Wed, 01/26/2011 – 16:37 – PokerPages Staff

We live in strange times.  The decidedly coercive and often punitive “morality” governing the public utterances and policy-leanings of many mainstream politicians pretends to be against Evil and in support of victims, but its proscriptions and punishments, prohibitions and persecutions, would have been unrecognizable to the great revolutionaries of liberty who founded the USA.  They were not blind to evil, but they were passionately in favor of a massive extension of freedom against authoritarian despotism.  That the dominant creed in the Land of the Free, at least amongst our politicians and moral crusaders, should have mutated – although perhaps reverted is a better word – to an almost pre-democratic form of authoritarian conformity is a mater which requires urgent attention.  As the founding fathers knew well, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and it seems today as though we may have been less vigilant than we should have been of late.

In the new morality of the more pious of our politicians, Evil is everywhere and must be resisted on all fronts.  In addition, it appears that Evil thrives when there is too much freedom, so the latter must be curtailed.  In addition, one of the forms Evil toady takes, so the logic of this argument goes, is gambling, including poker.  It encourages reckless betting, leads to ruinous addictions, and causes financial penury.  The vulnerable, especially the young, must be shielded from it at all costs before it seduces them and lays waste to their lives.

It is the contention of our argument here that such a perspective rests upon a misguided, over simplistic and ultimately misanthropic vision of humanity.  We are, in this shamelessly bullying moral world, all one-poker game away from oblivion, or corruption, or helpless addiction.  We need to be protected against the irresistible temptations which will overcome us should we start out along this path, where the only winners are ruthless gambling houses and casino owners.  Evidently, what this moral ideology cannot endow us with is intelligence, resilience, and individual agency.  There is something just a little sour and joyless about it – if you are having fun; the assumption appears to be that you are flirting with the Devil, or with his secular descendants in the gambling industry.
 
Politicians who think it is somehow “moral” to oppose the licensing and regulation of online poker are suffering from a curious form of social amnesia.  It is, apparently, the height of morality to risk labeling hard-working, law-abiding Americans in Washington State as felons if they dare to indulge in a little online poker.  Equally, it is “moral” to bully money-transferring companies into banning U.S. citizens from playing online poker; for fear that, they will be busted by the feds and severely penalized.

What would President Warren Harding have made of twenty-first century US politicians?  He played poker regularly, as did Secretary of State Daniel Webster, President Truman (who used to mix poker with generous quantities of Kentucky bourbon), and even a young future presidential candidate called Barack Obama.  Were these politicians less moral than their contemporary descendants were?  Hardly; and yet many of our politicians – who we should see as our servants rather than our masters – are imposing a narrow and simply assumed “moral” agenda on everyone else.

If we were to recover our traditions, to listen to Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin rather than the narrow-minded zealots of modern fun-aversion, we might realize that it is profoundly immoral to seek to control the behavior and limit the freedoms of ordinary Americans.  It is a lamentable indictment of their tunnel vision hubris that so many politicians believe that is where morality begins.