The opening ceremony to the London Olympics was yesterday and already authorities are investigating an athlete who bet on a competitor and won $4,800. International Olympic Committee rules bar athletes from betting on Olympic events. (Of course, the IOC may top the NCAA when it comes to hypocrisy, corruption and money.)
Back to sports betting. We did a blog post the other day, pointing to concerns about bets during the Olympics and match fixing. As sports betting spreads, look for corruption and sports-betting scandals to become a part of all games.
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"Here we are, protected, free to make our profits . . . ninety miles away, in partnership with a friendly government."
— Hyman Roth, The Godfather Part II
Gambling is still morally bankrupt Paul Davies, Baltimore Sun, 8/22/2012
New York, Play This Hand Very Carefully Paul Davies, NY Daily News, 6/8/2012
Play to Extinction Kevin D. Williamson, National Review Online, 3/19/2012
New York's Bad Bet Paul Davies, New York Times, 1/22/2012
Cuomo vs. Cuomo on casinos David Blankenhorn and Andrew Yarrow, NY Daily News, 1/4/2012
More Casinos? Think Again David Blankenhorn, Albany Times Union, 1/2/2012
America's Bad Bet:
Why the Growing Government-Casino Partnership Is a Deal with the Devil Paul Davies, Propositions 6, January 2012
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Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Taylor Branch says that "state-sponsored gambling is an essential corruption of democracy."
See the 60 Minutes report on how more and more states have become addicted to gambling as a source of revenue. In the report, former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell tried to defend the explosion of state gambling by lashing out at correspondent Leslie Stahl. WATCH
"It's a terrible way to raise money. It's a tax on ignorance. . . . I don't like the idea of the government depending, for certain portions of its revenue, on hoodwinking citizens."
— Warren Buffett
There was a time when elected officials understood the downsides of casinos. Giants like New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia launched campaigns to root out gambling as seen here.
Are Casinos Like Cocaine for the Brain? A discussion on the still unaddressed public health and ethical consequences of expanding casino gambling in New York State.
"Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. Winston had nothing to do with the runnning of the Lottery, which was managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware . . . that the prizes were largely imaginary."
George Orwell's 1984
Paul Davies is the editor of www.GetGovernmentOutofGambling.org and the Maggie Walker Fellow at the Institute for American Values.
That didn’t take long.
