Legalized ‘jueteng’ a terrible idea
Ben D. Kritz
AS much as President Duterte resorts to “stream-of-consciousness bluster” as a policy-making tool, he doesn’t often propose a truly hare-brained idea. His suggestion last Friday that the popular illegal numbers game jueteng be legalized, however, is definitely an exception.
Jueteng is a form of lotto. Despite occasional high-profile campaigns to curtail it, which at one point even contributed to the removal of a sitting president, it’s ubiquitous throughout the country particularly in the provinces. So far, every attempt to offer a legal alternative to jueteng, such as the Small Town Lottery that offers a similar type of game, has completely failed to make a dent in the popularity and prevalence of jueteng.
Adopting an “if you can’t beat them, join them” perspective towards jueteng, Duterte proposed to simply legalize the game which would presumably also benefit the government by providing a new revenue stream. His rationale, beyond the implication that government is powerless to stop it anyway, is that jueteng is at least a form of commerce in the absence of any other significant economic activity in the provinces.
At first blush, that might actually seem like a practical perspective. Undoubtedly, some pundits who ought to know better but continually surprise us with their semantic contortions to gild everything that comes out of Duterte’s mouth with Solomonic wisdom will see it that way. Duterte’s proposal, however, has two fatal flaws. Whether they’re based on actual misanthropy, incredibly bad judgment, or simple ignorance is difficult to determine, but the result is the same in any case.
The first rational flaw is the notion that it’s the game itself that’s popular and that the solution is to either legitimize the game or provide an equally popular comparable legal substitute. Jueteng, however, isn’t significantly different from existing legal substitutes. It’s popular because it’s illegal. One would think someone with Duterte’s practical legal background would understand this.
For individual gamblers, it’s probably not much of a consideration, although the illegal nature of the game does translate to greater convenience — games are available right in one’s own neighborhood rather than at a distant official gaming outlet; better, more flexible odds of winning, and freedom from taxation or other forms of government meddling. For the web of operators, facilitators, and protectors, however, the illegal nature of the game coupled with the potentially very large market creates an enormous incentive to maintain and promote it in the form of earnings through organized bribes. Legal, government managed or regulated games don’t offer this incentive and are therefore ignored or even actively resisted. The prospects of successfully initiating a “legal jueteng” game are therefore rather unpromising.
The second flaw in Duterte’s idea lies in his dubious characterization of jueteng as “economic activity.” It is in a very basic sense but it’s an activity of a particularly destructive sort. Unlike other forms of economic activity, organized gambling shifts financial resources upward in an extreme way. Capital flows from lower economic strata to higher economic strata in most other parts of the economy as well. But there’s a difference. First of all, there’s some exchange of value – goods or services in exchange for money – and second there’s a degree of return flow. Some part of the upward capital flow eventually flows back downward in the form of wages, public services funded by tax revenues, interest on savings, and so on. All that is missing from organized gambling. No real value is exchanged and there’s no secondary return flow other than occasional winnings which are an
astronomically small proportion of the capital flowing in the upward direction.
The argument could be made that legalizing jueteng would correct that problem because the proceeds could be put to some good purpose such as the PCSO’s funding of medical charity from the proceeds of the lottery. But that would be a marginal improvement. It does nothing to balance the flow of resources. Rather, it just redistributes some resources among the poor. The government frames it as providing a social service but the beneficiaries are in fact funding it for themselves.
All of which is probably moot because it’s unlikely that Duterte will be more successful in reducing the jueteng monolith than any of his predecessors. Jueteng is simply too widespread and too connected at the level of local governments for an aggressive approach to make much of a dent in it in a reasonable amount of time. The vast amount of money that circulates in the jueteng ecosystem means that encouraging a switch to a legal alternative through some kind of incentives is impractical if not impossible.
If there was an easy solution to the problem of jueteng, it would have likely been found already. Efforts to find one must continue. Simply legitimizing it, in effect further institutionalizing something which at best increases economic inequality and makes flow of resources more inefficient, is certainly not the answer.
ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
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