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It’s easy to see why people get hooked on gambling. It’s not just casinos and sports books that expose us to the dangers of addiction; it is also horse races, financial markets, and a growing number of state-sponsored lotteries. The question is whether governments should be in the business of promoting a vice, especially when they are generating such a tiny portion of their budgets.

Government-sponsored lotteries are particularly troubling because they skew heavily toward poor people. This is mainly because they are very expensive, but it’s also because the winnings tend to be small. The average prize for a Canadian lottery game is about $3, so for many players, it is simply not worth the price of entry. Even if they win the jackpot, the winner is likely to spend most of it on other things like food, clothing, and housing.

The skewed nature of winnings is the result of both design and practice. The designers of these games have always tended to make the prizes large and the odds of winning low. For example, the odds of winning the big prize in a Canadian Lottery are one in 14 million. This is very close to the probability of being struck by lightning, which is about one in a million.

As for the practice, it dates back to ancient times. The Old Testament has several instances of the Lord instructing Moses to divide land by lot, while Roman emperors used lots to give away slaves and property. Privately organized lotteries also flourished. For instance, Benjamin Franklin ran a lottery to help raise money for the Continental Congress during the American Revolution, and John Hancock ran a lottery to build Boston’s Faneuil Hall. George Washington even ran a lottery to try to finance a road over a mountain pass, but that project never materialized.

In America, the same religious and moral sensibilities that eventually led to prohibition began to turn against lotteries in the 1800s. Corruption was another factor: crooked promoters were known to steal millions of dollars from players.

State lotteries are now run as a business, with no oversight from legislators or other agencies that do not have a stake in their profits. As a result, they have an incentive to tell players and voters all the good that they are doing by raising money for the states. Unfortunately, those claims have been largely disproven. In fact, a recent study of state data found that states with lotteries have higher income inequality than those without them. It is time to put an end to this regressive policy.