Suckers deserve to get took

On a recent trip home to Georgia, I bought a $1 Powerball lottery ticket.

Obviously, I didn’t win, because I’d be off doing rich people stuff like buying midgets on the Internet instead of writing this if I did.

A lot of other things didn’t happen because of my purchase of a lottery ticket, either.

I’m happy to report that the state of Georgia, which sells lottery tickets, has not been overrun by the Mafia or prostitutes. Nor have the majority of its residents become addicted to gambling. Vidalia onion, fried catfish and boiled peanuts, yes, gambling no. The state has not been plagued with an excess of floods, fires, locusts other expressions of divine displeasure. Nancy Grace does live there, but I think that’s a test of Georgians’ patience and endurance rather than a punishment.

On a personal level, my purchase of a $1 lottery ticket (and a $1.69 Sunkist so the convenience store clerk wouldn’t look at me funny for just purchasing one ticket) has had a very minimal effect on my life, other than the loss of the aforementioned $2.69. I feel no overwhelming compulsion to empty my bank account and pawn my DVD player to buy more Powerball tickets. I do not think I will sell off any family members into white slavery to play the scratch-off just one more time.

My point, if I have one, is that I completely don’t understand why some people have a hang up about gambling. 

To me, lotteries, casinos, slot machines, sports books and the like are a great way for business and the government to tap into a nearly unlimited natural human resource.

Stupidity.

If you take a look of the odds involved with nearly any game of chance, you’ll see that they’re very highly stacked in favor of you losing your money. You’ve almost certainly got a better chance of making something out of any amount of money you’re planning on betting on a lottery ticket or bingo card by putting it in the bank or in an investment. Of course, there always are those one or two winners, but chances are that you’re not going to be that guy.

Folks who get bent out of shape say that gambling preys upon the poor. I hate to say it, but most folks who are poor, myself included, got that way by doing incredibly dumb stuff like dropping out of school, racking up a criminal record or going into journalism as a career. It’s not like these folks are going to make incredibly wise decisions with their money if the temptation of gambling is removed. They’ll most likely go and spend it on cigarettes, video games or Dale Earnhart commemorative plates instead.

Stupid people create most of society’s problems, so I really don’t have much of a problem with letting them pay for the mess in the form of taxes generated from gambling revenue or jobs created in casinos or gaming halls.

It all basically boils down to this: Suckers deserve to get took, so it may as well be us that takes them.

Jim Cook is taking bets at .