Wild misunderstanding of Smith. He considered it a moral defect, wrote several pieces criticizing gambling, and criticized state run gambling.

"The over-weening conceit which the greater part of men have of their own abilities, is an ancient evil... their absurd presumption in their own good fortune, is even more universal."

Par for the course for many who mention Adam Smith. Another classic libel is bringing up his name in cases of gross misconduct by a business or a businessman, but he was very critical of the excesses of merchants. Smith was a moral philosopher first and an accidental economist second.

Yes! As a beginner-level, amateur armchair economist who hated philosophy class in high school, I have to admit I was surprised to learn about this when reading https://store.abramsbooks.com/products/economix by Michael Goodwin. The book overall seems to lean liberal whenever there's a political choice to be made, and yet it paints Adam Smith in a much more positive light that one would imagine, if all you've learned about him is the criticism of today's political left.

A really fun book, also!

> if all you've learned about him is the criticism of today's political left.

Leftists I've known are more likely to quote Smith than criticize him. He seems to be seen by leftists as an important figure in political economy (flawed in not reaching certain important questions, perhaps, but not much in how he addressed those questions he did consider.) Even his argument that the class whose understanding of their own interests is best aligned with the common interests is the landed aristocracy (the bourgeoisie having interests opposed to the common interest, while the working class shares—by its sheer size, defines—the common interests but lacks an understanding of what their real interests are in the domain of interest) [0] is seen as describing exactly a problem than the Left (see, e.g., Marx and discussions of class consciousness) sees as central to solve, rather than being a regressive idealized preference.

The Left criticizes a lot of the arguments people who appeal to a mythologized caricature of Smith use his name to defend, sure, but that's a different thing than criticizing Smith.

[0] Which is about as far as you can be from leaning liberal where there is a political choice to be made, though given the complete displacement of the landed aristocracy as an economically-meaningful distinct class it is largely irrelevant in practical terms in the 21st century.

Some in the Left, including Marx - perhaps most of the well-read Left - do this. Then there is an entire category of people who throw his name around in the mud and call “Adam Smith liberal” anything they view as immoral or excessive.

There's a great podcast about Adam Smith here, debunking some of those oversimplifications: https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/what%E2%80%99s-wrong-with-...

It's funny as a economist people thinking that the free market is some kind of god, that the invisible hand is infallible. He never argued markets work without institutions. He believed governments must enforce justice, prevent monopolies, and provide public goods for markets to function properly.

Maybe you have a valid point here, but by intentionally taking him out of context, it perpetuates the misunderstanding. We'd be better off actually understanding Smith, reading Smith, and grappling with limitations of the invisible hand. Otherwise it is just an exercise in nihilism and blowing everything up.

It's not about whether he is a good guy or not, it is about what we can learn from his writings.

I know he is always associated with the 'invisible hand of the market' idea, but a lot of his writings were about the PROBLEMS that arise because of this invisible hand. He had a lot of good insights into what we have to be careful of when the free market does what it does. We should actually take some of those lessons to shape policy to protect us from the invisible hand.

Noam Chomsky explains (I won't say 'apologizes for') Adam Smith frequently, but I think it is more important to allow modern, living thinkers space and consideration to reflect upon what is happening in our time, rather than relying excessively on canonical figures who didn't have our contemporary context available in their writings. Sadly there is plenty of timelessness, problems recognized in 1776 that still remain unsolved, but too many use the weight and respect for Adam Smith disingenuously to advocate for insane market policies.

Now we're discussing "audio frequencies"? My gosh, you really are off the deep end, aren't you.

If you want to effect change, then state your critique precisely, or not at all. Your looney top-level comment has derailed what should be a discussion of how to reign in Polymarket, because you've overstated your case, messed up your references to authority, and apparently you've slandered Aleister f*cking Crowley, too, such that his defenders are arguing about him here, instead of about how to reign in Polymarket.

When you make your side appear detached from all sense and reason, you are functionally no better than controlled opposition.

Much like Marx, who had a lot of very insightful observations.

Whether what was done in his name is or isn't directly attributable to his writings is somewhat academic. That has taken on a life of its own, and overshadowed all his other ideas.

It has also certainly made talking about class in America very difficult.

