March 4, 2025
By Rachel Lu
It was surely one of the Super Bowl’s funniest commercials. Eli Manning, former quarterback of the New York Giants, rode atop a parade float shaped like an enormous blue foot. His brother Peyton laboriously pulled it from the front while their father, Archie Manning, stood among the cheering crowds. The gag was set up weeks in advance through a run of commercials: all three Mannings are retired NFL quarterbacks, but in childhood Eli ostensibly wanted to kick field goals. On the morning of the Super Bowl, his dream was fulfilled when he bested Peyton in the “Kick of Destiny” field goal competition, broadcast on national television. “Sorry, Peyton,” says Eli, flexing on his float, “but the best Manning won.”
It was fun. But why were the Manning brothers doing this? Were they raising money for a charity, or advertising their regular Monday Night Football “Manningcast”? No. The Kick of Destiny was sponsored by FanDuel, the nation’s leading sportsbook. The Mannings have become part of the campaign to legitimize online gambling and integrate it into American life.
This is a new development in America, especially with respect to sports. Until 2018, sports betting was illegal across most of the United States, with certain exemptions (especially for Las Vegas). Then, in 2018, the Supreme Court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), and the flood gates opened. There was no cautious testing of waters. Thirty-eight states legalized sports betting over the next seven years, with legislation pending in many of the remaining outliers. Online gambling has exploded, with the market worth more than $80 billion in 2024. Everyone assumes that business will continue to grow, with markets expected to exceed $150 billion by 2029.
Yet public discussion of the issue has been minimal. In many states gambling has simply been legalized by the state legislature, but casinos and online sportsbooks are always major players, whether or not the voters get a direct say. Last November, when Missouri narrowly legalized sports betting in a referendum, the supportive campaign was overwhelmingly funded by DraftKings and FanDuel (both online sports books) while the much smaller opposition campaign was funded by Caesar’s Entertainment (a casino chain). We’re not really arguing about whether Americans should lose billions to gambling each year. We’re just squabbling over the best way to divide the cash.
The emerging picture is broadly consistent with previous eras in which legal gambling saw rapid expansion. Other forms of gambling have gone through similar phases of rapid legalization and legitimization. Typically, promises of revenue combine with corporate PR to normalize something that used to be both illegal and disreputable. State lotteries spread across the nation after New Hampshire created the first in 1964. Once the taboo was broken, other states were hungry for the extra revenue. Casinos hit their growth curve a bit later, but the pattern was similar.
Legalization campaigns usually come with ritual acknowledgment of potential risks, and may be accompanied by moves in the direction of mitigating harms. The Mannings, for instance, have also participated in a “responsible gambling” campaign, urging fans to treat “gaming” (the sanitized, industry-preferred term) as a form of entertainment, not a source of profit. The problem is that the entertainment, in this case, involves nothing more than losing money in the expectation of winning money. There’s no similar promise involved in simply buying tickets to a sports event.
So the end result is predictable: Americans end up gambling a lot more than they previously did. Many become addicts or “problem gamblers.” And we’re still in the early phrases of the trend. In a world where people can place wagers anytime and anyplace, it’s hard to predict how deep the online casinos or sportsbooks might eventually reach into American pockets. In Australia, where sports betting has been legal since the early 80s, problem gambling is a serious public health issue, with Australians collectively wagering more than 50 billion each year. That’s in a country with a population about a tenth the size of America’s.
The implications could be huge, both for public health and for the integrity of American sports. The need for wider public discussion seems obvious, but it’s unlikely to happen at present, for reasons familiar to anyone who has worried about pornography or recreational pot. Twenty-first century Americans have little appetite for stemming the advance of markets in pleasurable-but-addictive things. They regard “sin markets”, in general, with a kind of exhausted acquiescence. There does seem to be a growing public willingness to consider certain protections specifically for minors, in light of alarming trends in teen happiness and mental health. For adults though, we’re still strongly disinclined to let the state interfere. Adults, we tend to feel, should be left to make their own choices; it’s both futile and obnoxiously patronizing to try to stop them.
There are plausible reasons to adopt that position. Yet it’s important to be realistic about potential consequences. Sin markets are on a robust growth curve. It’s only reasonable to expect that their impact on American life will also grow in coming years. There will be negative externalities. If those become sufficiently ugly, public opinion is likely to shift, in ways that may sanction more aggressive state interference. It is worthwhile at the present moment, especially for those who care deeply about freedom, to think through the logic of these markets with greater nuance. A prudent response may be essential, not only for America’s cultural or economic health, but also for heading off future initiatives that might try to stanch the bleeding by expanding state power. Online gambling, and sports betting in particular, makes an interesting test case.
