Martin Owens Jr., a California attorney specializing in the law of Internet and interactive gaming, is responding to the Jan. 8 editorial "Should we place bets on online gambling?" The editorial stated: "How does the state benefit from poor people gambling away their grocery money or rent on state-sanctioned Internet gambling sites?"
So, Internet gambling must be resisted because of its "harm to California's most vulnerable citizens"? Nonsense.
Drive around Sacramento, see the empty storefronts on J Street, in the Downtown Plaza or Arden Fair mall; the holes in the ground where buildings were supposed to rise on Capitol Mall, K Street and in Natomas. Did gambling do that? Go farther to Elk Grove, Roseville, Stockton, up and down the state, in fact, and look at whole neighborhoods turned into foreclosure ghost towns. Which casino did that?
Or consider the workings of California's state government, where a projected deficit of "only" $5 billion, with an unemployment rate of "only" 11 percent, are trumpeted as great improvements, statesmanship at work. Were these caused by "Wicked Gambling's" siren call?
If The Bee's editorial board is so solicitous about vulnerable people being fleeced by unscrupulous operators, where were they when the public was being sold dot-coms that turned into dot-bombs, impossible mortgages and booby-trapped financial derivatives? The twin crapshoots known as Wall Street and the real estate market have inflicted trillions of dollars of loss on America's economy. Ten thousand casinos put together, online or off, couldn't account for a fraction of that. A simple question: Would Internet gambling be characterized as a social menace if it advertised in The Bee, the way the hustlers of realty and finance do?
It's true that licensed gambling is no panacea, but that's not the point. In the first place, unlicensed operators continue to access California's Internet gambling market at will, with no benefit to California or its taxpayers, and no protection to the public.
More importantly, if you can't trust a man's choices with a few dollars of his own money and a few minutes of his own time, on his own computer in the privacy of his own home, then how can you possibly justify allowing him to vote?