The Federal Ban on Sports Betting Is Unfair, Unnecessary, and Unconstitutional

Reason.org highlights Michelle Minton and Steven Titch’s report on the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act.

As Steven Titch and Michelle Minton note in a new paper from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, even professional sports leagues, which have long opposed letting people legally bet on their games, are starting to come around. In 2014 National Basketball Association Commissioner Adam Silver wrote a New York Times op-ed piece arguing that “sports betting should be brought out of the underground and into the sunlight where it can be appropriately monitored and regulated.” In 2015 Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred told ESPN legalization of sports betting deserves “fresh consideration.”

One of the most common objections to legal sports betting, especially from the professional leagues and the NCAA, is that it will have a corrupting effect, encouraging bribery of players or officials to change outcomes or shave points. That concern, Titch and Minton argue, is misguided, since legal, transparent betting makes corruption easier to detect. They cite several cases, including the “Black Sox” scandal of 1919, where sudden shifts in betting odds revealed behind-the-scenes manipulation. “By criminalizing sports betting, PASPA actually increases the risks of match-fixing and corruption,” Titch and Minton write. “In Europe and much of the world where sports betting is legal, bookies are incentivized to share with authorities odd betting patterns that might signal corruption….By contrast, in the U.S., the law disincentivizes gamblers from alerting authorities to suspicious betting that might indicate match fixing, lest they open themselves up to investigation.”

Read the full article at Reason.org.