Selling Sin
What is a “sin market”? Some readers will smirk at the puritanical phrasing, noting that markets meet a huge array of human wants, many of them less-than-virtuous. Whose prerogative is it to decide which are condemned as “sinful”? This sounds like the sort of “public conversation” one would expect to have in Iran, not America.
Here's an interesting thing, though. Although they can be relied upon to make these objections, I find that my libertarian friends know without being told which markets I have in mind. Technology and mass production may have changed the way we access experiences. But the basic landscape of human vice is pretty well charted by now, and we know the major nodes: sex, drugs, gambling. Violence might qualify as a fourth, more noticeable now that video games and graphic videos can distill that particular pleasure into forms that can be consumed without personally attacking anyone. And of course, there could be further conversations about other screen-based entertainment (which may be targeted to stimulate the brain in calculated ways), or even about potato chips, bad music, faddish toys, or other distasteful objects. Those sound like fun debates for another time. The truth is, the most consequential sin markets are easy to identify, because the human impulses that drive them are, well, old as sin. Sex, drugs, and gambling are still the big three.
Not all activities facilitated by “sin markets” are always or necessarily sinful. Alcohol is clearly at the center of a sin market, but I like it, and I don’t think it’s wrong to serve wine at a dinner party. I do regard pornography (even though it is admittedly hard to define at the margins) as intrinsically immoral, but gambling can take many forms (such as a fund-raising raffle or low-stakes office sports pool) that most of us would recognize as “good fun.” A sin market is not defined by the immorality of the activity as such. It’s defined by the shape of the market.
There are certain things in this world that deliver pleasure in ways that can be isolated from meaningful connections to thicker human goods. Those “thicker goods” might include health, beauty, or rarified excellence, or they may be mediated by broader ties to human communities. It’s hard to ruin one’s life though an excessive appreciation of art or nature, because those pleasures tend to be uplifting, supportive of good mood and mental health. Exercise can be addicting in a sense, but it also requires discipline and improves health. And while a proper moral analysis of violent spectator sports such as bullfighting or boxing would be complex, it surely matters that those activities are enjoyed communally, with public ceremony and cultural investment. Even fermented alcoholic drinks like wine and beer were historically associated with convivial nourishment more than inebriation—and in some parts of the world, still are.
But no discipline, self-improvement, or communal participation are needed to enjoy the dopamine hit one gets from drinking a cocktail, smoking a joint, or winning a slot machine. These pleasures can be enjoyed alone, with no particular etiquette. You don’t have to make friends, or keep them, to keep coming back for more. Any pleasure that meets this general description has potential to be harmful, but concern is especially acute if the activity is both habit-forming and seriously dangerous in excess.
This puts the entrepreneur in an obvious ethical bind. Moderation is good for the individual, but addiction is much better for the company’s bottom line. Realistically, “problem users” drive profits. This is the defining feature of a sin market. Though healthy use may be possible, harmful use is key to maintaining or increasing market share. Business strategists cannot fail to know this. This again brings us back to sex, drugs, and gambling.
Sinful Pleasure Ecumenism
There are some good and understandable reasons why the public is suspicious of “sin policing.” Americans tend to feel that this kind of initiative has been tried in our recent history, and found wanting. Prohibition and the War on Drugs are the most obvious examples. Neither was particularly successful, and both had serious negative ramifications, fueling both black markets and aggressive policing.
Somewhat oddly, we tend not to see tobacco in the same light, though that plausibly represents a far more successful example of a sin market stymied. One wonders whether that case is viewed more favorably in part because the activity involved is less destructive than many other sinful pleasures. Interventions justified on public health grounds may seem more tolerable to us than a puritanical War on Sin. That logic makes a certain kind of sense, insofar as the American public seems to feel that the failures of Prohibition and the War on Drugs reflected a wider failure to grasp the trajectory of modern societies. Perhaps in earlier historical eras, it was possible to keep people on the straight and narrow simply by removing temptations from the table. But (we tend to think) that simply doesn’t work now. Civil society has become so fluid and ill-defined that harnessing it feels like a fool’s errand.
And even if we had the means to stop them, we seem to lack shared moral norms that feel necessary to justify “sin regulation.” Most “sin” activities are understood to be voluntary, discretionary, and properly relegated to one’s personal time. Americans reasonably feel that the bar for restricting that kind of activity should be high.
