The Dangers of Playing the Lottery
The lottery is a form of gambling in which numbers are drawn at random for a prize. Some governments outlaw it, while others endorse it to the extent of organizing a state or national lottery. Most lotteries require that a certain percentage of the pool be deducted for organizational and promotion costs and that a smaller percentage go as taxes and profits to the sponsor. The remaining amount available to bettors is typically split between a few large prizes and many small prizes.
There is, of course, an inextricable human impulse to gamble, which is why so many people play the lottery. But there’s more going on than that, and it’s worth taking a closer look at the lottery as a whole. For one thing, it’s a modern day scapegoating machine. It offers up a scapegoat for the poor, the uneducated, and the downtrodden, and it’s not just in the US either. The mass incarceration of African Americans, profiling and hate crimes against Muslims after 9/11, and the mass deportation of immigrants in the US are all examples of this kind of behavior.
But there’s another issue with the lottery that’s even more troubling. The way most states run their lotteries, they’re basically a tax on poor people. People in the Northeast started lotteries first, and they did so because they were facing a crisis with their social safety nets and wanted to raise money without raising taxes. But the truth is that these states were also selling a fantasy. They were selling a belief that, if you played the lottery, you could solve all your problems and live the life of your dreams.
It’s no surprise that so many people bought into this myth. Especially in the immediate post-World War II period, when states had just begun to expand their array of services and were desperately trying to do so without putting a heavy burden on the middle class and working classes. And the result of this was that state governments started to promote their lotteries as a great way to avoid raising taxes and to provide the public with an opportunity to win big.
And the people who were winning big did not really understand that there was a cost to all of this. They just figured that the bigger the prize, the better. This is a dangerous way to think about lotteries, and it’s important that we all take the time to understand exactly what’s happening here. In a country that prides itself on being the land of the free, we shouldn’t be okay with this sort of behavior, and we should always question the status quo when it seems like it might be out of control. This story is a great example of that. It shows that, despite what we might think, evil can be found in small, peaceful looking places. And that’s something we should never forget.