People from different places and political affiliations can have honest disagreements about the form of government they tend to favor, but they seem to have one thing consistently in common. Those who seek political office, regardless of the type of government, tend to enjoy trying to control the behavior of their constituents, while accepting no limits on their own actions. These fun Governors will try to enact legislation that will often impose monastic type rules on the people while they, themselves, have the keys to Sodom tucked into their vest pocket. This “Do as I say and not as I do” attitude seems to come from the pretention that they are mature enough to handle these activities, while the unwashed masses need to be protected from themselves.
In the state of Illinois, a Will County Board Chairman is firmly standing against gambling, poker, and anything that slightly resembles these practices. He called out video poker specifically when voicing his opposition to gaming, "My understanding is, video poker is one of the most addictive forms of gambling there is," he said. Apparently Mr. Moustis has made it his mission to decide what addictive activities we should be allowed to partake in, and which ones we should be protected from.
Will County is not a dry county, so apparently Jim is okay with alcohol. Drinking is far more addictive then gambling, and kills well over a thousand residents of Illinois per year, yet he is not railing against that. Cigarettes are still widely available in his county, and considering the waistlines on some of his fellow board members, apparently donuts are addictive as well. I don’t hear any outrage from him about these addictive influences.
Granted, this is one small politician in a small county, he is symptomatic though. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority leader from the Vegas district has agreed that online gaming should not be available in the United States. Politicians have used the “addictive” argument (along with somehow connecting stopping online gaming to protecting the children) to keep people in the United States and other countries from logging on to an internet poker room and playing Texas Hold'em using their own time and money.
While many of us resent those who preach to us about responsibility while they are using the community chest to get into the bra and knickers of a working girl or are rewarded for cheating on their taxes by becoming the guy who runs the IRS, what most of us want is just to be left to sort out for ourselves how to spend our money. Is it really the business of any political figure if you choose to play online poker at home, or drop your own quarters into a video poker machine?
