Game off

Parliament is debating the Gaming Bill, and the speeches made by some MPs give interesting insights into their understanding of what constitutes vice, and whether vice is caused by social problems or whether social problems are caused by vice.

I am not quite sure that outlets equipped with gambling machines increase demand rather than merely catering to it. They might well increase demand, but then again, they might not. Some people are inclined to gamble, others are not. You can’t make a gambler out of somebody who is not that way inclined by placing a gaming outlet on his high street. Then again, you can argue that if that somebody were never to see a gaming outlet on his high street, then the thought of using a gaming machine might not occur to him, and the desire to gamble might never be triggered off.

But you can argue that way only if all opportunities for gambling are eliminated. As things stand, the gambler deprived of his local gaming outlet can go to the lotto office or to the equally convenient corner-shop for scratch cards, and spend the same amount of money towards the same end of satisfying the urge to gamble. This is not a column for or against gaming outlets, or for or against the Gaming Bill. It is a piece about consistency.

Parliament cannot mount its moral high-horse and crusade against gaming outlets when the state used to run the country’s biggest gambling operation – the public lotto – until it was sold off to the private sector a few years ago. Now Maltco Lotteries Ltd, the privatised operation, runs Super Five and the Malta lottery, and remains the country’s biggest gambling business – bigger by far than all the gaming outlets put together, though nowhere near as big as the billions of euros that account for the turnover of the internet gaming businesses which are run out of these islands.

We’re building an industry, and creaming off the profits in taxes, property rentals, ex-pat expenditure and job creation, in international internet gaming. One MP praised the bill because, in his view, it would discourage investors from setting up more such businesses in Malta. I hope, in that case, he has some alternatives up his sleeve, given just how much money Malta – and that’s not just the state coffers but private operators with flats to rent out and restaurants to fill – makes out of this sector.

By voting to constrain the operations of gaming outlets, parliament will not be working to cut down on vice and social problems, but will be doing little more than something it shouldn’t be doing at all: interfering in the market by diverting business from one operation to another.

The government, at some point, appears to have decided that one kind of gambling (the lotto, Super Five, traditional casinos) is good, but another kind of gambling (everything else) is bad. I can see no difference between all these forms of gambling, though that might be because I am as inclined to gambling as I am to sport, card-games and board-games, which is to say not at all. So I might be missing the nuances that render losing your home at blackjack or your car at the poker-table somehow morally and socially superior and preferable to turning your social security cheque into loose change and feeding it to a one-armed bandit instead of funnelling it into the state-sanctioned lottery.

Let’s put it this way. If the government truly believes that availability of gambling options creates demand as well as feeds it, then it should remove all gambling options and not just some of them. It can’t say ‘This sort of gambling is fine, but that sort of gambling is not.’ If gaming outlets lead to social distress, more misery through usury, and wives and children going without (in reality, there is a big gambling problem among housewives, so don’t just blame the husbands), then so do casinos, lotteries, scratch cards and the Super Five. I know of a man whose wife cleans houses for €125 euros a week to buy food for her children while he spends €50 a week, of his own wage, on scratch-cards. He’s never been near a gaming outlet.

If the government thinks this way about the evils of gambling, then a total ban would be consist and logical, even if it would drive the market underground. But if the government does not wish to be thought inconsistent, then it has to be honest and say: “Look, all forms of gambling are bad, but we can’t really legislate to have Maltco Lotteries shut down, not after we sold it for such a high price. And we really have a good thing going there with internet gaming. So we’re just going to shut down the other people and hope that this cuts down on gambling just a bit, and that the gaming outlet customers won’t all rush to spend the same amount of money, with the same consequences for their families, on the lotto, even though Maltco are probably gleefully anticipating that very prospect.”

A government which believes gambling to be a vice that undermines society and then goes on to ban some forms of gambling while enshrining others in the law (after having first sold the country’s gambling mainstay) is doing the equivalent of saying that hard drugs are damaging to society and then going on to legalise cocaine while banning heroin – so that at least we will have fewer heroin addicts and let’s hope that those who used heroin don’t rush to the cocaine dealers instead.

