A good debate can really help you focus your mind.
Last week I debated Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, about the legalization of sports gambling. Chuck Todd, the former host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” moderated. We were in front of a crowd of students and professors at the University of Chicago, and it was everything you’d expect out of a public fight with Gov. Christie.
He was entertaining. He was, well, insulting. But at the end we shook hands and parted as friends.
Since I was a participant, it’s not for me to judge the outcome of the debate, but if there was one thought I wanted to communicate to the crowd, it was this — we are getting liberty backward in this country. That mistake is harming our nation, and it’s especially harming young men.
What is the problem? We are making virtue more difficult and vice easier to access. By the time young men enter adulthood, they’ve been conditioned by a world that makes it ever easier to place a bet and harder to go to college. It’s easier to watch porn and more difficult to form real relationships. And the social results of this gigantic national experiment are exactly what you’d expect them to be.
Sports gambling is the perfect example. I debated Christie in part because you might consider him the (unintentional) founding father of modern sports gambling. During his tenure as governor, New Jersey picked a fight with the federal government over the application of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act.
The act had been on the books since 1992 and largely banned sports betting. But there was a problem — it gave a small number of states (including Nevada) greater leeway to allow such gambling. New Jersey understandably objected to Nevada’s legal and economic privilege.
The issue made it all the way to the Supreme Court, and in 2018 the court ruled for New Jersey and struck down the act.
The rest is history: Sports gambling is everywhere. Sometimes I feel as if the entire American sports establishment is sponsored in some way by DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM and the host of other sports books.
The scale of the business has also exploded. Gross gaming revenue from sports betting in the U.S. (the amount of money wagered, minus winnings) has increased from roughly $400 million in 2018 to almost $17 billion in 2025, with gamblers betting a total of nearly $167 billion on athletic contests.
A Siena Research Institute/St. Bonaventure University study released this week found that a stunning 52 percent of men aged 18-49 have an account with an online sports book, and 31 percent of bettors overall had someone express concerns to them regarding their use of online sports books.
The social costs are extraordinary. In a column last year, I shared some of the terrible consequences. A Maryland study found that 19.8 percent of sports bettors in the state engaged in “disordered gambling,” with an additional 31 percent of gamblers deemed at risk. That means half of all sports gamblers were either problem bettors or at risk of becoming problem bettors.
Other studies found that people with gambling addictions had the highest rate of suicide compared with people with other addictions; another study found a “substantial increase in average bankruptcy rates, debt sent to collections, use of debt consolidation loans, and auto loan delinquencies” in states after they legalized online sports betting.
The rise of prop bets — “proposition” bets that permit a gambler to bet in real-time on in-game events (whether a pitch will be a ball or a strike, for example) — has had a particularly pernicious impact. Such bets have a kind of slot-machine effect that glues bettors to their phones during games.
It should surprise exactly no one that we’ve also seen a number of indictments and suspensions of professional athletes and coaches who’ve either gambled themselves or rigged bets during games. It should also surprise no one that athletes experience gambling-related harassment, as disappointed gamblers pour out their frustration on the players and coaches who cost them money.
The fliers advertising the debate asked, “Is sports betting the new pornography?” There is an excellent reason to bring pornography into the conversation. Like gambling, it’s an ancient vice that is much, much easier to indulge than it used to be even in the relatively recent past.
Consider this: The age of first exposure to pornography among boys is in their preteen years, with one study finding an average age of roughly 13 years old, and the types of pornography many boys are exposed to are often dark and depraved, beyond any decent person’s imagination.
One concrete result of this extraordinary increase in access to pornography is the growth of dangerous and dehumanizing sexual practices in the real world. For example, as Peggy Orenstein wrote on our pages in 2024, a survey of students at a major Midwestern university found that nearly two-thirds of the women said they had been choked during sex, and 40 percent said their first choking experience was when they were between the ages of 12 and 17.
In an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court in 2024, two scholars who’ve studied the effects of pornography on the brain wrote that pornography addiction can cause “disproportional cue reactivity, a dampening effect on the ability to receive and process pleasure and structural changes to the brain itself” and that adolescence is “the exact worse time for someone to be exposed to pornography.”
