Some years ago, I spent a day at a libertarian convention in Portland, figuring I could get a column out of it.

I did, but I also got the same cognitive dissonance I always get out of libertarianism.

I’m a small-government conservative, but society exists so we can live in peace together and not just to enable individuals to take actions that might benefit themselves but harm the community around them.

Thus, we need boundaries ruling some actions out of bounds. Ideally, those lines should be drawn by custom and tradition, with government stepping in as a last resort, and I would put them in vastly different places than a “progressive” would, but we can’t be really free unless damaging practices are under control.

I had occasion to recall the feeling when, once again, a referendum to authorize a casino in Maine qualified for the statewide ballot as Referendum Question 1.

This proposal, whose backers are primarily business owners in southern and western Maine (who will not themselves operate it, as a national “gaming” firm will be brought in to operate the casino and take a large chunk of its profits), is set to be placed somewhere along Route 26 in the town of Oxford if it gets voter approval on Nov. 2.

If it does get a “yes” vote, it will become only the second casino in Maine, as voters have turned down other proposals in 2003, 2008 and 2009.

(In the first such vote, when Mainers turned down a huge casino to be run by Maine’s Indian tribes, voters as a sort of consolation approved “racinos” at or near the state’s two full-time harness racing tracks, primarily as a way to support a traditional Maine pastime that had come on hard times. But since the law required local approval, and all the towns around Scarborough Downs rejected it while Bangor approved the idea, the state’s only casino sits in the Queen City.)

Libertarians say people shouldn’t be told they can’t gamble with their own money. And I see no problem with that at the retail level.

If a bunch of friends want to get together on Friday nights for Texas hold-’em, or if a group of workers run a March Madness pool, bet on the baseball playoffs or put a few bucks down on the Super Bowl, so what? Horse racing has a long history in Maine and wagering on it is well-established.

But what we’re being sold now is industrial-scale gambling, set up as a scientifically designed money-inhaling assembly line using slot machines ergonomically enhanced to keep people pumping in money — and losing most of it.

Most people can see that this is far different from friendly wagering. They see it so well, in fact, that we have already turned it down three times.

Our society tells people all the time that they can’t spend their money on illegal activities, and casino gambling is illegal and has been upheld as such in multiple votes (except for Bangor, which as we noted is a special case).

There’s no full-time harness racing track in Oxford that will be saved by this (though the backers have optioned the track at the Oxford fairgrounds as a drop of eyewash to meet the law’s requirements for an affiliation with racing).

Nearly a decade ago, this paper sent me to Ledyard, Conn., to talk to people there about the impact on their area of Foxwoods, a real destination resort casino with headliner acts and the largest gambling facility in the world.

I spoke with community officials in Ledyard and surrounding towns, and they were unanimous in telling me they wished the casino had never come. Traffic soared and crime and other social problems had risen, taking what had been a pleasant, leaf-shaded town into new, darker reality.

Looking around the country, says Dennis Bailey, the spokesman for Casinos No!, which has a decade of successful experience opposing casinos in Maine, nearly all communities with casinos report either no discernible economic benefits or have experienced declines in overall measures of prosperity.

It isn’t just the big basket cases like Atlantic City, where gleaming casinos line a Boardwalk while the rest of the city remains blighted.

Smaller communities such as Lawrenceburg, Ind., and Tunica County, Miss., which had looked to gambling to solve their economic issues, found local dollars going out of state, tourism scant and unemployment remaining high.

The Oxford casino’s backers helped finance and are advertising a study by a University of Maine economics professor, Todd Gabe, who said a casino there would bring in tons of money and jobs.

Question 1’s backers tout that finding, but oddly, they don’t cite a sentence at the very end of Gabe’s report in which he says his analysis “does not show — one way or another — whether this can be considered ‘new’ economic activity to the state and region, or whether it is money that would have been spent elsewhere on other goods and services.”

Gabe also says he does not take a position on whether gambling “is positive or negative for the state of Maine.”

Some study. Some support.

Maine, Bailey says, does a lousy job of regulating the gambling it has, sending revenues to OTB parlors owned by foreign firms and not requiring any accounting by other recipients of funds. Now, he says, the state is letting another group draw up the law that will govern its own business.

Mainers have voted wisely three times on casinos. One more “no” could cement that judgment permanently.

 

M.D. Harmon is an editorial writer. He can be contacted at 791-6482 or at:

mharmon@mainetoday.com

 

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