> and who is not profit-motivated and therefore will do less to encourage problem gambling, is better than the alternative in practice.

When a government taxes vice its now depending on those revenue streams. It creates an incentive system where the regulator for advancing social good is depending on tax income from the failure of regulating.

Illinois is doing this right now with their gambling industry. Those little gambling machines are in every restaurant and there are dedicated e-gambling buildings everywhere in Springfield. You see folks go in and dump their life savings into those machines. I know a restaurant owner who has customers park out back to hide their gambling from their spouse.

But gambling tax revenue is bailing out the failing state. At the end of the day, it seems like the government of Illinois is the true addict.

I just think it's ok for the government to run a lottery and not advertise it. Allowing gambling machines in restaurant is a whole different story. I think conflating the two is a slippery slope fallacy.

The government may not be profit-motivated (debatable), but it is still cash-motivated. Lottery money in many states go to a variety of services, like education and state parks and such. This does create a motive to encourage spending on the lottery as those services end up relying on the lottery earnings as much or more than conventional taxes and fees for their funding.

The ethical optimum seems to be:

1) Government run lotteries. Otherwise there will be shady illegal lotteries instead.

2) No skimming funds. 99.8% of what goes into the lottery tickets gets paid out to winners, taking only enough to fund the lottery itself. Otherwise you're taxing the poor, and their lives are hard enough.

3) No advertising. To prevent big stories about the "mega-billions" jackpot, cap and split jackpots. So if you have enough to do a 10 billion jackpot, instead offer 100 million jackpots for a while, until the funds are used up.

It would be nice to end the drug war and put lotteries under the same management as Portuguese-style state drug distribution.

Also nationalize coffee chains for same reason lol.