Powerball shmowerball!

National Review, Sept 1, 1998 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

NEW YORK, JULY 28

In this part of the world (and a lot of others), traffic came to a stop for the four-odd hours before 9:52 P.M., which is the hour when the dispensers closed that gave out Powerball tickets. The newspapers calmly recorded the stoppage, citing in the case of New York/Connecticut about two and one-half hours to cover a distance that normally requires about 20 minutes.

How many people were affected? The exact numbers aren't sitting around, but Rhode Island reported last May approximately one million tickets sold there, in a state with a population of about one million. The economic implications of the tie-ups are very interesting, but first, what do others get out of it?

Money, run out of an Iowa-based command post, goes to participating states, of which there are twenty. It isn't loudly advertised who wins what share of the loot. It isn't a single charity, like cancer, or AIDS. Moreover, when government gets into the business of taking in money to redistribute, almost anything can fall under the banner of charity. That would include of course medical care and education -- and libraries and art -- and newscasting and meteorology. Whatever your method of keeping track of government spending allocations, stick Powerball in under Government, General.

The managers of Powerball are having a whale of a time, because nobody has been winning lately, which means they can laugh all night. One statistician reckoned that the chance of any one ticket purchaser's winning is about one in eighty million. "It would be likelier," he reflected, "to shoot twenty consecutive holes-in-one."

So we begin by understanding that the people who purchase the 100 million tickets -- or, if Rhode Island's purchases set the standard, the 270 million tickets -- will get nothing. What do the vendors get?

They are paid five cents for every ticket dispensed. This would seem, at first glance, pretty exiguous compensation for all that commotion. On the other hand, one convenience store near Greenwich reported sales of 10,000 in one hour, which makes for $500 in revenue. Even so, the storekeepers were grumpy about the whole business. The reason is that Powerball consumers waited in line last weekend without purchasing anything in the stores they lined up at. "It would be nice," one storekeeper admitted, "if they would buy a little liquor."

So it hasn't been like ice-cream cones at Jones Beach. People go to Jones Beach in order to go to Jones Beach; the ice-cream cone is incidental. People last Friday went to convenience stores not to buy conveniences, but to buy Powerball. It is a rather insensate experience: close your eyes, walk forward one step every 16 seconds, and, eventually, give somebody a dollar and receive your piece of paper, which is all that it is in effect.

The concern, in this quarter, is for the victims of Powerball. To take only one saturation-bombing area, consider New York's Westchester County, which abuts on Connecticut's Fairfield County. To use round figures, one hundred thousand people traveling west to east spent three hours doing, in effect, nothing. Worse. Doing nothing allows you to sit and read a book or to watch television. To be required to gently depress the accelerator every forty seconds and then touch the brake and then turn the wheel means tedium plus energy expenditure; which is why someone at the wheel for three hours who has driven twenty miles is far more exhausted than someone at the wheel for three hours who has driven a hundred miles. Suppose one puts a value on the drivers' time? Say three times the minimum wage, or $15 per hour. That means $4.5 million. Got that? Three hours per person, or $45 times 100,000 drivers. Even then, this attaches no value to wives and husbands and sons and daughters kept waiting. Why should they be thus imposed upon?

The moral of it is that there is a vast subsidy to Powerball by aggrieved Americans who have no recourse other than to stay out of the way every time Mr. Powerball decides to flex his muscles.

There ought to be a law.

I'd vote for laws in all Powerball states. It would be illegal to dispense a ticket except between the hours of midnight and 4 A.M. Let the suckers search out an hour to finance Lotto when the seas are calm, and sane people peacefully asleep.

(Universal Press Syndicate)