Very good comparison. I do have more respect for Marx, the modern concept of life/work balance owes much to his concept of estranged labor ("Life itself appears only as a means to life"), as I haven't had to live in a society afflicted by his excesses and misappropriations, unlike the case of Adam Smith.

Adam Smith mentions something similar as well. He talks about how the worker's attachment to the work is different when he's working in a super specialised part of a production process rather than making the whole product like an artisan.

For some reason people tend to forget the most important part of "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law", I guess it because the words "Love is the law, love under will" doesn't sound satanic enough. If you take the time to actually read some of his material you'll be surprised how much he (the 'satanist' Crowley) talks about God and angels (as positive forces).

They won't understand friend.

> I sense a large number of Polymarket apologists in the comments.

This is a bad faith start to any argument. It speaks past the conclusion that one side needs apologetics/advocates in the first place.

People have been threatened with murder (and I wouldn't be surprised if some people have actually been murdered) over shorting stocks. Yet no one is talking about "stock market apologists". I don't think Polymarket is actually introducing any novel risks or failure modes here. Functionally shorting a stock is not much different than a Polymarket prediction. People trading on oil futures may not be explicitly betting on the outcome of the war, but in practice they are.

Hard disagree. In most countries, you can not anonymously trade stocks, for starters, where you can anonymously bet on Polymarket.

Pretty sure that discussion was had in the 20s. What emerged was a securities regulation system with rules and prohibitions built on the mission of productive companies and positive-sum games.

Polymarket also bets on sports games and wars which makes it a categorically different market from a regulatory perspective.

> Functionally shorting a stock is not much different than a Polymarket prediction.

But can you short a stock if you are a director at that company?

The problem people have with betting markets isn’t that you can bet on an event. It’s that the event’s outcome might be shaped by the same people (or friends of the people) who actually shape the event.

This is why there are so many articles speculating who bets on Trump winning the election, or which company buys Time Warner or when Venezuela is attacked or when Iran is attacked. Maybe the winner is just a super forecaster in their own house or maybe they are a cabinet secretary walking into the Situation Room.

Sports betting was illegal until the last decade and the sports leagues in the USA had extremely stiff penalties for violating these rules. I’m still not sure what changed (other than money buying the crumbling of regulation).

> But can you short a stock if you are a director at that company?

You can, if you cover your tracks well enough. Or donate to a President willing to keep the SEC off your back.

I get that people in power can place bets on their own actions. But again, they can just do that in the stock market. A lawmaker might know a law is going to pass and trade on that insider knowledge. Or maybe the vice president owns shares in Haliburton and then helps encourage invading Iraq... what's old is new again, I guess.

In many companies this is not allowed.

Polymarket being an incompetent cabal that doesn't deserve to have a license is so passe, so ingrained in the standard recurring narrative that comes up whenever prediction markets are mentioned, and so universally agreed upon at this point that it frankly isn't that interesting to a lot of people. We all agree with it already, there is no one left to convince, certainly not on this site, better to talk about more interesting things that are nevertheless related. It's, well, boring, and this is exactly why a comment like this wasn't the top comment. I'm not saying a comment like this wouldn't be true, it would, it just isn't going to be a top comment, and that fact is unsurprising. I do share your sentiment though, that it would have been nice if human attention worked slightly differently here, but it does not.

> Hand over the names of the large bettors on that side of the market to the Israeli police

Woah there, didn't see this coming to be honest. But, I mean we already trust Israel to spend our tax dollars on genocide, so heck, why not, they'll do a great job!

> If Polymarket (and its competitors) cannot fix this, then it's time to get tough. Maybe it's time to actually crack down on Americans using VPNs

First of all, why is it time to get tough on limiting human rights, why is your freedom of speech and freedom of privacy the first thing on the chopping block, rather than Polymarket's license to operate, which is a much more obvious target for all of our disdain.

And also, it's physically impossible to crack down on VPNs 100%, especially within the constitutional framework we have in the US, and the technical reality of the modern internet. Keep in mind the US Government itself invented TOR to help destabilize and leak information out of autocratic regimes that have implemented sweeping censorship and blocking of VPNs (you know, the sort of autocratic regime you apparently want to start here in the US given your comments on the matter).

