The Lottery: State Sanctioned
Exploitation.
By John W. M. Flaherty
(Published 3/94, Dover Record, Dover, NJ)
If you hate taxes, why do you play the lottery?
Recently, while shopping in a local convenience store, an
interesting situation arose and pointed its particularly ironic head in my direction.
I was standing in line with the items I intended to
purchase, listening to the none-to-subtle conversation of two customers in front of me.
They were discussing the subject of taxes, and marveling with disdain at the increasing
injustices being visited upon them daily. At this point in the conversation, I was of
course in hearty agreement with them.
Then it happened. On the very heels of a particularly
poignant observation by his comrade, the second individual, with a rousing, "You said
it pal." proceeded to hand over $10.00 in exchange for several worthless pieces of
paper known as lottery tickets.
What, I said to myself, could be a more ridiculous
contradiction? Here, in the middle of lambasting the land of "taxation without
representation," this individual proceeded to stoke the very flame which was roasting
his posterior!
For what is the lottery if not a voluntary tax?
Who sponsors it?
The state government.
Who takes these weekly "donations," invests them
and feeds off the interest like a pack of jackals over carrion?
The same.
And where does that leave our "charitable
donator?" It leaves him $10.00 poorer than he can probably afford to be that's where.
The lottery my friends, has become the great opiate of the
masses in contemporary America.
The rich don't play lotto or any of its inbred spawn. It's
the less-financially solvent who tend to fall asleep in the arms of this financial
placebo.
It is nothing more than a voluntary tax targeted
specifically at the lower-middle class. It is insidious in the fact that it toys directly
with the dreams of working men and women. The State turns to these people, burdened by the
ever increasing costs of raising a family and running a home, and says, "Hey!
Can’t afford college for the kiddies? House in foreclosure? Weelllll…come on
down! Have we got a deal for you! Just pick a few numbers and be on easy street the rest
of your days! All it will cost ya is a buck! Hell, just play $10 worth and increase your
odds!
Where does that $10.00 go? Straight into the coffers of the
politically aspirant. Multiply that by 52 weeks. We would scream bloody murder if our
property taxes increased that much. Then again, that is presicely the point. Politicians
just love their jobs and know that tax increases of this kind would place them very
quickly in the "where are they now" files. Of course, if the tax increase is
hidden under a phantom of financial salvation, well then! That's a different story
altogether!
There is no escape from it either. It is positively
ubiquitous! Every week it’s a new game! I swear, somewhere in the State capitol,
there is a room full of bean counters whose only job is to find out how many more ways
they can suck a few bucks from us with promises of milk and honey.
"But the money is earmarked for special government
programs, right"? Yeah sure. It will buy you a front row seat at the all-you-can-eat
trough of government sponsored guano ala bovine. Whatever happened to all that money going
towards education? My fiancée is a teacher and the amount of money she is forced to spend
out of pocket on supplies for her children leaves me in constant wonder as to whether she
is actually employed by the school or merely, a source of supplementary revenue.
"Yeah! But I still have a chance of becoming rich,
then none of this will matter anyway." You stand better odds of being struck by
lightning. You know it, I know it, but more importantly, the state knows it! Hell, they
positively COUNT on it! There would be no money it otherwise!
There is however always the possibility that you will win something.
Just keep throwing your money down the gullet of government bureaucracy week after week
and maybe, just maybe, you will one day "win" a finer appreciation for
state-sanctioned exploitation.
