So I read this article this morning about how piles of money are shockingly not greatly improving the lives of lottery winners. Why ever might that be? Could it be that people who pay a dollar a week for a one in a billion chance at unearned riches are not amazing money managers?
The lottery is the only system of welfare paid for exclusively by the people who can least afford it. The lottery is wrong. Your lotto ticket buying grannies are subsidizing under-funded programs that should be paid for by funded state mandate. Supporting the lotto is encouraging our government to tax the poor for social programs designed to benefit the poor (while the rich buy yachts and pinch bottoms in St. Barts.) Furthermore, allowing the poor to elect one person to be rich obviously doesn’t benefit the community and also doesn’t benefit the newly moneyed individual. Most folks who have the capacity to earn reasonable wealth are doing so and are not spending money on the lotto.
Winning the lottery is kicking Darwin in the nuts. It’s setting up a survival of the least fit situation. I can give my dog a flux capacitor, but he’ll just piss on it; it takes a Doc Brown to stick it in a DeLorean and err… popularize rock and roll. Can we please stop giving these dogs flux capacitors? Can we please leave Darwin’s nuts alone?
Another example: warning labels. You mean I shouldn’t tip a soda machine onto myself? I shouldn’t drink Drain-o? Au contraire, I say. If I have the God given American right to be an asshole, I think I should have the right to accidentally kill myself, should I be a complete idiot. Think of the babies people say. What of it? When was that last time you saw a baby trying to jiggle a Snickers out of a candy machine. When was the last time you saw a baby reading Dostoevsky? How about a Goodnight Moon? No? Well then what are the stickers for? Adults. Stupid adults. Mr. Yuck stickers are for kids. ‘Don’t jump into lion’s enclosure’ signs are for their moron parents.
Let idiots be idiots; how about instead of granting million dollar settlements to people who spill coffee on themselves, and allowing legalized gambling to fund our schools, we ask everyone (including corporations) to contribute towards better schools and hospitals. This way we don't have to give any old idiot a million dollars to put up his nose for ten years before he's back in the government cheese line, just to partially fund full day kindergarten for a year.
6 comments:
I can't tell how serious you are here. You know warning labels are to avoid legal liability, and not for consumers, right?
Sure, but that's not really my point, basically my point is that we are practically encouraging dumb people to breed and take over the Earth.
We live in a society where if it doesn't say not to and someone tips a coke machine onto themselves instead of being a cautionary tale he (or his family) sues Coke, and the distributor, and the building the machine was in and makes a ton of money for the value of his life and the emotional significance instead of the loss of earning potential. By the way, money which he (or his family) then puts up his (their) nose etc. years before he (they) die of preventable lung cancer or heart disease in a trailer in Detroit.
The bottom line is that we shouldn't be forced to warn people against doing obviously idiotic things, and we certainly shouldn't have to pay them when they do something stupid and we didn't take the time to remind them not to be dumb. You may feel differently about it, especially being a law student. For me this all goes back to accountability. Clearly, it's not Billy's fault he died because he stuck his hand in a garbage disposal- it's the disposal's fault.
Law suits, warning stickers, constant disclaimers, the lotto, non-skill based gambling, it's all avoidance of true accountability. YOU spilled the coffee in YOUR lap. YOU decided to take YOUR kid's picture next to a bear in a national park. YOU have made poor financial decisions, but YOU deserve to be rich? Wait, what?!
I'm sure you see where I am going with this. Clearly we're trapped in this system forever, and as this is a private blog read by maybe 40 people, mostly in the field of education I'm obviously not advocating for anything.
I recently informed my coworker that he was to stop smoking, he would save $127 per month. He replied that he could buy 127 more lottery tickets per month then. He supplements the state games with some games on the side. Without state lotteries, the numbers games would still occur. I think that it would take a gun for him to open an index fund. A fool and his money...
I own a gun. Well,no bullets; but you can buy those at Wallmart, right?
You would enjoy -- if you haven't found it yet -- OverLawyered.com . All kinds of ranting (based on current news) about the whole "not-my-fault" culture in America and beyond.
ESV
Lottery + check cashing places + furniture rental = ethically sickening exploitation of the poor and/or ignorant.
I'm turning into enough of a conspiracy believer to think we don't fund education enough, because the industries that benefit from ignorant consumers won't go for it.
Word, sister.
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