Lottery fever sweeps US with 1 in 2 Americans buying a ticket, generating some $70 billion in yearly revenue for the state run lottery monopoly.
One man or woman in South Carolina has won $1.6 billion. That’s if they opt in to receive it by installments over 29 years during which time inflation should eat plenty of it. If they want it in one payment, they receive only $1 billion. Half a billion of that goes to the state, with the lucky winner really winning $500 million.
Still a lot of money, but what are they going to do with it? Drugs and prostitutes? Party like an idiot until all of it is gone?
They’re not going to invent a flying car are they? They’re not going to invent the next smart-phone. Chances are in fact they won’t do anything productive with such an astonishing amount of money.
Money that was effectively stolen from anyone who bought a lottery ticket, which often happens to be the poorest for they are the most desperate to get out of whatever misery this rigged system has put them in.
Rigged because his chances would have been far better if he had put that $2 into start-up Facebook. Maybe he wouldn’t have become a multi-millionaire, but he still hasn’t and his chances of doing so from the lotto are close to zero.
That $2, however, could have perhaps turned into $2,000, or maybe even $20,000. Life-changing in its own way, especially for those down in the gutter where the lotto is most advertised by the state government.
Yet this poor man can’t save that $2 by throwing it at a start-up in the hope he wins a different sort of lottery. One that is actually productive. One that creates wealth for all, rather than burning it.
That’s because the law prohibits the poor from investing in start-ups. It prohibits the middle class too, and everyone else who is not already very rich or is not a bank.
Yet that same law is very happy to give the poor complete freedom to gamble what little penny they may have so that one idiot can go and spend whatever peanuts are left from that $70 billion into drugs and prostitutes.
The law, men and women. Not the culture. Government policy. You disobey you go to prison. SEC has been busy in fact threatening many fine men and women who dream of actually building something. You need millions first, pay lawyers and whatever else, to get SEC permission. Then the poor can be “protected.”
By “then” we mean after the rich have taken all the gains, with not even crumbs left for the middle class let alone the poor. The poor can go away pay “voluntary” taxes in the “lottery,” making the rest voluntarily disgusted.
$1.6 billion. Why not make it one hundred billion so that they can sell their shirts in the “hope” of zero chances. And even if they get lucky, we’re all the poorer for it because someone who has not earned such huge sums won’t put them to any productive use.
You get rich by building things, by creating value, not by burning money in the lottery. Yet you can’t build things. That’s prohibited.
Not technically, but practically if you want to start an innovative business you need at least some upfront funding. You can’t have that upfront funding by asking many to chuck $2. SEC comes knocking, demanding papers like the gestapos of old.
Rigged. The whole system is rigged. That’s why the rich keep getting richer. It is not the market, but the law which prohibits everyone but the rich to meaningfully participate in the market and thus reap the rewards.
Copyrights Trustnodes.com
