What kind of person thinks the Justice Department should devote its time and resources to harassing online poker players? Probably the sort of fellow who describes online poker as a “clear danger to our youth, who are subject to becoming addicted to gambling at an early age.”
A hysteric, in other words.
Republican Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama, quoted on the subject in The Wall Street Journal, is hardly alone with such lurid sentiments, unfortunately. More than a decade after the Internet came into its own, online gambling remains in a curious limbo. It’s considered illegal under a 1961 law — the U.S. Wire Act — that was written in an era when a global communications wonder like the Internet existed only in science fiction.
Suppressing gambling on telephone land lines may have been a rational objective nearly half a century ago. Stifling gambling by the citizens of one country on the Internet, however, is an ultimately futile cause.
Since the gaming sites are based offshore where their activity is legal, the feds can’t simply shut them down. They’ve either got to target domestic player accounts or deputize, through onerous regulation, the banks, credit card companies and Internet service providers that facilitate the play.
Congress, which has never explicitly outlawed Internet gambling despite targeting the financial transactions that fund it in 2006, should bow to reality and both legalize and license online wagering — as Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., has proposed in HR 2267.
I say that as someone who dislikes casinos, has been to Las Vegas just once and who voted against every proposed expansion of gambling in Colorado since a gaming lifeline was thrown to Central City, Black Hawk and Cripple Creek in 1990. Limiting the physical locations of gambling, in my view, amounts to a defense of our communities from the worst sort of garish commercial blight and the drumbeat of get-rich-quick claptrap that typically surrounds it.
Just because I recoil at the prospect of slot machines in the corner pharmacy, however, doesn’t mean I should care whether my next-door-neighbor whiles away his evenings wagering on Internet poker. It’s none of my business how he spends his leisure time in his own home.
Shouldn’t we worry, though, about gambling addicts rushing pell-mell toward ruin? Maybe so, but alcoholics are often caught in an even deadlier spiral and yet most of us don’t lobby for the outlawing of booze. There are many paths to bankruptcy; most do not require a single wager.
As for protecting children, Frank himself may have said it best. “You cannot run a free society by prohibiting adults from doing what you don’t want children to do,” the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee declared in a recent interview with a Nevada radio station. Children can’t smoke, drink, watch certain movies or use credit cards. If online gambling is ever legalized, they’ll be barred from that as well.
That doesn’t mean they’re second-class citizens. It just means they’re kids.
Until the day that Frank’s bill — or one like it — gains traction, the federal government remains free to fix its sights on the apparently intolerable threat of hobby poker players. And don’t assume that federal prosecutors always have better things to do. Just this month, the Justice Department reportedly froze or seized $34 million in accounts belonging to thousands of online players.
That’s $34 million of a $16 billion Internet gambling industry, perhaps half of which, The Associated Press says, is “fueled by U.S. bettors.” Sturdy Americans that they no doubt are, most have no intention of meekly slinking off to spend their free time on other pursuits.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
