Libertarian think tank makes case for legal sports betting

The Competitive Enterprises Institute, known as a libertarian think, has published an eight-page paper on what it considers a foolish federal policy on sports betting in the U.S.

The  group describes itself as "a non-profit public policy organization dedicated to advancing the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty."

Here is my summary of some of the key passages:

For those not fully up to speed on how we got here, it's explained thusly:

The Origin of the Sports Gambling Ban. By the late 1980s, at least 13 states had considered proposals to legalize sports gambling, most in the hope that legalizing and taxing the activity would fill increasingly large budget deficits. That so worried gambling opponents—such as lawmakers and sports league officials who feared gambling would compromise the integrity of sporting events—that Congress passed the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA). Once enacted, PASPA prohibited states that did not already allow sports betting from licensing, promoting, or authorizing the activity. In effect, PASPA blocked all states, save for Nevada, from legalizing and regulating bets on the outcome of individual sports contests.

"The proposal, sponsored by Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.), was championed by the commissioners of the four major sports leagues, who testified that such a law was necessary to prevent “a cloud of suspicion” over athletes and games and to avoid sending “a regrettable message to our young people.” Congress justified intervening in what had traditionally been viewed as a matter for state regulation by declaring sports gambling “a national problem. The harms it inflicts are felt beyond the borders of those states that sanction it. The moral erosion it produces cannot be limited geographically. … Without federal legislation, sports gambling is likely to spread on a piecemeal basis and ultimately develop an irreversible momentum.”

This is a segment on "game integrity with a reference to a very famous case:

"In many ways, sports betting lines operate like financial markets. For example, when international open market trading is done in commodities, attempts at manipulation become much easier to detect because anomalies will be noticed and analyzed quickly. The same holds for sports betting. Betting lines do not shift much. An extreme fluctuation, which might occur if large amounts of money was suddenly being bet on a longshot underdog, would set off alarm bells......

"This is exactly what happened during the “Black Sox” scandal, when several members of the Chicago White Sox threw the 1919 World Series. It was the strange, sudden shift in betting odds that first alerted sportswriters and others that something fishy was going on. Bookmakers originally had the Sox as 7-5 favorites, with rumors that the odds might go as high as 2-1 by the time of the game, but a sudden swing in betting in New York—an unusually large amount of money being bet on the underdog Cincinnati Reds—put the odds at even money by Game 1. The odds shift occurred, it turned out, because gangsters had bribed several members of the heavily favored White Sox to throw the Series. Rumors about a fix were rampant well before the Series’ first pitch.

The “Black Sox” went on to become the most infamous sports betting scandal in history. As a result, nearly 100 years later, gambling remains virtually the only unpardonable sin for an active player, coach, or manager in any sport. Players who have used performance-enhancing drugs or have been found guilty of criminal acts ranging from assault to illegal dog fighting have returned to the field. Gambling on games, on the other hand, almost always results in lifetime bans for athletes and officials. This is a formidable disincentive for players to be involved with gamblers or game fixing. Yet, few remember today that it was the bookmakers — those taking bets on the gam e— who first caught the scent of something fishy going on with the World Series."

The volume of new tax revenue also is addressed:

"If this economic activity were brought into the daylight, it would mean millions of dollars for cash-strapped states. In New Jersey, for example, illegal sportsbook makers prosecuted in the late 1990s had an annual volume of around $200 million. Global gaming research firm GamblingCompliance projects that a fully developed legal American market—where bets are placed at casinos, online, and at retail bookmaking shops—would produce $12.4 billion in annual revenue, five times bigger than the U.K.’s sports betting market and 11 times bigger than Italy’s. All of which would be subject to tax. Tapping into this new source of revenue would not even require new laws for most states, as the federal government already requires people to report earnings from gambling and even allows them to write off gambling losses up to the amount that allows them to offset their winnings."

The paper concludes by saying that "the law must treat consumers like adults."