Doing my part to distribute Steven Horwitz's Open Letter to the Left. If only there were a presidential candidate who would take this sort of stance.

Moral is: listen to AEI more often.

Speaking of suicidal tennis players, here's David Foster Wallace in Tennis magazine on the U.S. Open, a piece not published in either of his collections (via McSwys).

(Post updated to reflect the obvious Mountain Goats lyric. Our friends say it's darkest before the sun rises. We're pretty sure they're all wrong.)

I obviously can understand a Nevada that permits gambling, subject to some light regulation for consumer-protection purposes. My kind of government, let people choose for themselves.

I can understand the view of most states fifty years ago, outlawing all gambling. I don't agree with it, as I don't agree with most nanny-state measures, but it is a conscious and internally consistent public-policy choice, and a community can have some say over the local morality.

I'm even willing to give some slack to hypocritical states like Virginia today that outlaw all gambling, but hold a state-owned monopoly through lotteries that have far worse odds than any slot machine. Yeah, it's a tax on the stupid, but we frankly don't tax stupidity enough or we wouldn't have so much of it.

What I don't understand is the reasoning of a state that outlaws nearly all gambling--but permits pull-tab shops. Pull-tabs are indistinguishable from slot machines, except they're manual sheets of paper, sold out of bowls in dismal storefronts in strip malls. What could the legislature be thinking? "We're okay with the social costs of gambling addiction, but we don't want anybody to actually have fun while doing it"?