Working within that paradigm, 21st Century America clearly bought into “sinful pleasure” ecumenism. We’re liquidating blue laws, legalizing recreational pot, expanding access to gambling. It seems to be increasingly accepted that a sizable share of our young people will spend hours each day consuming porn. (The plea among today’s enlightened technocrats is to instill “porn literacy” by teaching kids about “healthy porn use.”) Already in this millennium, sin markets have given rise to significant problems, including a true public health catastrophe in the opioid crisis. Yet the markets for pot, gambling, and pornography are all growing robustly, with expectations of continued growth. (Alcohol is a possible outlier here, as one pleasure younger Americans view with more suspicion.)
I’m modern and libertarian enough to think older generations may have been short-sighted in their efforts to suffocate sin markets. Yet it’s important not to engage in another form of wishful thinking, telling ourselves that the markets for the relevant pleasures are limited or naturally self-contained, or that legal markets merely provide safer outlets for appetites that would be indulged one way or another. In the bigger picture, this just doesn’t seem to be true. Legal markets generally increase use, including problematic use. And addiction is a major (and growing) problem in the United States today.
This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, least of all to people who already believe in the power of markets. The United States is a wealthy society that is presently coping with a great deal of what we might call “social erosion.” We have a lot of lonely, disconnected people with expendable income and a great deal of time on their hands. Markets are very efficient about finding those people and offering them easy-entry pleasures to lighten the gloom. As Americans spend more and more time online, and AI-powered algorithms become smarter and smarter, sin markets will surely locate and entice likely customers with ever-more-ruthless efficiency.
Of course that will mean a lot of addicts, and a lot of broken lives. But the negative ramifications spread outwards from there, in ways that are predictable even if the causal connections are more diffuse. More addiction will mean more bankruptcy, more mental illness, more crime, more homelessness, longer welfare rolls, and more kids in the foster care system. Everyone will feel the downstream effects. There’s something valuable in our disposition to let people make their own choices about their own lives. But there’s also great danger is supposing those choices have no consequences for anyone else.
What, if anything, can be done to prevent this cascade of harm? It’s an excellent question, but we shouldn’t expect to find a single, uniform answer. Although they share certain features, and target many of the same people, sin markets differ quite a lot in their risks, cultural impact, and mechanisms of distribution. Each sin market really requires its own fine-grained analysis. Still, we can identify three main issues to consider.
First and most obviously, we need a realistic picture of the harms. How dangerous is the relevant thing, who is most susceptible to addiction, and what second-order harms are likely to follow? An analysis of harms should also account for direct harms on the production side. That might include fueling drug cartels, encouraging political corruption, or winking at the mistreatment of prostitutes and porn stars. The supply side of sin markets often entail forms of ugliness that are hard to regulate or legislate away.
Next, it’s important to tally the positives. Job creation and revenue are generally the most obvious (and the ones supporters consistently stress in legalization campaigns). But it’s also reasonable to assign some real value to leisure and fun. Some indulgences may be intrinsically self-destructive, but many potentially dangerous things can be perfectly healthy in moderation and some are connected to real human goods. Poker involves gambling, but also cultivates real skill and insight. Alcohol destroys lives, but also adds to the culinary arts, to social gatherings, and to many religious ceremonies.
Finally, we need a realistic appraisal of possible options for state intervention, and their likely consequences. Legal markets can generally be abolished by state fiat (though those efforts require attention to the proper scope of federal, state, and local authority). But of course, people don’t always follow the laws. Addicts in particular are not known for their law-abiding behavior. When legal markets are banned, black markets predictably get a boost. Enforcement necessarily empowers some branch of government to interfere in economic or civic life. Sometimes the best option is to permit and regulate legal markets, using measures such as blue laws, licensing requirements, or restrictions on advertising. We can try to fence certain people out of the market (such as minors, convicted criminals, or people with abysmal credit), and companies can be forced to make contributions to addiction treatment services. But it’s important to recognize that regulation, even if it’s a more permissive option than an outright ban, often involves more state oversight, opening doors to forms of supervision that potentially affect everyone, not just addicts.
Underlying all these options is the same depressing truth. Sin markets threaten our liberty, and there is no straightforward way to neutralize that threat. Free and unregulated, they will spawn a slew of further harms and undercut society’s capacity for self-governance. There will be more crime and homelessness, but also more police, social workers, prisons, and taxpayer-funded treatment centers. Every form of ban or regulation will require enforcement, which means inviting the state into some corner of our lives, whether that intrusion is manifest in our communities, our businesses, our personal devices, or our personal choices. We’re going to have to pick our poison.