From a technical perspective, with SSL being standard for most web traffic it is utterly trivial to set up VPNs that hide in all kinds of ways that look completely innocuous and are unblockable. You can even hide exfiltration traffic in DNS queries, and I even got to see this a few times in practice when I still worked for the DoD back in the day. People will go to all kinds of lengths to get information in and out of a closed system and stopping that is like trying to catch air with your hands, you will always just end up hurting/restricting the average citizen and the bad actor who wants to slip through will still slip through.

Such a ban or KYC program is also fundamentally against every notion of privacy and freedom enshrined by the constitution and even more so by the founding spirit and values of the internet and reputable tech circles that care about privacy and freedom. You sound just as bad as Zuckerberg and Palantir trying to push KYC on Linux right now to help build a better mass-surveillance state for their fascist overlords. You seem to be the sort who would be extremely supportive of that project, though I sincerely hope that is not the case.

> we have extradition with Israel

For now. Once the Boomers finish their reverse mortgages and are finally out of the equation we'll hopefully cut all funding, sanction Israel, and label them a terroristic genocidal state, which they are. As usual, moral progress is always delayed by rich old men refusing to let go. Ethnostates are also extremely problematic in their own right, never mind genocidal ones. Certainly not morally praiseworthy, certainly not good "ally" material. Should be sanctioned in the very very least, definitely not subsidized.

And the funniest part is I agree with you that Polymarket is bad, which is your underlying point that you care so strongly about throughout this thread, but your arrogance and sudden undeserved spitefulness, in response to completely innocuous, imaginative, on-topic comments, just comes off as really bitter and makes you hard to talk to and even harder to agree with. Like you really have an axe to grind and I think it is rooted in some sort of deep-seated fear that everyone around you is as evil and misanthropic as you claim to be through your espoused values.

Look, it's not the point your making, but Adam Smith was not a laissez-faire capitalist. If you want to do the "capitalism bad" thing, I would suggest learning a bit of history, or at least understand that the "laissez-faire" in laissez-faire capitalism is a political ideology, not an economic ideology.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/11/the-gu...

More to your point... I don't think economic theory has anything to do with it. I'm a capitalist and I think that "prediction markets" is just an idiotic rebranding of "legalized gambling" and generally speaking, gambling more than a token sum (say, less than $100) should not be legal exactly because any benefits of gambling is far outweighed by the mountains of externalities it brings. Yes, this includes the obvious incentives to threaten random people. It's bad for society, so it should be effectively banned. The only reason why it has suddenly become legal everywhere in the US is because many states have found themselves under mountains of deferred liabilities and are scrambling to raise revenues however they can without raising taxes. It's shameful.

And "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law", does not mean "you can do anything you want", it's much, much closer in meaning to the famous quote from the Upanishads (Crowley largely felt that much of esoterism was basically, as Dion Fortune put it "Yoga of the West"):

> “You are what your deepest desire is. As is your desire, so is your intention. As is your intention, so is your will. As is your will, so is your deed. As is your deed, so is your destiny.”

But HN has increasingly been about having vigorous, opinionated discussion on a surface level understanding of topics (plus a growing number of AI participants), so I'm not sure there's much benefit to pointing it out.

This entire discussion is ridiculous. We shouldn't be conflating the serious economic and philosophical work of someone like Adam Smith with the rantings of someone like Aleister Crowley. It's absurd.

> rantings of someone like Aleister Crowley

Crowley had a penchant for drama and provocation (which, hilariously, still seems effective today!), but writing off his work as "rantings" is really ignoring the scholarly work he did on Western esotericism (and he also did make a lot of progress bringing greater awareness of non-Western traditions as well), which has always been an important part of Western culture (even if commonly underplayed by mainstream academia).

Technology, science and the occult have always had an interesting relationship in the West. Pythagoras, in addition to his contributions mathematics, is famous for founding a Hermetic mystery cult. As I'm sure you know, inventing physics and calculus was basically a part of Isaac Newton's study of alchemy (which has long had a big of a mystical component pulling from the Hermetic tradition as it has a proto-chemical component), and even Jack Parsons followed in that tradition (being himself a student of Crowley).

It's completely understandable if you don't find Crowley work of interest, but plenty of people also don't find Adam Smith's work of much interest either. Dismissing the work of Western esotericism on the history of the West would be similar to dismissing Sufism on the history of the Middle East.

