The article and the Free Press editorial on March 17 concerning legalized sports gambling cannibalizing revenue from the state lottery are interesting as they present two examples of using the ends to justify the means.
In both cases, public education is being supported using a means that is demonstrably corrosive to the public weal, i.e., gambling. There’s a certain absurdity (nope, it’s not irony) in financing education with an activity that children are rightly forbidden to engage in and that was illegal not many years ago.
Perhaps, rather using the support of scholarships to encourage people to buy lottery tickets, the lottery folks could threaten to shoot a puppy whenever enough tickets aren’t sold daily. They’d probably make up what’s being lost to sports betting pretty quickly, and we wouldn’t have to involve the kids.
Nick Decosimo