Rolling the Dice
Gambling is an interesting case, insofar as the foundational experience is basically familiar to everyone and integrated into all sorts of pursuits and activities. All potentially-addictive pleasures trigger a release of dopamine in the brain. For gambling, this is connected to the excitement of risk and the possibility of gain. Everyone has experienced this exhilarating risk-and-gain thrill in some context, whether it’s found in athletic competition, public speaking, or asking someone on a date. There is a sense, perhaps, in which all humans are gamblers, from the Wall Street trader to the child playing Candyland.
Sometimes the risk-and-payoff thrill might augment a healthy pleasure, but when it is placed directly at the center of an activity, that opens doors to abuse and addiction. Some people experience a significant release of dopamine in both winning and losing, which explains why gamblers feel such an intense compulsion to “chase losses.” That same spirited determination that inspires the underdog athlete to fight harder may perversely draw the losing gambler into some very poor decisions. The sense of letdown comes only later, perhaps on the way home (after losing the farm). Just as with many drugs, gamblers seem to build tolerance, meaning that they need to place ever-higher bets to capture the same thrill.
It is possible for a person to enjoy placing the occasional wager without becoming an addict. The American Gaming Association claims that about half of Americans gamble in any given year. Meanwhile, the National Council on Problem Gambling estimates that about 1%, or 2.5 million, Americans have a severe gambling problem, while another 5-8 million are more moderately addicted. Clearly there are many non-problem gamblers in America, and yet, addiction is lamentably common. Though no one overdoses on a slot machine, gambling addicts do seem to have some of the highest suicide rates among all use disorders, and there are further grim consequences. When states legalize sports gambling, they predictably see a noteworthy uptick in bankruptcy filings along with an 8% rise in debt collection amounts. There is a measurable drop in credit scores statewide. Problem gambling is especially common among young men, alcoholics, drug addicts, the poor, and the mentally ill.
With cognitive behavioral therapy, gambling addiction is one of the more treatable use disorders, but addicts are particularly unlikely to seek treatment. The National Council on Problem Gambling estimates the total social cost of problem gambling (including criminal justice, bankruptcy, lost productivity, and other ramifications) at $14 billion. Clearly that number is highly speculative, but those downstream consequences are all real.
Not all forms of gambling are equally addictive. Where alcoholics often find it necessary to distance themselves from old friends to stay sober, gamblers seem to be at greatest risk when they are alone. Slot machines have long been recognized as one of the most addictive games, making up about 70% of casinos’ profits. Sports betting, the overwhelming majority of which happens online, shows worrisome trends thus far, with one study suggesting that 16% of online gamblers meeting the clinical criteria for a use disorder, a considerably higher percentage than we see among gamblers more broadly. Sports betting is popular with the kids. A 2023 NCAA survey indicated that 67% of college students living on campus had engaged in some form of sports betting, with 6% acknowledging that they had lost more than $500 on sports in a single day. That survey, and others, suggest that young people tend to engage in sports gambling in part because they are confident they can win extra cash. In one survey of more than 2000 adults, sports bettors indicated that making extra money was their number one motive for placing bets.
Online gambling generates considerable revenue. In 2024, online sportsbooks handled about $150 billion worth of wagers, made $13.71 billion in revenue, and paid $2.9 billion in state and local taxes, plus an additional $375 million in federal tax. Online casinos and poker sites contributed a further $2.2 billion in tax.
But sports betting in particular carries another significant risk. It threatens the integrity of the sports themselves. Gambling-related sports scandals are not new in the United States. Pete Rose, despite holding baseball’s record for the most all-time hits, was banned from baseball in 1989 after gambling slips found in an Ohio restaurant exposed his extensive involvement with gambling rings. Jack Molinas was banned from basketball for his involvement in the 1961 point shaving scandal, and college basketball has had other scandals over the years relating to bribery or allegations of game fixing. Baseball, in its early years, was perpetually dogged by betting-related scandals, culminating in the Black Sox Scandal of 1919, when professional gamblers bribed the dominant White Sox to throw the World Series. After that shameful event, Major League Baseball was forced to reckon with gambling as the existential threat that it was. Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis issued a slew of lifetime bans and set to work cleaning house, likely saving professional baseball from extinction.
