Las Vegas casinos influenced the House. Their motto: "Keep American gambling American!")
There's an offshore angle to all this. Most of the best betting web sites are based in European or Caribbean tax havens such as the Isle of Man and Gibraltar. U.S. government pressure already has blocked credit card use for some gambling sites. In Belize 80 people lost their Net gambling jobs when the IRS attempted to freeze the U.S. owners' funds. The Belize Court refused the freeze and the owners took their cash and ran.
The U.S. anti-Net gambling push has had even greater impact in the tiny (pop 68,000) island nation of Antigua & Barbuda. Once 3000 people worked for the island's offshore Net gambling industry, and now less than 1000 still have jobs. So Antigua sued the U.S. and won an interim ruling from the World Trade Organization that the U.S. law criminalizing online gambling must be struck down as counter to international treaties
I am no advocate of gambling per se -- but I am an advocate of personal liberty, including the right to spend one's money as one pleases. In this case the U.S. government has no right to be everybody's morals nanny.
The fact is that about half of the millions of online gamblers are U.S. citizens. They're not going to be blocked from taking a chance on winning from this billion dollar jackpot.
As one observer notes: "America's various attempts at prohibiting sinful behavior have bred corruption, organized crime, black markets and significant erosion of our civil liberties. The story's no different with gambling."
That's the way that it looks from here,BOB BAUMAN,
Editor: THE SOVEREIGN SOCIETY OFFSHORE A-LETTER
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