Internet poker: new ways to fund the welfare state

D.C. Plays Fizzbin With Online Poker - How to make the poor pay for the welfare state: online gambling.
Excerpt:

Sometimes only a Star Trek metaphor will do. Remember the episode about a primitive people who developed a planet-girdling civilization based on the principles of the Chicago gangs? Many modern economic anthropologists would tell you that the state begins as organized crime, dividing up rackets and controlling turf.

Case in point: anything having to do with Internet poker.

It starts with the enterprising activities of the Justice Department. Seizing on a 2006 law making it illegal to process U.S. payments for online gambling, federal prosecutors last year brought charges against three offshore poker websites. While admitting no wrongdoing, the sites quickly settled and agreed to hand over substantial sums of money to the department.

Some of these funds were supposed to reimburse the "victims," U.S. poker players who had money in their accounts when the sites were shut down. But so cumbersome and legalistic is the process created by Justice that many lawyers say they don't expect their clients to find it worth the trouble or legal fees. Justice may end up keeping much of the loot itself under asset-forfeiture rules.

Don't expect a hue and cry from gambling interests, however. Bigger stakes are up for grabs, not unlike the turf war Captain Kirk found when he beamed down to the gangster planet Sigma Iotia II.

Having cleared the online poker marketplace of its incumbents, Justice decided that under the 1961 Wire Act most Internet gambling isn't illegal after all. This new "interpretation," which came at the behest of Illinois and New York, has inspired a new light in the eyes of state officials looking for ways to fund the welfare state. Dancing in their heads are visions of new state-sponsored gambling empires built on online poker, online slot machines and online lottery-ticket sales, with politicians collecting most of the vig.

Comment: I missed that episode but I was never really a Star Trek fan. On Fizzbin. Fizzbin image source.  On Chicago Mobs of the Twenties. And Star Trek Season 2 » Episode #17 - A Piece of the Action