Professional sports leagues still recognize that gambling represents a real threat. They were in general very supportive of federal bans on sports betting, up through the 2018 Supreme Court ruling overturning PASPA. Big money inevitably gives players, referees, or coaches strong incentives to cash in, but the leagues know that fans will lose interest in professional sports if they suspect that games may be fixed, or players intentionally underperforming. After PASPA was nullified, the leagues obviously concluded that “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” They wanted their cut, but presumably also recognized that a cooperative relationship with online sportsbooks would be helpful for catching cheaters.
But it’s clear that no one has a satisfactory solution to the problem. The recent explosion of sports betting massively magnifies potential opportunities for point shaving, game fixing, and other forms of manipulation. Even now, the NBA is still working to fully expose the gambling ring that got Jontay Porter expelled from the League for point shaving, which has also thrown suspicion on point guard Terry Rozier, who currently plays for the Miami Heat. Baseball umpire Pat Hoberg, one of MLB’s best-rated umpires, was recently fired for sharing online gambling accounts with a friend who bet on baseball. It seems inevitable that more such cases will arise as sports betting becomes ubiquitous, easily accessible from any phone or computer terminal.
In the past, ugly gambling scandals have often been the primary catalyst for crackdowns. The Black Sox scandal opened a new and cleaner chapter for MLB; indignation over the Pete Rose scandal was the primary impetus behind PASPA, which moved through Congress with very little opposition in 1992. One wonders whether American sports might repeat that same pattern in coming years. At present, the American public has limited appetite for policing socially destructive pleasures, but we do truly love our sports. Are we really going to stand by and watch as they get blown up by bookies?
Knowing When to Fold ‘Em
To this longtime sports fan, the cost-benefit analysis looks easy. Online gambling, especially sports betting, is bad for America. It’s likely to cost us far more in lost productivity, addiction treatment, crime, and bankruptcy, than the revenue gains can possibly justify. Those costs will fall most heavily on the people who can least afford them. To me those seem like strong reasons for banning online sportsbooks, but even for those who find those arguments offensively paternalistic, the case for banning online sports gambling is quite strong. Every athlete and sports fan stands to lose a great deal if gambling becomes so pervasive that the leagues are unable to plausibly maintain the integrity of professional and collegiate sports.
If there is ever a reasonable time for invoking the “common good” in a policy debate, this would seem to be a paradigmatic case. American sports obviously have a corporate component, but they are more than just businesses. They are a cultural institution with deep roots in American history. It’s appropriate to see them as a common inheritance, beloved of Americans of all backgrounds. Insofar as the online sportsbooks pose a real threat to that public good, it’s reasonable to ban them, and it seems likely that this is the public argument most likely to succeed. As we see in differential public attitudes towards the War on Drugs and the War on Tobacco, Americans are often more comfortable with bans when the justification isn’t too intensely moralistic.
Though it may sound extreme, banning really is the better option in almost every way except one: the public isn’t really on board with it (yet). Polls indicate that more than half of Americans think sports betting should be legal, with only a small minority opposed. This is probably a textbook case of sin ecumenism: though Americans as a group aren’t in love with sports gambling, only a smallish minority think that it’s wrong, and Americans are reluctant to support bans on an activity that some people clearly enjoy. Accordingly, public opinion is far more favorable to aggressive regulation than to out-and-out bans.
Is that really the best option in this case, though? It may not be, for multiple reasons. Bans are likely to be more effective, and easier to enforce. They may raise fewer Constitutional issues than regulatory efforts, showing more respect for the limits of federal authority. That consideration may in turn lead lovers of liberty to reflect that some sin markets pose less of a threat to our freedom if they are simply banned. Heavily regulated sin markets seem like exactly the sort of thing one would expect to see flourishing in Alexis de Tocqueville’s softly despotic state.
On the level of enforcement, online gambling is one vice that can be controlled with considerable effectiveness by federal legislation. The case is very different from, say, Prohibition, in that a commercial transaction is really at the core of the activity itself. Black markets exist, and would presumably grow somewhat in the wake of a ban. But without open advertising it’s much harder to find potential bettors, and people naturally tend to be more reluctant to throw money at strangers in under the table transactions. Recall how effectively the Department of Justice shut down online poker in 2011, on a day gamblers still refer to as “Black Friday.” For both law enforcement and the sports leagues, bans are simpler and cleaner, with fewer complicated shades of gray.
