Briefly: State lotteries are hypocritical and exploitive shams

It disgusts me that state governments steal so much money from people — mostly those who can’t afford the loss — by dangling before them the promise of $750 million in the Powerball lottery. A lottery is nothing but a tax on those who don’t understand probability statistics. If private parties want to operate gambling systems and if ignorant individuals want to throw their money at them, it’s not my business to stop them. But I’m disgusted that governments piously pretend it’s shameful and exploitive for private interests to run lotteries, but it’s fine and dandy as long as the coercive monopoly called the state gets the profit instead. This is wrong on many levels.