I’m only dismissing it in relation to the field of economics. I would trivially dismiss Sufism in the same context.

This discussion is ridiculous. We’re literally talking about the occult here.

> generally speaking, gambling more than a token sum (say, less than $100) should not be legal exactly because any benefits of gambling is far outweighed by the mountains of externalities it brings. Yes, this includes the obvious incentives to threaten random people. It's bad for society, so it should be effectively banned.

I agree with you in theory, but remember that people frequently do illegal things, just illegally. If we assume that people will in practice gamble whether or not it's legal, I'd rather the gambling not be run by organized crime free from the ability of everyone else to oversee and regulate. That would be the same thing which happened with alcohol during Prohibition and which happens now with the many illegal drugs fueling today's Mexican cartels and US gang networks.

> The only reason why it has suddenly become legal everywhere in the US is because many states have found themselves under mountains of deferred liabilities and are scrambling to raise revenues however they can without raising taxes.

And because of a SCOTUS ruling overturning a federal prohibition on states' ability to legalize sports betting, but otherwise yes.

>If we assume that people will in practice gamble whether or not it's legal, I'd rather the gambling not be run by organized crime free from the ability of everyone else to oversee and regulate.

I don't see why we should assume that. Making something annoying to engage in dramatically reduces the amount of people who engage in it. If illegal gambling rings operate, you'd have to 'know a guy' and the gambling ring would -- by definition -- have limited scope.

It's like saying "legalize fent" to protect people who use fentanyl. Like, yea, the problem isn't the addicts, it's that if you can sell the drug in a store, you're going to get 1000x the number of addicts. We need frictional barriers to prevent people from becoming addicted in the first place.

The previous system was fine. We had a couple highly regulated areas where you could travel to (Las Vegas, Reno, a few Indian casinos) for people who were obsessed with gambling. That meant the rest of us were mostly left alone, and not tempted to engage in the vice.

The approach of allowing a limited amount of some "vice" (or otherwise disfavored activity), highly regulated, combined with stiff penalties for illegal use is a pretty common approach to greatly reduce anti-social activity.

Yes... harm reduction approaches can be effective. The point is that they also need a "very annoying" frictional element to prevent harm reduction from creating worse outcomes than prohibition.

The existing Las Vegas & Indian casino system we had previously effectively achieved this goal by making any gambling habit include regular travel, which itself prevents the habit from becoming a daily or even weekly activity.

"Legalizing dangerous drugs" doesn't mean you can go to the store and buy meth. I mean we create a safe consumption site, where you have to go through harm reduction education, be offered alternatives, and likely have things like blood work done to check for potential disease spread and damage from the drugs themselves.

The point is that the harm reduction strategy has to be annoying enough where non-addicts would not engage in the process, whereas addicts would go through the process trivially.

> If we assume that people will in practice gamble whether or not it's legal

Except it's not the same gambling in both cases, they have qualitative differences beyond simply where they're happening. My unhinged neighbor who'd threaten a journalist probably doesn't have an invite to the Underground Gambling Den.

Even if he did, when a court case happens there's no presumption of normalcy. He can't say: "Pshaw, everybody legally gambles on all sorts of things there, the fact that I bet big on the journalist not having his fingers broken is just coincidence."

The immediate illegality of the gambling is also a check on corruption, since it's already disqualifying for Judge Stickyfingers McBriberson to be on the platform, let alone "betting" on the outcome of cases he presides over.

Excuse my ignorance if otherwise obvious—but how does legalized but untaxed gambling raise any public revenue? Bookie licensing?

Why on earth would you think it's untaxed? A legalized gambling business trivially creates taxable income.

Ah, right. These legalized bookies should be paying income tax to the jurisidictions they operate in (albeit probably happening as reliably as winning bettors are on their winnings).

Small nit but you probably don't mean to say that you are a "capitalist" here, even if you maybe own some significant capital. Not because its wrong, but it's not what your trying to appeal to (ideological commitment). A "capitalist" can believe in anything really, they are such by virtue of their relation to the overall economy. Its kinda like saying "I'm a digestor of food" instead of "a patron of restaurants."

You are, quite succintly, a liberal in your beliefs here. This is not liberal in the CNN/Fox News sense, in case this comes off offensive.

