Gambling? Speculating? Investing? Betting!

Flaps over legalized gaming (a fancy term for gambling) are familiar to our fair shores. The Commonwealth has sort of split the difference on the issue, permitting, of course, the wildly popular poker machines to bing-bing-bing along, allowing a lottery to operate here, and, strictly in Tinian, jumping fully into the casino realm.

Guam, meanwhile, has become a Johnny come lately to the issue, and a flap is brewing over the prospect of some legalization of gaming.

The arguments usually run like so: Pro-gaming– “it’s good for the economy.” Anti-gaming– “gambling is immoral.”

There are, of course, other arguments. One charged leveled at lotteries is that they prey on the poor and simple minded folk who don’t understand the odds involved. This argument interests me, since nobody seems to object to people who are too dingy to buy lotto tickets from having a full fledged say at the ballot box. Such a say, collectively, will determine the course of public economic policy. In summary, they’re too stupid to buy a lotto ticket with their money, but so smart they can vote to steer government economic policy, and, with it, the financial future of my family and I? That’s like saying since Uncle Joe is too drunk to drive his car, he’s going to drive the school bus instead. Go figure.

Turning from the left side of the Bell Curve to the right, I know guys with advanced degrees in finance who will queue up in California when a big lotto jackpot is just begging to be won. The last time I crunched the numbers, I came up with a value of 52 cents per lotto ticket sold. In other words, you’re losing 48 cents of every dollar spent.
But, to some, 48 cents is a small price to pay for the hope–however faint–that you might wind up being a millionaire and can tell the boss to shove it, tell his wife she’s fat, tell yours she’s a grouch, and flee to Tahiti for an eternity of Wahines and rainbows. Come to think of it, 48 cents seems like a bargain, eh? I can’t even buy a postcard of a rainbow for a measly 48 cents, and never mind the Wahine angle.

Of course, gaming laws or not, the sophisticated set has fantastically powerful ways to gamble. You don’t have to go to the store to buy a lotto ticket, drive to the poker place, or take the trip to Tinian if you want the thrill of playing the odds. All you need is a computer, and you can be trading stocks, and bonds, and futures, and options, and options on futures, with the click of a key. You can easily–and I’m talking easily–wipe out 10 or 20 grand in a week if you’re an average Joe with a small portfolio. As far as futures and options go, the man on the street is, indeed, merely gambling when he enters the treacherous waters of speculative leverage. He’s betting against big, institutional players in the market. Gee–guess who usually loses? Last I read, the man on the street gets wiped out in futures trading on 85 percent of the trades.

When I hear the fur fly over gambling issues, then, I wish somebody would tell me exactly what gambling is. If it’s playing the odds with money, then Wall Street is the biggest casino of all. In locales where gambling is illegal, then, should it be against the law to trade securities through your on-line broker? Should Merrill Lynch be outlawed in some communities?
If not, why not?

Don’t look to me for any answers. I’m still trying to get the questions sorted out.