Let's not feed the monster

I've seen a couple of references to this USA Today blog post and poll, one in a user comment here a few days back, and another on some other poker blog (sorry for not giving credit, but I don't remember where it was now).

I have a real problem with this. Notice how Rep. McDermott puts his entire argument in terms of shoveling more money into the federal government's coffers. Nothing about gambling from the privacy of one's home being a simple right with which the government shouldn't interfere. He appears not to care about that. His sole--or at least chief--concern is increasing revenue to the treasury.

I think that is horribly dangerous. If the proposal were simply to regulate online gaming and assess a fee or tax that would exactly cover the expenses of running the regulatory body, I could probably hold my nose and live with that. But I absolutely hate how the PPA, Annie Duke, Lou Krieger, and others keep arguing, just like Mr. McDermott (by the way, how weird is it that a congressman pushing for federal regulation of online poker shares a name with the main character in "Rounders"?), that the government should take on the role of regulator because it will be profitable to the government to do so.

This means that these people want us--you and me--to hand over our money to the feds, above and beyond what they would need to spend for the regulatory agency, so that they can spend it on other crap: the federal debt, the war in Iraq, escalating the war on drugs, studying the sex life of a subspecies of hookworm, building a museum and monument to whatever obscure group is left that doesn't have one yet, farm subsidies, etc. In other words, we would be further fueling the increase in the size of the federal government, when it is already, oh, about 1000 times bigger than by any rights it ought to be, and when most of what it does is already not authorized by the Constitution.

Governments are endlessly greedy and ravenous. For the sake of our own freedom and economic stability, they need to be put on subsistence diets, almost starved--not indulged like the guy in "SuperSize Me," eating McDonald's three times a day for a month. Remember how the cute little "Audrey II" plant in "Little Shop of Horrors" started off just asking for a single drop of blood, but grew to be an unmanagable man-eater? That's how the federal government is. Whatever level of skimming it does at first will be only the beginning. The rate of theft from every pot will get to be more and more as time goes by. There is nothing to stop it. There is no competition to keep the greed in check as there is for, say, the rake at Vegas casinos. Look at what has happened to tobacco taxes over the years if you want a foretaste of what legalized, federally regulated poker will grow to look like.

To continue my string of bad movie images and analogies, think of the poor souls in "Dracula" (I'm thinking specifically of the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola version, though many others show the same thing) who are kept by the vampires as a source of ongoing meals, rather like farm animals. They are barely alive, left with just enough blood so that they don't die and can be bled again later. That is what I am convinced would be the end-game of federally regulated online poker--taxed to within an inch of its life, marginally profitable for anybody except the feds.

It is wrong to give this unspeakably corrupt, inept, misguided, overbloated government yet another source of its nourishment, with which it will keep growing, sucking ever more vitality out of the economy and ever more freedom from its constituents. It's like kudzo, already massively overgrown and taking over everything in sight. Our collective goals should be to chop at it wherever and however we can, not pump it full of yet more fertilizer.

I would far rather have online poker continue as it is, in a reasonably healthy condition, though with barriers to entry and uncertainty about its exact legal standing, than to have it become a source of more federal revenue. I firmly believe that such a move would ultimately be bad for poker and worse for the nation.