I'm a "capitalist" in the sense that I think markets that allow people to exchange private capital create the better outcomes for society for society than other types of economic systems.

I'm also a "liberal."

Ha! I see, well, I'm clearly in the wrong here then.

May all your capital provide the most good it can! Godspeed.

Pendantry -- unhelpful and qualitative particularly when we largely agree -- as you clearly reveal in your 2nd paragraph.

Clearing up the incorrect connections you made is helpful.

Someone largely agreeing doesn't mean they should ignore mistakes.

You're connection between an economic system with some kind of an amoral political view is a non sequitur. You could trivially operate gambling institutions in a socialist system. The gambling existing has nothing to do with the economic system itself. It has to do with the political climate.

Name one (1) human activity in your opinion that isn't bad for society

People taking care of cats have done large damage to bird populations and many people are infected with pathogens carried by cats. How many people are killed by dogs each year? Should we ban caring for animals too? There are no 0 harm activities.

Reasonably splitting activities up into subcategories and regulating those makes way more sense. Your $100 attitude is just a shitty, less enforceable and more harmful way to regulate it. Calling the behavior of a system "shameful" is a total copout. You know what else creates negative externalities? (besides everything) DEBT! Why not ban debt, besides a token $100, I'm sure states will function just fine!

Do you have a religion that works on systems/corporations/states? If so I'd love to see it, cause the past 2000 years has been dogshit failure after pathetic failure

We have a system. Free speech, public debate and democratic elections.

Inventing Assassination Markets in 2026, not bad.

On one hand, it isn't all that different than derivatives and other established securities. On the other, the extremes of gambling are deterimental.

You can either take the libertarian view that it should be allowed until someone is put in harms way, or take the prohibitionist view that it should all be illegal.

With the latter approach, you will be doing more harm than good potentially, because it will just become an underground betting market, fully unregulated and with the worst of people abusing it.

I see no problem with betting on who will win a sports match, or who will become the next presidential race nominee. At least no more than options trading, or betting on the price of oil, or a poker match.

I agree that betting on someone else coming into harms way, be that violence or other types of harm (loss of property, livelihood, wellbeing,etc..) shouldn't be allowed. A sports team losing, or your preferred politician losing are not someone coming into harms way.

I've commented on these lines before, but reactionary extremist approaches will always do more harm than good.

also, politicians shouldn't be allowed to bet in even so much as a poker game!

> I see no problem with betting on who will win a sports match...

I do wonder - what if the sports teams or politician loses intentionally; which could either be to profit off the loss or due to threats from an actor who seeks to profit?

I heard that Kalshi paid out for when Khamenei was killed in Iran (the bet was for when he would go out of power), so murdering people could be another way to win such a bet on who will lose. Even injuring a sports player could easily change a game result. With so much money on the line, it doesn't seem like a good mix.

Athletes (both college and professional) frequently receive threats from sports betters. Since the betting apps let you make specific wagers such as whether a specific player will make more than 6 three pointers in a game the harassment can become quite targeted.

Let me make an obvious opposing argument: what is the social benefit in allowing people to gamble on the outcome of a sports match, or any other event? We encourage investment in the market in theory to allow companies to grow and produce things many people might benefit from (how well that works is another thing...). Gambling as far as I can see is net negative to everyone but the winners, and not entirely positive to them. Imagine if your next door neighbor dropped a cash-filled envelope that you found - lucky you? And if that was your neighbor's rent money? Like a lot of scams, the 'value' is only accrued by fleecing rubes, and it also creates a new class of super-bookies, which also not positive.

You're asking the wrong question, in a free society (supposedly) people are allowed to do whatever they want by default. They're not perimtted to do things, they're forbidden from doing specific things.

Is gambling a neg-negative? why do you care? how is that relevant? Things shouldn't be forbidden because of net impact, specific harm needs to be outlined and addressed. Most of the time, there are more specific problematic behaviors that should be legislated against, not gambling.

In your example, that person spending their rent money could maybe addressed by the law? Or if someone spends their family's savings on a bet, that specific behavior can be addressed. If you think about it, this lazy approach doesn't address root causes. Maybe that guy's rent money, or family's savings, he could have blown it on a fancy car, no law against that.

