Harry Reid Has an Actual Good Idea

According to Politico, Senator Harry Reid wants to add the legalization of online poker to the current tax deal.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), as well as several senior congressional sources and gambling lobbyists, confirmed that Reid and his staff have reached out to other Senate offices to try to build support for adding the online poker legislation — a draft of which POLITICO has obtained — to a measure extending the Bush-era tax cuts

Naturally Reid's proposal isn't some sort of principled support for allowing Americans to make their own decisions about how and where they want to risk their money gambling. It's payback to his supporters in the Nevada casino industry. Even so, any effort to lift ridiculous nanny-state prohibitions on gambling should be applauded.

Republican Nanny-Statism

Many nanny-state efforts come from the left, and tend to be supported by Democrats. But unfortunately the GOP is also complicit in efforts to restrict personal freedom and undermine the notion of individual responsibility. A prime example was a law restricting online gambling, passed by a Republican-controlled Congress in 2006, and set to go in effect on June 1. Congressman Barney Frank (D) is sponsoring a bill to block the law by legalizing online gaming. Here's the response from Republican Spencer Bachus of Alabama.

he would do everything in his power to stop the legalization of Internet gambling, specifically singling out online poker. 

"Internet poker is the crack cocaine of gambling," Bachus told ABCNews.com. "Young people are particularly vulnerable – we don't want to put a casino in every dorm room in the country. Compulsive gambling, by many accounts, is a very serious, growing problem."

We have to ban it for the children! -- actually college-age adults in this case. Bachus sounds like a typical nanny-state Democrat. He thinks we need big government to protect people from themselves. No one can possibly take responsibility for whether or not they want to do some online gambling. We need people like Congressman Bachus to ban it for our own good.

It's very difficult to present the GOP as the party of smaller government, personal responsibility, and individual freedom -- even though it usually is in contrast to Democrats -- when we have Republican idiots like Bachus and his cohorts acting just like typical big government Democrats.  

Government Attack on Online Gambling

The state government of Minnesota is trying to use a federal law to block online gambling sites.

The state's Department of Public Safety said Wednesday it had asked 11 Internet service providers to block access to 200 online gambling sites.

The state is citing a federal law that requires "common carriers," a term that mainly applies to phone companies, to comply with requests that they block telecommunications services used for gambling.

Why is Minnesota trying to censor the internet? Does the state see gambling as a serious problem that they need to combat? Of course not. So why are they attempting a "novel tactic" of reinterpreting an existing law in order to try to block adults from playing poker and other games online? Why do they want to impose an unnecessary restriction on personal freedom? Like most states, Minnesota isn't opposed to gambling -- far from it. In fact, they love gambling. But they only love it if the government can control it, and get its greedy hands on a big chunk of the money.