Actually, I had a more sphincter-specific adjective in mind. I tuned the nasty old fart out years ago, when he approving noted the spread of AIDS. The CBS-TV in-house crackpot hasn’t stopped rejoicing in human misery since then. Here are some gems from last Sunday’s “You kids get off of my lawn” jeremiad:
“I have good news for you tonight. According to an American Gaming Association report, revenue from casino gambling fell by almost two billion dollars last year. A lot of people are out of work and it turns out that when people are unemployed, they gamble less. You’d think they might gamble more but they don’t. There’s some good things about everything, I guess …
“There’s only so much money in the world and if it’s lost at a gambling table, it’s money that isn’t spent on things America makes. I mean who’s best for this country — a machinist at an automobile plant in Detroit or a blackjack dealer in Las Vegas?”
They’re either of them better for this country than you, Mr. Rooney.
If you turned off the sound the Andy Rooney piece looked like an ad for Las Vegas, arguably a better one than “Camp Vegas.
I don’t like the guy either, but his basic premise is sound. When a dollar changes hands in the casino environment, no value is created thereby. Therefore, a casino employee whose job is to facilitate that transaction (a casino dealer, for example, who is a middleman for the function of the customer giving his money to the casino) is less useful socially than someone who builds, manufactures, or otherwise creates something of value.
A person who, because of financial difficulty, stops gambling, is realizing a benefit, in that his real shortfall isn’t as much as it would otherwise have been. A guy who made $2000/month, and is out of work and collecting $1000/month unemployment, is in reality only $500 short, not $1000, if he formerly pissed away $500/month gambling.