I’ve written before about how we’re being taken over by gambling. Otherwise intelligent people have lost enormous amounts of money, athletes have lost their careers, and the poor are getting poorer. As Economist Elliot Eisenberg wrote:

On 4/3/24, a drawing for a $1.09 billion Powerball jackpot will occur, the fifth largest. While the chances of winning are one in 292 million, Americans spent over $100 billion in 2022 buying lotto tickets and it’s mostly the poor. In the poorest 1% of zip codes, the average adult spends about $600/year or 5% of income, versus $150/year or 0.15% of income in the wealthiest 1%. Talk about regressive. 

Today I’m exercised about a couple of things. First, “prop bets,” gambling on micro-outcomes in a game is not only hurting athletes who are sometimes tempted to participate in scams, but it is also killing community. People in a sports bar, for example, are no longer experiencing community with their fellow fans as they root for their teams to win the game, they’re following their prop bets, communing with their phone. Russell Moore writes about this phenomenon at length in the article, Against the Casinofication of the Church. A long article, worth the read.

But the article also contains this observation as an aside. He’s quoting McKay Coppins, a writer for The Atlantic:

When Coppins describes the “casinofication” of everything, he points to the ways betting markets are now about, almost literally, everything. You can bet on whether a Venezuelan drug boat will be blown up between May 1 and May 10. You can bet on whether Tom Holland and Zendaya will split up in 2027. You can bet on whether famine will hit North Korea by winter. And on and on.

WHILE I WAS READING MOORE’S ARTICLE, a report came out that someone manipulated the weather at the Paris airport to win A LOT of money.

More grievous, I think, a master sergeant bet that President Maduro in Venezuela would be gone before a certain date. Then he participated in the US-led raid that took him out. The report of his arrest came out the same afternoon as I was reading Moore’s article. You can’t make this stuff up.

If this were the stock market, that would be called “insider trading.” But it’s not the stock market, it’s a largely unregulated betting platform that’s not even called a betting platform. Andy Kessler decries it in Gambling by Another Name.

I don’t even know where I’m going with this except evil seems to be multiplying. Take care, my friends. We’re still in a war.

But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.

But as for you, O man of God, flee these things… (1 Timothy 6.9 – 11, ESV)

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. (Matthew 6.13, ESV)