How does operating expenses like salaries and bonuses look like? 10k bonus for every life ruined? I'm always worried about cronyism and corruption with this kind of monopolies.

When I was a cashier the state owned lottery monopoly had a training session for us on how to operate the lottery machines, and it was really dystopian how most of the time was spent on encouraging us to make upsells with sales pitches and being happy about gambling.

Sure. Is a private free for all better though?

Sorry, but that is not true.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotto#Verwendung_der_Einnahmen

50% for is the gamblers

23% is diverted towards the charity you mention.

16.7% is taxes

7.5% is commission

2.8% is for running the business

In other words, the "Aktion Mensch" gives around 1/4 to those in need.

* Correction, "Aktion Mensch" give close to 1/3 to those in need and less to gamblers (also 30%). But they keep more to themselves.

What is "provision"?

My apologies, I meant commission. For the places which offer lottery tickets, usually kiosks.

Yes. 2.8% is kept by the business. vs 40-60% by a bookie.

I don't think this really disproves their post? They said the profit that doesn't go to players goes to charity. Probably a smidge of the 10.3% that goes to the business and the lotto becomes profit, but out of the other 89.7% everything after taxes goes to either the players or the charity. Close enough; if they're off it's only by a couple percent.

I don't get why you are using the lottery ticket revenue as a baseline when in reality the lottery company mostly acts as a payment processor or intermediary. It'd be like arguing Visa only gives 2% to shareholders and shareholders should be owed all money transacted over the Visa network.