WTO wants to legalize gambling where gambling is illegal
Posted by Moonage on 30 Oct 2006 | Tagged as: International Issues
I got issues here. Some places don’t benefit from gambling. Some places, like my home town, outright ban gambling. We didn’t ban casinos, we banned gambling. There are a lot of social problems that come with gambling. If it’s legal, then more often than not social support is put in place to deal with those problems FROM the revenues those activities generate. What Antigua and Barbuda are saying is they want the money while towns like mine pay for the problems. That’s just not right folks. I personally could care less if gambling’s legal or not. But, if you’re going to tempt people with a vice that can be very damaging, you better spend some money dealing with it. If Antigua and Barbuda want to send money to the US to compensate for all the damage their activity could incur, then I might ease up on them. As it is, I think this is a horrible suggestion by the World Trade Organization. The United States, along with any other country that does not wish to have gambling, has the right to protect their citizens from that activity. If gambling were legal countrywide, THEN Antigua and Barbuda would have a valid argument.
Secondly, very few of these gambling organizations are even IN Antigua and Barbuda. They sit in places like New York and Los Angeles, form a company in those little countries, and do what they can’t do within the US. So, for Antigua and Barbuda to make the claim this is an "unfair trade practice" is horribly disingenious to me. For the World Trade Organization to not recognize that fact in this dispute to me is equally disingenious.
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