Better lobyists

Drugs are in fact banned for the public good (ostensibly).

And why aren't gambling advertisements "part of a free society"?

I'm all for being skeptical of the government and its (ab)use of power, but I must admit I struggle to find a good excuse to not ban gambling past "people should be allowed to ruin their own lives".

I don't necessarily disagree with your conclusion but I'd like to know how you arrived there. What makes gambling a part of free society but not gambling advertisements?

> No. Gambling is a part of a free society, just like drugs are.

How do you square the harm that gambling does to unrelated parties?

It's really easy to lose a lot of money super fast with gambling such that suddenly your entire family is dire straits (losing the house, facing bankruptcy, etc.) before the non-gamblers have any ability to react.

There is no logically consistent world in which “Gambling is a part of a free society” and “Gambling advertisements…Don’t let it happen”.

If you’re taking a libertarian, its part of a free society therefore we are helpless and must allow it view, then banning the speech around it completely contradicts this view.

The same argument could be made for alcohol, cigarettes, credit cards, luxury goods, lottery tickets, tattoos...

If you banned everything that some percent of the population could use to harm themselves, you might be disappointed by what's left.

So is sugar. Would you ban that? People have agency and choice

Index investing isn't really gambling in the generally understood sense though, you just buy the whole haystack (or at least a haystack that's big enough) and ride it.

There are countless activities that could be deemed "not socially valuable". That is far too broad and subjective a metric to determine whether something should be banned.

There are some forms of gambling that may arguably be a social good. For example, car insurance is a wager by the car insurance company that a driver won't get in a car accident during the coverage period. Commodity speculators may serve as a counterparty for farm insurance derivatives.

I’ve wondered if it could be possible to harness some of these "suboptimal" gambling behaviors into "socially good" gambling but I haven’t quite figured out how to do it. Maybe someone else here can do it.

Maybe. Day trading is silly.

I agree, but unfortunatley prohibition never works.

I would suggest restricting the aboslute crap out of it. make it really hard to get into.

If I read the graphs in [1] correctly it's more like 70% male in Massachusetts. In fantasy sports betting it's 60% male [2]

1: https://commonwealthbeacon.org/by-the-numbers/poll-indicates...

2: https://thefsga.org/industry-demographics/

Yes.

Legalized gambling with big enterprises running it and ads visible to most people, many of whom wouldn't usually gamble, should be orders of magnitude worse than informal networks. One may not get rid of the latter, but stopping the former has a very great value.

Interesting question! Depends on how strong is your desire to ban it. The humanity has a long history of banning things, including certain plants, certain thoughts (for example, religious beliefs), certain ideas, certain symbols, certain pictures, and even certain numbers.

I have a few ideas. Criminal groups are often broken by having a police infiltrate the group and collect the evidence. We could have police officers joining the gambling groups (the groups need to accept some people, so they have someone they can make bets with) and catching the perpetrators. I also don't think that - at least right now - gamblers use tor or sufficiently anonymous proxies, so it would be easy to get most of them by just observing network traffic. Also, significant money transfers between random private people are uncommon. You can find sets of people who often do transfers like this, and find the "gambler networks".