Legal Sports Betting Was Always A Form Of Theft

As Warren Buffett explained so succinctly, expanding gambling, including sports betting, means people like him don’t end up paying more in taxes.

But, as a recent report from the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research laid out, whatever states collect in sports betting taxes is offset by cannibalization of other taxable gambling products (i.e., the lottery) and by the rising social costs of addiction and population-level financial harm.

Legal online sports betting may cost states money.

Who reaps the rewards? A small clique of policymakers who get wined and dined and get to rub shoulders with athletes. The owners of sportsbooks, teams, and media companies. The leagues as a whole.

Legal sports betting is a form of oligopolistic rule, with early support shaped by highly manipulative polling. Now, that polling is starting to shift.

Who has been robbed? Everyone, even those who aren’t betting or aren’t affected by someone who is. The ones who are savagely robbed are the people who become addicted, but the theft is truly at the societal level.

It’s hard to stop theft of this magnitude with mere corrective policy or regulation. Colorado tried recently, with mixed results, as the industry watered down the bill the governor signed. Nonetheless, kudos to everyone in Colorado who worked hard to pass something, a truly monumental achievement.

The litigation playbook against “Big Tobacco” may eventually work, but we live in a more vicious and corrupt era, right? I’m not optimistic.

Some speak of a “popular mandate” for sports betting reform—that’s not nearly enough. There are other policy issues in this country with overwhelming majority support, and nothing gets done.

Well, what is to be done?

What could greatly help is for people to get organized and boycott betting products and the financial support they give to their favorite teams and players. Cancel your sports subscriptions. Stop buying team merchandise. Don’t post on social media about sports.

Organize neighborhood or community sports watch parties to minimize financial support of the leagues and their media partners.

Tell your friends, family, neighbors, and coworkers about the ongoing heist tied to the legalization of sports betting. There’s no reason to be alarmist, but you can point out that sports are a terrain of ghoulish financial predation like never before. We don’t have to tolerate it.

I won’t even go into the youth sports crisis and its insidious harm to working families, but that’s more connected to legal sports betting than you may think. We live in dystopian times.

It may be unpleasant to stop financially supporting your professional sports teams, but that’s what it would take to undermine sport and its fusion with the gambling sector. They need to feel it in their share prices.

To make organizing easier, we must obliterate the stigma of sports gambling addiction so people can more easily support boycotts of sports betting products, teams, and leagues. People experiencing gambling addiction, often called the hidden addiction, must receive support, but prevention is crucial.

Perhaps it is unrealistic to think that people can organize to make a material dent in the predatory commodification of sports. But it can’t hurt to try.

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