Life is full of paradoxes. Contradiction, I suppose, makes things more interesting. For instance, the official state stance on gambling is one of the more glaring contradictions American society faces today.

President Bush signed into law what I can only describe as a useless and unenforceable law prohibiting Internet gambling

US President George W. Bush this week is expected to sign a bill making it harder to place bets on the Internet, a practice which already is illegal in the United States.

Bush was expected to act quickly after Congress approved the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act making it illegal for financial institutions and credit card companies to process payments to settle Internet bets. It also created stiff penalties for online wagers.

Billions of dollars are wagered online each year and the United States is considered the biggest market.

“It is extraordinary how many American families have been touched by large losses from Internet gambling,” said US Representative Jim Leach, the bill’s main sponsor in the House, in a statement after its passage early Saturday.

The bill’s chief Senate sponsor was conservative Republican Jon Kyl, who, like Leach, has said he believed Internet gambling was a moral threat. He has called online betting as the Internet version of crack cocaine.

I guess a lot of people I know are “Internet crack” addicts.

Senator Kyl’s laughable and ridiculous hyperbole aside, Internet gambling is hardly an evil we as a society need to be putting on the front burner. At least, that is, if we want to remain unhypocritical. State run lotteries are the biggest legalized hack scams ever divised by government. If a private individual ran a multi-billion dollar operation giving you an expected value of less than 20 cents for every $1.00 spent on a scratch-off hoodwink, they’d be run out of town with pitchforks and torches, and rightly so.  But if you do it for “education” (which really means, displacing the money you’re already spending anyway), it’s okay. And I don’t even want to talk about the expected value of a jackpot ticket. Sheesh.
But if I went to Vegas and played the slots, or bet on a sporting event, the expected value of my $1.00 spent is about 98 cents. The casino gets the “juice”, but I risk actually winning.
And a disproportionate amount of state lottery ticket purchases are the poor.

You tell me which one is the greater evil. Casinos, whether online or towering above the strip, enjoy more morality than their state run equivalents (and don’t forget, they’re healthily taxed, too).

So what’s happened is this - the lesser evil, by the rationale of the bill’s sponsors and supporters, is being outlawed. The greater evil, which is a double-edged battle axe, both with lousy odds and ensuring bigger government, is given the wink and the nod.  The government doesn’t play self-righteous all that well - they ought to get out of the gambling business completely, whether as the proprietor or the regulator.