9th Circuit sides with states in Kalshi gambling fight

Gambling is a negative externality that needs to be taxed.

Gambling takes advantage of the poor, under-educated, and addictive personalities and puts them into financial distress. This places burden on families, the state, and local municipalities. It creates strain on the workforce and deflects legitimate economic activity that would otherwise strengthen the economy.

We're a free society. I'm fine with gambling from a personal liberty perspective, but the companies that facilitate and profit need to pay 40-50% of their gross revenue to the government. That's comparable to tobacco.

Companies also need to be restricted in how they are able to advertise their vices. Never to children, and never targeted to at-risk personality types.

They also need to be tightly regulated and kept from using dark patterns and addictive gotcha mechanics to cause even greater harm to those most at risk.

The law is slow by design, it's deliberative, it's multi-staged, it's escalatory and obsessed with consulting multiple jurists. That can be extremely frustrating until you start looking into how the country would look if individual judges were able to fast-track the whole system. Naturally we'd celebrate the positive outcomes, but the bad ruling would immediately go into effect rather than facing injunction, review, etc.

These laws have profound effects and it takes people time to learn about what they pertain to, especially new technology or new ways of using it. It's good to have periods of feedback between the public, the courts, the legislature and the executive branch. The same things that slow down what we most want to happen quickly also slow down the things we desperately want to avoid.

"If only the law moved as quickly as an individual" is great until you get a guy like Trump in power.

Everyone agreed that this (what the court ruled) was the plain meaning of the law up until Kalshi just decided to go for it. They basically did an Uber on the law, completely ignoring how it had long been interpreted and demanding someone stop them. And only once Kalshi wanted to make money on sports gambling did there start to be parsing like this, to try to argue that sports gambling was legal on a CFTC-regulated exchange. If Kalshi had gotten the law thrown out for vagueness then basically there was a road map for making any law that got in the way of a company making money thrown out for vagueness.

The key is that up until a few years ago basically the universal consensus was that sports gambling was not possible on a CFTC regulated exchange, then all of a sudden Kalshi did it and now they are trying to pay enough lawyers to get them to justify it. This ruling is not judicial legislation, this is demanding that companies actually follow the law.

From the opinion:

"Because the definitions of event and occurrence do not resolve the issue before us, we must also consider the statutory context"

They talk about this and the exact definitions for basically the entire opinion. It's not just "meh, I felt like it". They are dealing with how these words have been defined in prior statutes.

Hope dang comes in with a headline rewrite