Shutting down online sportsbooks, while allowing states to make decisions about casinos and other brick-and-mortar establishments, might be a reasonable arrangement that would still allow for some wagering, but with higher barriers to entry, as well as more room for social and cultural “guardrails.” What if you had to go into a physical betting shop, likely rather seedy, to wager instead of using your phone? That might discourage casual use, much like people not wanting to go into the porno store.
Constitutionally, regulation raises some hard questions that a federal ban on online sports gambling could more easily avoid. The Supreme Court overturned PASPA, the anti-sports-gambling legislation that largely contained sports gambling from 1992 through 2018, on the grounds that it violated the 10th Amendment’s anticommandeering doctrine. The law forbade states from passing state-level laws authorizing sports betting, which, in Samuel Alito’s view, was a usurpation of their powers. A sweeping federal ban on online sports betting could probably avoid that defect, but regulatory schemes will find this far more difficult, since they inevitably require more meticulous supervision of the activities of both sportsbooks and bettors. Already, two Democratic congressmen (Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Representative Paul Tonko (D-NY)) have proposed legislation meant to establish a regulatory structure for containing the harms of sports betting. Under this law, states would be required to submit applications to the US Attorney General every three years demonstrating their capacity to keep sportsbooks in compliance with a lengthy and detailed list of restrictions. This likely is the sort of thing Americans have in mind when they express support for more regulation, and it responds to the reality that states feel considerable pressure to legalize gambling when their citizens are regularly taking advantage of a nearby state’s more permissive laws. No one likes to see potential revenue flowing to their neighbors. But if PASPA was unconstitutional on grounds of commandeering, it’s hard to see how this new legislation could possibly pass muster. States should not be treated as the Federal government’s enforcement lapdogs.
That Constitutional point invites further reflection on cultural and historical themes. Would the banning of online sportsbooks really constitute a serious blow to our freedom? What natural activity would we be unable to engage in in the wake of such a law? Many people enjoy low-stakes sports gambling with their loved ones, but offices or friend groups would still be free to pass a jar around, inviting everyone to put in a $20 with the agreement that the winner of the fantasy season gets to keep the pool. Websites could still play a role in facilitating the game. (I myself have been the commissioner of a friends-and-family fantasy league since 2009, and we’ve always found it fun without wagering. But if we did want to wager, I’d trust all those people to honor a handshake agreement.) By contrast, serious efforts at regulation are likely to habituate people to multiple forms of monitoring and screening, some of them potentially quite invasive. Do we want people to get used to the idea that it’s normal for the state to pose credit or mental-health related contingencies on ordinary, leisure-related transactions? To force us to comply with waiting periods before using our own money? Banning sin markets might seem patronizing, but in the day to day, it’s likelier to be regulation that teaches us to cheerfully accept the leashes imposed by benevolent state babysitters.
To some of us, sports betting is deeply depressing not only because it preys on the weaknesses of the already-vulnerable, but also because it threatens to overwhelm a one of American culture’s true realms of excellence. Sport itself, and especially team sports, display many of the excellences of ordered liberty, and it’s one of our best assets for helping kids to learn the benefits of discipline, fitness, perseverance, cooperation, and fair play. Gambling has always been in the background of that sporting culture, representing a real threat to all those goods. It’s part of the history of American sport, but not a particularly admirable part. Do we have to tolerate forms of commerce that are so clearly destructive to our civic life? I don’t see why. Banning online sportsbooks may not be politically viable right now, but that could change if (as seems likely) new gambling scandals emerge in coming years. Conservatives should be ready for that opportunity.
Sin is old, but it perpetually forces us to confront new challenges, both practical and philosophical. Right now the practical challenges of addiction and mental illness, both exploding in our time, are crashing up against a more abstract (but still vitally important) conversation about modern man and his proper relationship to an overbearing, technocratic state. Prohibition was misguided in many ways, but the soft libertinism of our own day is just as blinkered. We can’t mandate virtue by law, but we can think in more nuanced and reflective ways about the shape and impact of different sin markets. They aren’t all the same, nor is there a single, correct approach for managing them. But they aren’t harmless, nor can they all be effectively contained by local or organic solutions. Sometimes a prudent measure, such as a federal ban, may actually be the most effective and least invasive option for stemming addiction and protecting real cultural goods.
Eli Manning may have bested his brother in the FanDuel kicking competition, but I’m hoping it will not prove to be a “Kick of Destiny” in the broader story of American sporting history. The Mannings have had more glorious days. So has America.
Rachel Lu is Associate Editor at Law & Liberty and a contributing writer at America magazine and National Review. She has a PhD in philosophy and writes on politics, culture, religion, and family life.