Wanna bet on it?

Voices in high places tell us that banning online gambling would only drive it underground, where it would be harder to control. If we believe this defeatist line, we would have to legalize every vice just to keep it in plain sight — an abject surrender dressed up as pragmatism.

From our Philosophy 101, this is a false choice, breeding fallacies like rabbits in heat. And from where this Contrarian sits, the question is not whether gambling exists legally or illegally, online or otherwise. It is whether the government has the political will to confront gambling’s ill effects, especially on those who can least afford it.

We are not speaking here of half-naked men playing cara y cruz on the street, but of high school and college students gambling away tuition money on e-casinos. In one 2024 law enforcement report, over 150 minors were apprehended in just six months for illegal online gambling, a number likely understated given the anonymity of the web.

Other countries have tackled the issue with enforcement, public education, and technology. As such, pretending that our only options are regulation or chaos is a failure of imagination — and a convenient excuse for inaction.

“The problem is not online gambling but its social effects,” another defense claims. This separates cause from effect, another fallacy.

Remove the act and you remove the consequence; remove the source and the damage stops. To say otherwise is like claiming cigarettes are harmless except for the lung cancer, or that drunk driving is fine as long as no one gets hurt.

Then comes the qualifier: online gambling is “not a criminal enterprise per se.” True — just as a slot machine is not a criminal in itself.

But the test of governance is not whether something is technically legal, but whether it breeds social ills and must be stopped. Not everything legal is moral, our ethics professor would always remind us.

The economic argument is rolled out like a sure winner: tens of thousands of jobs, billions in revenue, taxes to fund public schools and hospitals. Yet the money has to come from somewhere — mostly from people losing more than they can afford.

A 2022 University of the Philippines study estimated that gambling costs the economy billions of pesos annually in lost productivity, health care, and social services. These costs do not show up in the revenue column, but the public pays them all the same.

The slippery slope warning is another favorite: ban it and it will thrive in the shadows. We may concede that this is an assumption that draws its strength from the failure of policing in the past. Remember jueteng?

Still, there is no credible evidence that a well-enforced ban will make the problem worse. On the contrary, legal status gives online gambling legitimacy and reach.

And then there is the language — “transparent,” “accountable,” “responsible gambling.” These make it sound like a civic virtue, not an addiction. In reality, the industry’s profits depend on the opposite of responsibility.

To speak of “responsible gambling” is to talk of “moderate fraud” — an oxymoron.

Regulation is not impossible. But it should not rest on myths — that the country will collapse without vice, that vice is harmless, that its revenues are pure gain.

What the public deserves is policy grounded in facts, not illusions. In the end, the real wager is on whether the government will act, not whether the odds will.