Why is America cracking down on poker sites? What's wrong with them?
Gambling is a fight over what people have banked rather than the creation of new wealth.
Take a woodcutter and a furniture maker. The furniture maker needs wood. The woodcutter happens to need a chair.
The woodcutter happens to have a tree he felled yesterday. The furniture maker has a chair he made yesterday. So... do they gamble? Is it an efficient use of time for them each to spend days trying to one-up each other, both in an attempt to get the other's small cache of wealth for no cost to them?
If the woodcutter would just fell another tree, and the furniture maker would make another chair, and they were to
trade, they would both have their original bankroll plus exactly what they want.
Work allows for sustainable gain. Gambling is nothing but net loss and can even set things up for a downward spiral -- what happens if the loser now has to sell the tools of his trade just to eat? Now he can't work. It is a significant loss to the system when a person loses the wealth required to create wealth efficiently.
Gambling screws with the market's disbursement. Instead of wealth movement showing a preference for movement supporting the creation of more wealth, you have wealth movement that prefers nothing, taking away from the pool finding its "best fit." (To the winner it's "found money", leading to splurging behavior, not wise investment. So what you have is an blip in luxury demand with no sustainable backing while the
real market is crashing.)
We have ample evidence that unregulated gambling causes serious problems. It's not something that people self-regulate particularly well, and even small fluctuations in disposable income can have profound effects.