Conversely, what if someone bet all their money on a stock option? People kill themselves over this, but it isn't illegal. you see how the entire approach is crooked and lazy? categorizing "gambling" addresses the reactionary emotions of the crowd, it doesn't address root causes, it doesn't evaluate nuanced situations.

It isn't betting or speculating that is the problem.

That's a strong libertarian position I think few would agree with. A similar case would be fentanyl - what harm does it do to me if people are dying on the sidewalk from overdoses? Well, the cumulative impact of that on society is considered negative enough that we've outlawed its recreational use. That argument of course doesn't apply equally to my neighbor taking shrooms, which doesn't have any impact, go ahead. The question is if you see gambling as closer to fent than to shrooms - I would suggest that it has a significant blast radius[1].

1: https://commonwealthbeacon.org/by-the-numbers/sports-betting...

No, I must disagree. With Fentanyl you can prohibit the substance just fine because it causes phsyical harm to its user, although even then I personally think so long as the seller educates its users well enough, it should be allowed.

If what you're bothered by is fact that people are dying on the streets, that's pretty grime, maybe make that illegal so they can find a less visually unappealing way of dying?

Consider this: How many people commit suicide? How people do __NOT__ commit suicide because fentanyl bought them something to chase after for a little while longer? How about we worry about all the people that die because they can't get enough medical care? Why is society quick to neglect that, and yet so eager to take away liberties for drug abuse? Or homeless too, I suspect you wouldn't want homeless people sleeping in tents on the street either, because that bothers you visually?

Your neighbors on shrooms are just as dependent on drugs as someone on fentanyl, so clearly you don't care about the dependency factor. If you care about mortality, then address the top causes of mortality.

Even with fentanly, people overdose specifically because it is illegal. In a sane society, people would be able to get fentanly administered to them in free facilities/clinics that give them correct dosage after doing a quick check on their blood chemistry. That would be cheaper than pumping junkies full of narcan every day, dealing with body clean up, all the crime that comes with the criminality of it all, and other costs to society. Same as with home with homelessness you could just give people free housing and that would be a lot cheaper, and it will solve the visual displeasure you have as well.

But the cruelty and hypocrisy is the point of it all isn't it?

Bankers and investors at major cities are cocaine junkies, that's a well known fact. In some states, being a weed junkie is highly normalized. being addicted to cigarettes and alcohol (which both have a well established mortality rate, and high cost to society!) is normalized, even celebrated at times. A junkie with needles on him by the street bothers you, but the same junkie with a bottle of beer and a blunt might not.

As I argued earlier, with gambling you're focusing on the wrong thing, gambling is the how, not the what. Every argument you make about "gambling" can be made about day trading stocks, or betting on options. People take risks they shouldn't think with money in a way that affects others, that interaction should be legislated, and some costs (not criminal) should be imposed by society on people that do that, targeting both the platform/house and the participants. The solutions are highly nuanced though, they're not as lazy as "just ban gambling", and they have costs associated with them that people don't want the government to subsidize, but in the long run are cheaper.

Should I be able to spend my life's savings on a corvette or an RV, without the seller asking how that would impact those around me, or how I would survive if additional costs arise later on? If I end up homeless, or my family becomes destitute because of that decision, the "blast radius" to society is the same as if I did spent that money at a casino. If your concern truly is "blast radius" then that could be addressed directly, root caused solved at the root.

I'm not a libertarian for the record, I'm simply trying to analyze the problems at hand and find the best solutions.

The social benefit is that it gives a controlled outlet for the need to gamble when managed by the government.

One major utility of prediction markets is to get good estimates of probabilities of future events.

That's an interesting idea, though of course while we've done that with crop or livestock futures, we seem to have coped pretty well without betting on absolutely everything until now.

We usually cope well before inventions improve things.

I don't know if prediction markets will be an important improvement, but it might be, so we should let them run.

There are lots of bets on Polymarket about when certain politicians cease to be the leader of the country. Trump, Netanyahu, Putin, Mojtaba Khamenei, Zelensky, etc. If they die, those markets are resolved in a predictable way. Death pools already exist, and it's a matter of time before we see an assassination attempt motivated by it.

