The Indiana Licensed Beverage Association is having a series of public meetings to put pressure on the General Assembly to legalize video gambling machines. And here's a prediction from someone who should know:
House Speaker Brian C. Bosma, R-Indianapolis, said that, "If you're a betting person, there's probably even odds that there will be an expansion of gambling (some) year in the General Assembly."If he's still speaker next year, he said, he'd make sure the issue had to pass or fail on its own merits, and not be inserted into some other popular bill that lawmakers would be loathe to oppose.
Resisting legalization is getting increasingly tough for the state, which faces two problems. When the law is too far away from people's actual habits, the law will merely be ignored, as is the case with video gambling. And the state's promotion of its own lotto gambling empire leaves it in a poor position to tell citizens a different form of gambling is bad for Hoosiers.
It's probably time for the state to give up on this one. My main objection has always been to state-run gambling -- it preys on people's weaknesses, which ought not be a function of the state, and it creates an easy way for government to grow unreasonably. Otherwise, gambling should be recognized as a vice like smoking and drinking and regulated and taxed accordingly.
Just about anything would be better than the current situation, with a law that is routinely ignored, maintained by a state that has lost any claim to the moral high ground. And, considering how much gambling money now goes to out-of-state entrepreneurs, it seems downright churlish to deny a similar source of funding to the local VFWs and Moose Lodges.
