Originally Posted by
Count Room
Originally Posted by
Bob21
The people attacking casinos are the same people who blame McDonald’s for fat peole, blame beer companies for alcoholics, blame tabacoo companies for everything under the sun. Basically, they are constantly blaming some company for doing something wrong.
These people also don’t beleive in personal accountability, and freedom, basically what our country was founded on.
It's OK to acknowledge personal accountability and freedom, but the flip side is to remember that beer companies, McDonalds, tobacco companies, and casinos wouldn't thrive without human weaknesses. 80-90% of the revenue comes from 10-20% of the customers. It can be argued that such businesses DEPEND on human weaknesses in order to exist, which leads to the ethical questions of how predatory businesses should be dealt with. I'm not going to try to dive deep into this topic; I'm simply making a passive observation.
EDIT: This topic reminds me of some of the principles behind why the Sackler family is facing massive lawsuits related to propagating America's opioid crisis. Personal choice and responsibility vs. using various outlets (drugs, gambling, alcohol, overeating, etc.) to anaesthetize pain from the general difficulties of biological life & whether businesses are predatory when their customers self-destruct while escaping such pain & difficulty through their products.
Ok, I’ll grant you what you’re saying is correct. What can our society, which is based on freedom, do about it? The short answer is nothing, other than make these businesses illegal. This is the ONLY way we can protect the weaker members of our society from the destructive nature of excessive drinking, smoking, fast food, gambling, etc. Anything in excess will usually lead to a person’s downfall one way or another.
The Bahamas have an interesting way of dealing with the problems of casinos. Only tourist (non-Bahamian residences) are allowed to go into a casino. It’s against the law for Bahamian citizens to gamble in a casino. This way the government can collect the revenue from casinos, without them harming its citizens.
The problem is in our country (built on freedom) there is no way to exclude a certain group of people from a casinos. In our country, you can not have a law that allows certain people in a casino and not others. This is why the only solution is to make casinos illegal, and many states and local areas have done just that. I live in a state with a lot of casinos and they have tried to come into my area but they are always voted down by the citizens. I’m proud to be one of them.
That’s why I will never blame the casinos for the byproducts (bankruptcies, crime, etc) that come with casinos. Everybody knows this will happen no matter how many safeguards a community tries to put in place. The group responsible for allowing casinos into our cummunities is our politicians, which is really us since we are self governing.
I think this is why APs struggle with their position. They are the ONLY group of people who make money off a legal business without providing any value to society. Yes, what we are doing is legal, but it’s not contributing anything to society. The argument you’ll see some make that they use the money they make to buy things which helps the economy is the same one liberals use to justify welfare. When the government gives money to people on welfare, these people also spend that money to help economic activity. If that’s all it took to help an economy, then governments should just give all its citizens money and no one would have to work. I think we can all see that won’t work, just look at Greece.
In the movie “Holly Rollers”, a documentary about church going APs, it had a side story of one member who struggled with what he was doing. It wasn’t because he thought gambling was wrong per say...it was because he saw no value in it. He saw that counting cards and winning money provided NO value to society. During the movie, he was constantly looking for verses in the Bible to try to justify his actions...and he obviously couldn’t find any. By the end of the movie, he quite the “church team” because he saw NO value in what he was doing, and he wanted his life to have value. This is the dilemma I think all APs face and one reason most of them are bitter nasty people. They are making money but their life has no value...at least, not from a work standpoint. They are kind of like welfare recipients.
I think this is also why most APs won’t acknowledge the casino’s business model...providing negative EV games for the purpose of entertainment. If they did, then they would be admiting casinos are doing nothing wrong, and that would make APs feel worse about themselves.
Just something to think about. And no, I’m not a casino employee. I’m a part time AP that has spent time thinking about what I do.