Billion-Dollar Bingo

When I was a spindly, five-foot, tree-climbing lad, I deduced that if I could tie four strings from the waist of a plastic army man to the four corners of a handkerchief, toss them out of a tree, and watch them descend slowly like a real parachuting soldier, I certainly could do something similar to myself. So I gathered the material: a bed sheet and four lengths of rope.

I'm here today, because my mother stopped me.

She interfered in my behalf on other occasions as well, including the time I planned to run a numbers racket. I didn't know that's what it was called or that it was illegal, it just made sense. And it seemed so simple. Why wasn't everyone doing it? That should have been my first clue.

As Catholics we were exposed to bingo. Our parish church, like just about every enterprising Catholic parish in those days, staged evening bingos, raffles, and festivals littered with carny-like games of chance.

Even though I did not do well in math as a grade-school student, it wasn't difficult to understand that the parish made out well in these enterprises. Especially raffles. When I asked myself, how can the parish afford to give away a new car? the numbers gave me the answer.

No surprise then that I would deduce with my soldier-parachute logic, that I could run a raffle in my neighborhood among my friends.

I'm here today, because my mother stopped me.

Okay, I don't suppose I would have been destroyed or even arrested for running numbers at my age, had I been caught. And it doesn't matter. But the lesson does.

My mother explained that raffles and lotteries are illegal, because they take money from a lot of people and give it to a few people without providing any other benefit. In short, many lose, a few win. And that's not nice.

On the other hand, a church bingo supports the generally beneficial work of the church. Fund-raisers for non-profits support good work that would not otherwise get done. When run by a state and the proceeds funneled into schools or infrastructure, a lottery amounts to a kind of fun-to-pay tax.

Capitalism rewards profit. It's counter-capitalistic to give money to a church, a public school, a teacher, a police department, a homeless shelter, a food bank, or any other non-profit entity. Unless you brag about it on your corporate website. While non-profit enterprises benefit us and even make more comfortable the environment in which we practice capitalism, they cost without generating profit.

Like Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors, capitalism gives us an awe-inspiring show, but it demands blood and to be fed more and more and more. We need some sort of force motivated by something other than profit, not only to build roads and feed the poor, but to regulate the most un-beneficial kinds of capitalistic enterprises such as private lotteries.

And yet that's exactly what free-market extremists have allowed to happen. While you and I worked and built our economy in return for modest rewards, others sat on the sidelines and gorged themselves on profits earned by simply betting on how we would do. They ran raffles on the profits they hauled in by the truckload. And that's not nice.

Had Doris Lloyd been in charge, she would have rapped the knuckles of Wall Street speculators and hedge fund gamblers with her wooden cooking spoon. Rapped them darn hard for playing billion-dollar-bingo with the life blood of our economy. Unfortunately she died in 1990, just as the greedy spirit of de-regulation was getting up to speed.

We're in the mess we are today, because my mother's wisdom could not stop the madness.

Labels: Audrey, bingo, capitalism, Doris Lloyd, hedge funds, Little Shop of Horrors, Wall Street