State-run lotteries continue and flourish while our Evangelical friends oppose them wherever they attempt to spread, usually without success. No matter how much hard evidence they marshal showing empirical links between lotteries and organized crime, or between lotteries and the spread of compulsive gambling disorders, they are usually dismissed as out-of-hand “wacko fundamentalists.”
There’s an interesting parallel here to the early days of the pro-life movement. Some of you may recall that for the first few years after Roe opposition to abortion was dismissed from public debate as merely “a Roman Catholic issue.” This became impossible in the 1980’s when, through the efforts of Evangelical leaders like James Dobson and Dr. Francis Schaeffer, large numbers of non-Catholic Christians joined the movement as well. I suggest that we Catholics return the favor now by joining the growing outcry against state lotteries and the epidemic of industrialized gambling-swindles which they bring in their wake.
But what about education, by the way? Can’t we at least say that the lotteries are swindling people for a good cause? Well, here I can only note that most Christians do not believe that “lack of funding” is what chiefly ails our educational system. We’ve been throwing money at the current system for years and have watched it wax worse and worse in response. No nation on earth spends so much money on education to so little effect. Throwing money at education is like the absentee corporate Dad who throws money at an unhappy son or daughter instead of changing his own lifestyle to meet their needs.
No, the answer to the problem of American education, like the problem it proposes to address, is going to have to be a spiritual answer. And those kinds of answers can’t be bought. That, theologically speaking, would be the sin of simony.
Oh, and by the way, the latest SAT scores for our state have just been released again, which is what prompted me to write this particular column today. It’s ten years and over 7.9 billion dollars later, according to our lottery commission, and what do the numbers show?
We’re 49th on the list of 50. And the story was buried on page 39 of the paper.
But the lottery is more popular than ever.
State-run lotteries are foolish, wicked nonsense—and Catholics shouldn’t be ashamed to say so.
I realize, of course, that they’ve been completely mainstreamed by now. And that no one thinks twice about the subject these days. But a numbers racket is a numbers racket is a numbers racket, as far as I can see, and it’s a darn shame that no one is saying so anymore except our separated brethren across the fundamentalist tracks.
It is true, of course, that Evangelicals have traditionally objected to games of chance per se, and have insisted that any wager at all — from poker with the boys Friday night to ten bucks on the Redskins game — is itself intrinsically sinful. That position, obviously, has not found a place in Catholic teaching. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, for example, tells us that “Games of chance (card games, etc.) or wagers are not in themselves contrary to justice. They become morally unacceptable when they deprive someone of what is necessary to provide for his needs or those of others” (2413).
In other words, to blow a bit of one’s cash on a round of pinochle is no more or less foolish than to blow the same amount on a ticket to Six Flags instead. But while our Evangelical sisters and brothers may have been immoderate at times in their condemnation of this latest plague of bunco, their hearts are definitely in the right place. And most of their arguments against it are good as gold.
In my state of Georgia, for instance, the pretext for establishing a lottery was education; the state SAT scores had just been published and we all learned to our collective chagrin that ours ranked 49th on the list. Well, as every politician knows, the sacred word “education” is big powerful medicine with the electorate, even under much less alarming circumstances. When a re-election campaign is failing, when an important speech is foundering, when the indictment is on its way down from the DA’s office, our public officials can be infallibly relied upon to start invoking the word “education” at a really breathtaking pace.
What they can’t be relied upon to do (as they have proven so completely these past 30 years) is to actually fix education in America. So what do they do instead? They become snake-oil salesmen on behalf of education. A lottery — yeah, that’s the ticket! A lottery will produce billions of dollars for education out of thin air! Just like rabbits out of a hat. No tax increases, no tightening of the belt elsewhere — it’s just found money, that’s all. Then we, the politicians, after loudly shoveling this magical bonanza in education’s general direction, get to take credit for having “done something.” And you, the voters, get to feel like “something is being done.” And everybody goes home happy.
Who but a bunch of toothless, tongues-talking, hillbilly aborigines could possibly object to a beautiful scheme like that?
Alas, the trouble with all this unyielding logic is that the billions of dollars in question do not, in fact, come from out of thin air. They come directly out of the real wealth of our economy. Every dollar spent on these worthless tickets is a dollar that wasn’t spent on real goods at one of our state’s real businesses. It’s also a dollar that wasn’t taxed for education purposes — or for any other purposes, for that matter.
Sometimes it’s a dollar from out of a welfare check, a dollar that’s been moved around by these same politicians quite a bit already. Often it’s a borrowed dollar that will eventually be liquidated in a personal bankruptcy action, leaving our statesmen to soak us for it one more time as it vanishes in a corporate tax write-off. In short, the magical bonanza isn’t magical at all. It’s just another political shell game, and it only fools the customers who aren’t really paying attention.
Some of my conservative friends (apparently not the “compassionate” kind) laugh and call our state lottery “the Idiot Tax.” And of course, it is true that lotteries only work because even the most intelligent of us can’t actually comprehend the true significance of that little phrase: “Odds of winning: one in 78,321,987.” Lotteries are by far the most foolish form of gambling; a person improves his or her chances of success immeasurably simply by taking the same money to Las Vegas instead. But the lottery isn’t an idiot tax. It’s a desperation tax, a tax on hopelessness.
A disproportionate percentage of these tickets, you see, are bought by poor people; ignorant, oppressed people whose chances of escaping their plight really might, come to think of it, be greater with the lottery than by traditional methods (though still statistically zero, of course, either way). Hopeless debtors purchase another large block of them; harried insolvents drawing one last cash-advance off the sole remaining credit card that isn’t maxed-out already.
For these kinds of people, all attempts to deal with money rationally have failed; all that remains is fantasy. Then, in the crowning irony, the lottery itself responds in kind. Millions of lottery dollars are recycled by the state itself into elaborate ad campaigns fostering just this fantasy—the fantasy that the lottery is a good way to get money. The final result is a situation in which the very government charged with looking out for their interests has joined instead the long and ever-lengthening queue of those waiting for another good opportunity to fleece the poor.
Yes, it’s true (as all lottery apologists are quick to point out) that no one actually puts a gun to their head. Caveat emptor, as the old saying goes in Latin, or (in the words of an early laissez-faire philosopher) “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen 4:9). Ironically, this is the same cruel economic Darwinism that reduced most of the poor and debt-ridden to their current status in the first place. It’s the same logic that keeps our parasitical credit card banks in business, despite the fact that they are systematically reducing over half our population to a state of permanent indentured servitude. And it’s the same diseased thinking which has been, throughout the ages, the traditional comfort of the pimp, the pornographer, the drug-pusher. I need hardly mention that it is also flatly incompatible with Christianity.
