re: #371 Belafon

If you were going to truly be correct, you would say schilling for the rich, since this is a way to get the poor to pay for their own children’s educations.

My favourite author points out that lotteries are a cry of despair on the part of governments. It’s an unconscious realization that they no longer have the power to tax economic activity within their sphere of power.

From the moment a government encourages its citizenry to finance the state by gambling–which means by idle dreaming–instead of through creativity, work and productivity, the state is in an unacknowledged crisis.

The Doubter’s Companion - John Ralston Saul

Or, as Emo Phillips put it, “Lotteries are a tax on the mathematically incompetent.”