Only in America

There are a couple of important points to be made regarding Smokey’s parable and the gambling issue.

First, Smokey’s parable illustrates the principal that our money no longer has any intrinsic value. It is nothing more than a way of “keeping score”. The only difference between the tourist actually staying the night is that no one made a profit, but several things have been “re-valued”! The $100 worth of meat the innkeeper bought on credit from the butcher must have been equal in value to the worth of the pig that the butcher bought from the pig farmer. Likewise, that pig must have been equal in value to the services provided to the pig farmer by the hooker. (Substitute maid, carpenter, plumber, or any other service provider--It doesn’t matter, the principal is the same.) Next, the services provided by the hooker (or plumber, or carpenter, or maid) to the pig farmer have been shown to be worth only as much as the “rooms that she rented when she brought her clients there”. Finally, those rooms rented by the hooker are shown to be equal in value to the meat purchased by the innkeeper from the butcher! No matter what any of these goods or services may have been deemed to be worth at the time, they have been “re-valued” to all be worth the same, and the $100 “score-keeping card” has been passed around to cancel all of the debts. The tourist is actually irrelevant in this parable except to confuse the issue. The same result could have been reached if all of the principals would have sat down at a table and talked their circumstances through. Essentially the same thing happens millions of times every day as “money” is electronically transferred around the world from account to account by Automated Clearing Houses. (For example, you work all week, the value of your work is transferred to your bank account, then part of it is transferred to your MasterCard account, from which there has already been some transferred to the “butcher” for the roast you had for dinner Sunday, and some has been transferred from his account to the pig farmer from whom he bought the pig.

Second, with casinos, just as in Smokey’s parable, the “tourist” is an OUTSIDER to the group of merchants and frequently decides to partake of the goods or services. When this happens, the “tourist’s” outside “score-keeping card” (the $100 bill) STAYS in the community to circulate in the local economy. When enough “tourists” bring enough $100 score-keepers into the local economy, the innkeeper buys MORE meat from the butcher to feed them, the butcher buys MORE pigs from the pig farmer, the pig farmer has more profit to spend on “recreation”, the innkeeper expands his inn, which puts MORE local tradesmen to work, and so on, and so on, and so on. While all of this occurs, there are more wages and profits to be taxed so that City Hall can waste the money on the same old failed schemes downtown or to build “water features” at new “gateways”.