You evidently stem from excellent entrepreneurial stock! In the past whenever the subject of „winning the lottery“ has come up at our dinner table, I have pushed back hard and (possibly) overly harshly. My point has always been that playing the lottery is an idiotic, losers game and that real wealth, if that is the goal, is to be found in entrepreneurial activity that organises around solving a problem for enough people to make the effort worth while. Success isn‘t guaranteed but by and large the outcome has very little to do with chance and almost all of it is controllable by you. Another excellent piece Bruce
When I researched this topic, I found the many of the original 13 colonies utilized lotteries as funding sources. Income taxes were not instituted in the US until the diabolical Woodrow Wilson ascended to the Presidency in 1913. The lottery practice was not abandoned on moral grounds, but because of wide-spread corruption. I would be in favor of eliminating income tax and returning to lotteries to fund our governments. At least that "tax" is voluntary, unless one concludes that preying upon the mathematically challenged deems the practice involuntary...
Thank you for this clear, insightful piece.
You evidently stem from excellent entrepreneurial stock! In the past whenever the subject of „winning the lottery“ has come up at our dinner table, I have pushed back hard and (possibly) overly harshly. My point has always been that playing the lottery is an idiotic, losers game and that real wealth, if that is the goal, is to be found in entrepreneurial activity that organises around solving a problem for enough people to make the effort worth while. Success isn‘t guaranteed but by and large the outcome has very little to do with chance and almost all of it is controllable by you. Another excellent piece Bruce
When I researched this topic, I found the many of the original 13 colonies utilized lotteries as funding sources. Income taxes were not instituted in the US until the diabolical Woodrow Wilson ascended to the Presidency in 1913. The lottery practice was not abandoned on moral grounds, but because of wide-spread corruption. I would be in favor of eliminating income tax and returning to lotteries to fund our governments. At least that "tax" is voluntary, unless one concludes that preying upon the mathematically challenged deems the practice involuntary...