I've never been a gambler. Heck, I've never even bought a lottery ticket. The whole concept goes against my grain. I like the pleasure of knowing that whatever I consume, whatever I own, I've earned with the sweat of my brow. I think there might be a moral/psychological element at work in my mind, that I don't feel that I deserve something unless I've worked for it.
My father once said, especially regarding government-run lotteries, that he is opposed to them, because it gives the people, in his words, "false hope". It is well known that the poor disproportionately buy lottery tickets, hoping each week that theirs will be the ticket (in both senses of the word) to wealth.
You can easily imagine the miniature roller coaster going on each week in the mind of the poor old woman who buys a ticket (or several), her spirits rising as she wonders whether maybe this will be the one, and then, deflating and coming back down to earth, as the answer is the usual no, you are going to remain in your current poverty yet another week.
I agree with those who call government-run lotteries a "regressive tax". Now a "progressive tax" is one in which the rate increases proportionately to the level of wealth or income. But a regressive tax is the opposite: the poorest pay the highest rate. Since governments run lotteries in order to fund government projects, they are essentially another form of tax. And as those paying this tax are disproportionately the poor, it is thus a regressive tax.
In Israel, there are, in each town, public buildings, such as gyms, funded by such lotteries. I have very mixed feelings about them. On the one hand, they serve a public good, but on the other, I have an uneasy feeling about any building funded by exploiting the false hopes of the poor.
The truth is that I did gamble, exactly one time in my life. I was 24 years old, and had just moved out of my parents' house to live on my own. I moved into an apartment building, where there were many single guys my age. I heard that a few of them got together once a week for a game of poker. Now I had about as much interest in poker as I did for, oh, curling, but I did have an interest in meeting the guys from my building, so I went. In my mind, this was a social event, an opportunity to get to know the guys in my building over a friendly game of poker.
Boy, was I wrong.
Instead of the fun, relaxed, friendly, male-bonding atmosphere I was hoping for and expecting, it was two hours of pure cut-with-a-knife-thick tension. There was absolutely no idle chatter, kibbutzing, gossiping, chewing the fat. These guys were serious. Focused. Playing to win. No smiles and grins. Poker faces all.
As I had almost never played poker in my life, I wasn't very good. Did I say not very good? Scratch that -- I was absolutely awful. I'm sure I didn't win a single hand that entire evening.
All the time, I kept thinking to myself: "And this is supposed to be fun?" This was like sitting in a doctor's waiting room for two hours with a bunch of other patients, everybody nervously waiting to find out whether the blood tests had come back negative, and at all costs avoiding eye contact with the other patients. I couldn't understand why these guys would willingly subject themselves to this every week.
Now it's not as if these were high-stakes games. Michael Jordan comes to mind, who was capable of losing more money in one gambling session than most people earn in a year. No, as poorly as I played, my total losses for the evening amounted to a bit more than twenty dollars -- the biggest loss of anyone that evening.
But there was a brief moment when the tension in the room broke, and it was all friendly smiles. It was at the end.
"So, it was great meeting you! We really hope you can come back next week!" Never in my life had I become so instantly and unanimously popular with a group of people. Somehow, I rather doubted that it was my wit and conversational skills which led them to so eagerly seek my return. I declined.
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