Brown today apparently launched a review into the super casino plans launched and much supported by Blair. This review is though popularly seen as the death of super casino plans as a means to redevelop some inner city areas.

The whole debate over the super casinos always slightly confused me surely casinos are businesses like all others they both provide positive externalities and negative ones. The whole debate about the wrongs of casinos seems to begin with the assumption that potential users of casinos can’t really handle it. That once you enter a slippery road of addiction and the entry to crime.

I’m not going to deny the fact some people do get addicted to gambling and that casinos also draw in crime if badly managed. Let’s follow the idea of addiction to its end though first, we have from Gordon the suggestion that the introduction of Casinos would lead to addiction a social ill and so should not be introduced. But then we allow smoking, drinking, pornography and even gambling on races all things that we can get addicted to but we wouldn’t ban those activities although saying that the government does discourage many of them. It seems them that there is no basis on which to attack casinos on the basis of social ill. Like all other firms they offer a service that rational consumers buy into, like all other firms they come with a level of social bad, the government must leave it up to consumers to decide what they which to do with their money

Now lets deal with crime again any concentration of private property is going to attract crime. It’s the basic problem of capitalist economics supply is based around scarcity, all firms encourage crime in that people will rob to gain what they otherwise cant have without committing a crime.

All in all then I don’t really see what the difference is between one business and another or rather a casino, and the truth is that there really isn’t one. Just as central government recognises that is none of its business in intervening whether or not a off-licence opens down the road its none of central governments business where casinos open. Much like the spirit rather than the practise of alcohol and tobacco tax the casinos and their customers should pay for the negative cost of their business paying towards gambling addiction treatment and extra policing rather than banning the freedom to gamble all together.