Hooray for Lotteries!

Here in South Carolina, we have the “South Carolina Education Lottery,” so named because a portion of the proceeds goes to fund higher education in the state. At the local JUCO, for example, with the lottery scholarship, tuition for a full-time student is around 700 dollars per semester. I just finished a Master’s degree, where I had the distinct privilege of paying about $2500 per class, so that’s pretty cheap.

The Nature Boy says "Who needs formula?"

It is, of course, fashionable to decry lotteries as taxes on the poor and the stupid; and such they are. But that’s what makes the lottery such a fantastic and positive redistributionist scheme.

The vast majority of players are taken from the dependent classes, many of whom receive a great deal of government support ranging from food stamps to housing assistance and health insurance.

The lottery is their chance to “give back,” to use a term popular among those who conflate success with some sort of nefarious theft. They are not giving back to the disadvantaged masses, to be sure. Rather, they are giving back to the middle class, from whose labor their existence is legally, if immorally wrested.

In essence, they are funding their own future, as the lottery is surely the only way you could fool the poor into chipping in a little bit of assistance to help pay for the college education of the next generation of workers. It is an investment in their own future, as they help defray the educational costs of those who will one day enter the workforce and be saddled with the burdens imposed by the welfare state.

So I say, up with the Lottery!

I don't really endorse the lottery system so heartily. As a publicly run system, it is a disaster. I find it tragic that so many squander what little means of support they have in pursuit of the phantom dream of striking it rich. But the lottery-education connection is instructive, because, as a microcosm of a poorly-conceived government program, it reveals much about the psyche of the architects of such programs; and what most of us really, instinctively think about wealth redistribution.

Advocates of redistribution may obfuscate the issue by vilifying “the rich,” and justify their theft with such spurious arguments as “they don't need it.” But ultimately, when we broaden the scope of the redistributionist policy in question, we find that most people begin to feel a sense of revulsion, because of what the idea truly entails.

It's not just stealing from the rich to give to the poor, or stealing from the poor to give to the rich that's wrong; it's stealing. We know this instinctively, but many tend to be apathetic, at best, until they become the victim of the theft. But it is this theft, and the arbitrary and unwilling transfer of goods between individuals that forms the basis of modern government; it is both the raison d'etre and the modus operandi of the state.

And the state-run lottery system reveals many of the disgusting characteristics of this system that we find so repulsive.

We see the fraudulent ways it justifies and then enacts its collection and expenditure of money; the hypocrisy of banning raffles, online poker, and sports betting, while running the largest gambling operation in the world. And most of all, the lottery underscores the obvious truth that underlies everything else: The State does not care about you. You are a number, an entry in an accounting book. Nothing more. For all the high-minded platitudes that politicians like to spew about doing things for “the children” and raising the poor from poverty, they heartily endorse any and every revenue scheme, however immoral, even those that prey upon the most vulnerable. They would as soon tax the poor as tax the rich, if that was equally politically expedient. And in the case of lotteries, apparently, it is.