Put another way, at the precise time when young men and boys struggle the most with sensation-seeking and impulse control, our culture and economy has handed them a device that can function as a porn theater and a casino at the same time.
As I argued at the University of Chicago, the combination of pornography and gambling does far, far more damage to young men than any ideological debate over “toxic masculinity.”
But that’s only half the story. At the same time that vice is easier, a key virtue — industry — is much more difficult. By “industry” I mean the virtue as Benjamin Franklin defined it, as a kind of purposeful diligence: the hard work of personal advancement and self-improvement that yields great rewards.
Now consider the barriers our culture and our economy place before this concept of industry. Skyrocketing college costs (which have far exceeded the rate of inflation, though that trend has started to ebb) hinder if not prevent access to one of the most important and effective means of personal improvement. As Jeffrey Selingo reported in The Atlantic this month, “The share of American teenagers enrolling in college after high school has dropped from a high of 70 percent in 2016 to 62 percent in 2022.”
Draconian occupational licensing rules, which require a person to get governmental permission before starting his or her own business, set profound economic obstacles before low- and middle-income Americans (wealthy Americans can afford to pay for professional assistance to navigate bureaucratic obstacles — complexity is a subsidy for the wealthy).
In 2022, the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm, released a new edition of a study called “License to Work” that found 2,749 license requirements across 50 states and the District of Columbia that applied to 102 professions largely practiced by lower-income Americans.
Some professions do need licenses and educational requirements. I’m not calling for a Wild, Wild West of economic deregulation, but the scales are overly weighted against economic freedom and in favor of government control and barriers to entry.
I don’t want to repeat all the arguments made in my colleague Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s important book, “Abundance,” but the sheer amount of governmental drag we impose on economic activity is a key reason for American despair. Homes are more expensive in part because the government makes it hard to build housing. Infrastructure crumbles in part because the government makes it hard to build new infrastructure.
Putting it all together, and we’ve devised a grim reality for younger Americans. If you want to watch porn or place a prop bet, the wind is at your back. If you want to go to college or start a business, the wind is in your face.
During my debate with Governor Christie, I discussed the concept of Chesterton’s Fence. The concept comes from G.K. Chesterton, the renowned Christian writer. Imagine that you come across a fence or a gate that’s blocking your path. Annoyed, you start to knock it down.
But before you knock down the fence, Chesterton argues, you need to know why the fence exists. Sure, it may need to be destroyed, but be careful before you do so. A simple way of stating the concept is that you must understand why a rule exists before you destroy the rule.
And there has long been a fence around the gambling industry. In an Atlantic piece describing his own misbegotten yearlong experiment with sports gambling, McKay Coppins described the historic American disdain for gambling, beginning with the Puritans banning games of chance all the way back in 1631.
George Washington said that gambling was “the child of avarice, the brother of inequity, and the father of mischief.” As a result, as Coppins writes, “gambling was largely contained to certain disreputable corners of society, such as riverboats, red‑light districts and Nevada.”
Beginning in 2018, America bulldozed the fence around the gambling industry. It had destroyed the fence around the pornography industry decades before. We tore down the fences we should have preserved, and elsewhere we built fences we never should have constructed.
I’m not suggesting that we lurch from one extreme to another. An analysis of our economic fences will show that some regulations are necessary and prudent. And, as I said in the debate, trying to entirely ban gambling is a fool’s errand. I don’t want to live in a country that clothes its government with the power and reach to eliminate vice (if such a thing could even be done).
No, the question is where and why do we increase or decrease friction on human activity, and from the founding of the country we have imposed more friction on vice than virtue.
At the end of the debate I proposed modest gambling reforms — just to start the process of repairing the fence. Raise the minimum age to gamble to 25, an age when young men have greater impulse control. Eliminate the prop bets that turn your phone into a slot machine. Regulate prediction markets and limit their scope (no betting on wars, for example — a restriction so obvious that I can’t believe it has to be said).
Those are far from the only reform ideas that are constitutional, prudent and fiscally responsible, but they’re a start. America is the land of liberty, but not all liberties are of equal value.
The Bill of Rights is the foundation of American freedom, but beyond those indispensable liberties, not every right is of equal value. And when it comes to the virtues and vices that define our lives, it’s worth remembering that the freedom to build is infinitely more valuable than the freedom to destroy.
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