If that is too extreme an example, I’ll give you another one, straight out of reality. Alcoholism and binge-drinking are the source of far greater social problems in Malta than gambling is. Drink-related difficulties, diseases, deaths, violence, family breakdown and financial problems are widespread right across the spectrum of socio-economic groups. I know, and know of, far more drunks than I know, or know of, gamblers. So let’s say the government wakes up one morning and decides to tackle the problem of rampant alcoholism by closing down all bars while continuing to allow supermarkets to sell vodka, whisky, rum, wine and the rest. Does this cut down on alcoholism? No, it just sends the alcoholics to the supermarket, which is where they were probably getting their cheaper booze in the first place.

If governments classify addictive substances or pastimes as vices which destroy families and undermine societies, then they have only two solutions: an outright ban or an ‘almost free’ market with minimum regulation on matters such as age. Much as we like to think there can be one, there is no middle road called compromise. There is only illogical thinking which dictates that you can ban one sort of gambling while giving another the blessing of officialdom, ban one kind of hard drug while allowing another, shutting down bars while leaving vodka on sale at every grocery or mini-market.

That is why we have a total ban on hard drugs (and even soft ones) and a market in alcohol and cigarettes that is subject only to taxation and the excise man and to restrictions on age of consumption/purchase. There is no middle road which involves banning a bit of the vice-causing agent while allowing another bit of it. When the American Prohibition of the 1920s proved beyond doubt that a total ban on alcohol, for a variety of reasons, is untenable in a democracy – and probably also in a dictatorship – the alternative was not a partial ban but a free market in all alcohol with restrictions on age, place of consumption and place of purchase. It wasn’t a case of ‘We’re shutting down the shops that sell bourbon, but you can buy as much beer as you like from the other shops.’

The proposed ban on gaming machines in social clubs where children go is a laudable one, but even here consistency and logical thinking are required. There are regulations already which make it illegal for the operator of the premises to allow children to use these machines, so presumably the idea behind having the machines removed from the premises is that children will not view them as tantalising but temporarily forbidden temptations. In that case, surely the same principle applies to cigarette-vending machines on the very same premises. Children are more likely to take up the vice of smoking than the vice of gambling. While at least one MP told us during the debate that gambling machines should be marked with the legend ‘gambling causes death’, we all know that is not true, unless irritated video lottery terminals have taken to assaulting with hatchets those who use them. Lots of Maltese people die of smoking and drinking but the odd ‘gambling’ death cannot possibly be anything other than suicide brought on by being entrapped in a spiral of problems.

One MP suggested that each gaming outlet should be equipped with closed-circuit television to “identify individuals and restrict entry”. What on earth might he have meant? I trust that he is not proposing spying on people to see who gambles and who does not, because really, it is nobody’s business. If gambling is legal, then it is legal, and the government may no more spy on those who enter gaming outlets than it may spy on those who enter restaurants.

The government minister who is piloting the bill, John Dalli, had an even more disturbing and illiberal suggestion, which rather spoiled, to my mind, the good he seeks to do by means of this piece of legislation. The government should reserve the right to monitor those who gamble on the internet, he told parliament. The government should be given the legislative backing to collect the IP addresses of internet gamblers, so as to be able to see who is playing what and where.

I don’t know about you, but I found this to be particularly chilling, more reminiscent of the stories I read in the newspaper China Daily while there a couple of weeks ago than of anything one would expect from the government of a liberal democracy.

Mr Dalli would also like the government to have ‘access’ to video lottery terminals – the machines you see in gaming outlets – so as to be able to monitor the identity of those who use them. “There are scientific studies on how best to administer such things,” he told parliament. Yes, and there are also long political and philosophical treatises on how and why governments should not spy on citizens who go about their licit activities.

Of course, throughout the parliamentary debate so far, the essential problem was not discussed: that the root cause of all this gambling (and alcoholism) is not the gaming outlets or the lotto (and the bars) but social alienation, boredom, and unhappiness. Content, well-balanced people don’t gamble, drink heavily or rely on hard drugs to get them through life. Gaming outlets don’t make gamblers and bars don’t make alcoholics.

If we cut down on gaming operations, we won’t be solving the problems that provide them with customers, but merely hiding those problems so that we needn’t confront them.

This article is published in The Malta Independent today.