It is a lot simpler and fairer to tax payers, due to high litigation costs, to simply make adhoc SaaS betting, as Polymarket provides, illegal. Why should tax payers have to pay for the regulation costs and, more broadly, society pay for the obvious disruption vectors arising from arbitrary speculation?

We're already seeing “insider gambling” from the current administration so I'm pretty convinced we'll see assassinations motivated by polymarket gains alone soon enough.

I suppose the extreme take would be that it becomes a de facto bounty hunting platform

Calling Adam Smith a libertine is beyond insane

Yeah I wonder if they meant libertarian.

I don't know you, but I do know that you haven't studied Adam Smith.

edit: lol bring the downvotes, I actually read The Wealth of Nations PLUS Smith's other essays.

> Adam Smith's libertine

What on earth does this even mean?!

Did you actually mean libertine or libertarian? I'm extremely confused.

The problem is that you are identifying a symptom of an ongoing societal moral decline with an economic system. Spend some time on Dostoevsky or Kant. When morality is solely based on our current nationalism/hedonism hybrid in the West you end up at these extreme morally dubious exploits whether in a free or autocratic society. I don't claim to know what can help society become more ethical. What do you propose will improve society's ethical foundations? It's often the case that staunch critics of a system or another don't usually have much to offer in terms of ethics, they pontificate in favor or counter a given system without exploring whether society's ethics dwell on shaky foundations, they spend a lot of time talking about the technicalities, the merits of this or that implementations when in reality all societies whose ethical foundations crater, do not recover their ethics through policy reform alone.

There are so many examples of this disconnect. Prohibition did not make for a society that wanted less alcohol, or felt that consuming alcohol was unethical, it actually had the counter effect, opening the door for a considerable larger problem of crime supported production. The war on drugs was/has been no different.

To see this as the top comment here, where you picked Adam Smith as your straw man, could have been Karl Marx or any other thinker, and say it boils down to this or that simple mistake.. Are you serious? There are much deeper issues driving this thirst for Gambling we have embraced of late amongst other dubious things that have been normalized. But pick whatever economic system you want, install it anywhere and the existing ethical issues you currently have will still be there.

"ubiquity of Adam Smith's libertine, some would even label satanic ("Do what you wilt"),

Ok this has nothing to do with Adam Smith ... what are you talking about?

Agree with him or not, Adam Smith was a Christian Ethicist more than he was an Economist, and never even remotely hinted at any of those things.

Smith was literally one of those 'Nothing will work unless people with power act responsibly' kind of thinkers. He was way more on the 'prude' than 'libertine' side.

Also - you're not likely using the term 'libertine' in the sense that you mean, look that one up as well.

Finally, even if you mean 'selfish libertarian' - this is also probably not that.

These are just horrible people, probably with gambling addictions, that would be doing all sorts of other horrible things otherwise.

There's no 'isms' here.

They're just villains, same as it ever was.

They are all over the place, far more common than we'd imagine.

I don't think it is a mirror, quite the opposite. I think most Americans (and probably europeans?) think a lot of this is in fact very bad, and should be stopped.

The problem is that our lawmakers are not mirroring what the voters want.

Adam Smith's libertine didn't allow the concept of rent-seeking entities. It sure as well wouldn't allow polymarket gamblers

"As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce."

"[the landlord leaves the worker] with the smallest share with which the tenant can content himself without being a loser, and the landlord seldom means to leave him any more."

"The landlord demands a rent even for unimproved land, and the supposed interest or profit upon the expense of improvement is generally an addition to this original rent. Those improvements, besides, are not always made by the stock of the landlord, but sometimes by that of the tenant. When the lease comes to be renewed, however, the landlord commonly demands the same augmentation of rent as if they had been all made by his own. "

"RENT, considered as the price paid for the use of land, is naturally the highest which the tenant can afford to pay in the actual circumstances. In adjusting the lease, the landlord endeavours to leave him no greater share of the produce than what is sufficient to keep up the stock"

"[Landlords] are the only one of the three orders whose revenue costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own. That indolence, which is the natural effect of the ease and security of their situation, renders them too often, not only ignorant, but incapable of that application of mind"

"[Kelp] was never augmented by human industry. The landlord, however, whose estate is bounded by a kelp shore of this kind, demands a rent for it"

"every improvement in the circumstances of the society tends... to raise the real rent of land."

