No one is obligated, play whoever wants to. Honest money is work and time spent earning it. It's yours, spend it however you like. The State has nothing to do with it.
A lot of people, most of them, play just for fun. To spend a few hours at roulette, black jack, baccarat, winning and losing, getting emotional, and if you come away with a little loss, fine, that's the price for the hours of fun.
In the United States, due to their criminal origins, casinos are among the businesses most supervised by the IRS, the police, and the casinos themselves to prevent fraud. No one is crazy enough to try to cheat at a Las Vegas casino. It's easier to steal it spectacularly, like in the movies.
Founded by gangsters to legalize their businesses, Las Vegas has become a family city, capital of gambling and entertainment and one of the biggest tourist destinations in the world: 40 million a year (Brazil receives 6 million). Imagine the mass of state, municipal and federal taxes. In order to have a license to operate a casino, it is necessary to comply with strict requirements, a clean record, and a searched police and tax history. Bandits, militiamen and front men are not welcome.
In Portugal, Italy, France, many casinos are state-owned, with quality control of the operation, efficient administrations and under permanent supervision, to detect money laundering and suspicious operations.
Gaming is not addiction: it's entertainment. But those who have the compulsion to bet on everything and anywhere, on the jogo do bicho, on the lottery, on scratch cards, on clandestine roulette, on horses, on cards, on the Stock Exchange. They throw the car, the house, the health plan, it's a disease, a pathology, an exception. Yes, gambling can also be hard drugs, there are people who live to gamble, they are addicts who must be treated in rehabilitation clinics, such as those who are addicted to alcohol, drugs and sex.
Since 1946, Brazil has lost trillions of dollars in jobs and taxes when, with an authoritarian stroke of the pen, Marshal Eurico Gaspar Dutra, president of the Republic, at the request of his ultra-Catholic wife Dona Santinha, banned gambling in Brazil, in the name of of God and family.
He threw tens of thousands of professionals who had their jobs in the casinos into unemployment. He stopped receiving taxes from casino owners, employees and gamblers and tourists' dollars. All in the name of God.
With the backwardness that characterizes us and the religious and populist hypocrisy that plagues us, what was ilegal, but tolerated, was finally legalized in Brazil, almost always in the hands of bandits, without any control and without generating jobs or taxes. These will be the big losers.
If managed and supervised like those in Las Vegas or Europe, casinos will be a great source of jobs and public funds. But what matters is what will be done with that money.
The game is open, gamblers have fun, but it's not the bank that always wins: it's the State.
Nelson Motta
Journalist and composer, Nelson Motta was born in São Paulo in 1944. He was the creator and scriptwriter of TV shows at Globo, such as the musical Chico & Caetano (1986). Currently, he has a weekly column in Jornal da Globo and presents the ‘Em Casa com Nelson Motta’ show, on GloboNews.
