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Gambling and the Loss of Morality

In: Social Issues

Submitted By finkel
Words 1951
Pages 8
In a recent online poll, people were asked to name the best quality, or virtue, that a person should have. The top three answers were honesty, integrity, and a solid work ethic. Gambling is not an activity that could be described using any of these words. Gambling corrupts the values of the life, replacing them with greed and selfishness. It is a form of theft from taxpayers, encourages the neglect of children and jobs, attracts a criminal element, cultivates laziness and lends itself easily to other societal ills such as alcohol and drug use and prostitution. Gambling undermines the work ethic by offering a “something for nothing” attitude and leads people to profit by causing loss to others. Most proponents of gambling consider it to be harmless recreation. However, like the tobacco industry, the gambling industry relies and thrives on addiction. The bulk of the gambling industry’s profits come from problem and compulsive gamblers. In terms of casinos, they produce no wealth for anyone other than the owners. They do not produce a good to be manufactured or exchanged. Almost every dollar spent in a casino is utilized by the casino; -- it is sucked out of the community, not spent elsewhere, or put into a savings account. Gambling and casinos are not economic development. We, as a society, must choose to build a future on solid economic foundation, or build a casino economy where we say it does not matter. The social costs of gambling, the externalities, are hard to quantify. Every casino market has had to deal with rising crime, strained infrastructure, increased personal bankruptcies, and the loss of tax revenue from other businesses that cannot compete with the casinos. (O’Brien, T., (1998) Except for murder, every major crime goes up dramatically soon after a casino’s arrival in a community. Rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and

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