Monday, July 24, 2006

Jason Ruspini is Paul Revere

when it comes to the Gambling Prohibition Act. An excerpt

Very often, moral concerns have been expressed that gambling is wasteful and diverts people from more productive activities. Alongside this idea, one would formerly hear that gambling instills a poor work ethic, or encourages "idleness", or places too much emphasis on chance over providence. Even here, real interests can be masked. Although the English laws of 1699, 1826 and 1906 were claimed to help the poor, there is reason to suspect that their establishment had more to do with maintaining the status quo and keeping the poor in their place. The higher classes had more to lose, and so had less of a need for variance than the poor. The 1906 law, orginally known as a "class law", was eventually recognized as outdated and unenforceable, and was discarded in 1960 when the Betting and Gambling Act legalized betting shops in the UK.
Read the whole thing. I said something similar, without the benefit of Jason's high intelligence quotient, here.

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