- Adam Smith (Ch 11, wealth of nations) [Pasted this from a highly relevant reddit thread(0)]

Adam Smith has wrote extensively about how much he disliked Landlords. It's a great tragedy that most people consider him with only his capitalist aspects but he was worried (from what I feel like) about landlords and many people forget that.

So my point is, that Adam Smith would definitely be against polymarket betting because its a form of renting in some vague sense but more importantly an insider trading and just all the weird shenanigans that we also associate with the parasitic nature of landlords can be associated to polymarket gamblers/degenerate betters too (which is what this article talked about)

(Pardon me if this got long but I genuinely feel puzzled by the fact that not many people in the world know that adam smith, the father of capitalism, even he was against the rent-seeking practices which I feel like can also be talked about to how large social media/corporations are feeling rent seeking on their platforms/algorithms too)

A little ironic at the same time as well on how we justify the existence of these very things in the name of capitalism too. My feeling is that Adam Smith would feel some-what betrayed by what rent-seeking social media hubs and polymarket betting and crypto bro thing is being done in the name of capitalism, when he was so against the practices of rent-seeking.

(0): YSK: Adam Smith spoke of landlords as cruel parasites who didn't deserve their profits & were so "indolent" that they were "not only ignorant but incapable of the application of mind." : https://www.reddit.com/r/adamsmith/comments/zche7/ysk_adam_s...

I can understand how you would call inside traders rent seekers. I don't understand the connection for some guy betting a hundred bucks. What's "parasitic" about the median person on the site?

(Also landlords only gain all the surplus when the entire system is super biased. It's not inherent to the concept of landlording. What's the alternative to having landlords anyway?)

I feel like my point more than anything (in the scope of this discussion) is that, relevant to the discussion (Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story)

> What's "parasitic" about the median person on the site?

The median is kinda skewed to be honest. The median you and I think is very few percentage points in my opinion.

Let me say "typical" then?

Second most malicious quintile?

I'm avoiding "average" because one bad actor will spoil the average. But if you exclude the worst ten percent, what's wrong with everyone else?

The people in the article are in that worst bunch. But you critiqued basically everyone on the site.

Also did you finish your first sentence?

There are definitely some (very few) people who can maybe use the platform in a "decent manner" but I feel like its 1 out of 20 type situation but sure theoretically I have nothing against those people actually.

> But you critiqued basically everyone on the site

My apologies in the sense, that I mean to critique the 19/20 people. I did think when writing the first comment that maybe I should've highlighted it more but I already partially did it by writing "degenerate" etc. words

So I definitely agree with you on that aspect. Not everyone especially not the people you are talking about now are parasitic in that sense but key point being the people mentioned in the article being the worst bunch as you mention.

> Also did you finish your first sentence?

Yea, I re-read it, it feels incomplete but in essence, I sort of agree.

TLDR: I can agree with ya in the sense that there are definitely some people on the platform who can use it in a decent manner but the people mentioned in the article aren't the ones. Also even with that being said, I feel like the platforms can push the people with decent manners to indecency.

Okay, so we basically agree on the principles but have very different estimates for what percent of people on the site are acting decently.

Good enough, maybe somebody is working on a study of that.

> … libertine …

Seriously? At least look up what words mean before you thesaurus them into your ideas.

> libertine

I think you mean libertarian. Unless there’s some spicy details of Adam Smith’s life that the history books left out.

Dollars to donuts that "libertine" was just as deliberate as the "satanic" that followed it.

I was prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt, but if it was deliberate it’s worse; it descends beyond mere polemics and is just casting baseless and unfounded aspersions.

I quite enjoyed it. Smith has long been commandeered by libertine laissez-faire cultists who have severed the “invisible hand” from his body of work to worship as a relic.

Yes famous libertine Adam Smith, up there with Marquis de Sade and Ami Perrin

Your logical conclusion is a slippery slope. Lets follow your argument to it's logical conclusion, humans are evil therefore, regulate all their actions, imprison them, kill all humans OMG you are sooo evil I'm absolutely shook. How could you!

Why ought we take your misunderstandings to the"ir natural" extreme?

I don't think "regulate all their actions, imprison them, kill all humans" is the logical conclusion of "prediction markets incentivize antisocial behavior".