Saturday, January 14, 2006

Lottery, Schmlottery

Dennis Mangan discusses the lottery and Social Security.

This reminds me of a thought I once had.

Someone was talking about the fact that so many lottery winners seem to lose all of their money in a year or two. They wondered if it weren't a cosmic karmic payback of some sort.

Pfah. The real answer is that the people most likely to win the lottery are probably people who spend the most money buying lottery tickets. That is, they are not too good with money. The people who would play the lottery enough to have a decent chance of winning are the exact type of people who would blow through their winnings because they don't understand that (a) even a million, or several million, dollars is a finite quantity, and (b) they only get to keep a percentage of what they supposedly won; due to taxes, penalties if they want it all paid out at once, etc.

Murray Rothbard once said: "In fact, if you wish to know how libertarians regard the State and any of its acts, simply think of the State as a criminal band, and all of the libertarian attitudes will logically fall into place."

If by criminal gang you mean a mafia, then the rigged numbers game education-funding state lottery certainly seems to fit in with the overall motif.

That is all.

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