Idiot tax?

There is a tax on being gullible in society today (although it is better known as the national lottery or lotto).

I blipped these guys scratching off a scratch card at a Bradford bus stop today & it started me thinking about the lottery. I do it on occasion but it's rare.

Many people (often those who can ill afford it) can spend £10-20 a week if not more on a chance that is so vanishingly small that if we could truly comprehend how unlikely a big win would be we would never actually play!

...and even if we do win this article from the guardian made me think...

Here's an excerpt;

The tragedy of sudden good fortune is that it offers the illusion that suffering can be bypassed...A lottery winner is the perfect scapegoat: he or she is at once like others yet suddenly now set apart with £45m worth of loneliness.

Bankers' bonuses are repellent because they fail to attach a realistic value to achievement: a very good banker who works hard can expect to be recognised and rewarded, but no amount of hard work is worth millions of pounds extra a year ? especially when the bankers' failures have been mopped up by the public purse. But the lottery winner does no more than show up in a corner shop and pick numbers on a red card in an exercise in crazy improbability.

Yet ours is a culture which teaches people to aspire to that very same improbability. The tabloids which deplore fat-cat bonuses drool at the prospect of a lottery win. Yet surely the fat cats have at least worked their way to their apparently random good fortune; and those born into money at least have a childhood-long chance to learn the responsibility that comes with it.

Life has elements of a lottery built in. Where and when we are born, what name we bear, where we school and grow ? these are not matters over which we have control. But that doesn't mean life is a lottery. Our freedom to act within the constraints of our lives is immense, and greater than we think. Ideally, we learn as we progress through life, increasing our knowledge of what is important and what isn't more or less at the same time as we acquire greater power to affect our lives and those of others.

That's why winning the lottery is, on the whole, bad news. For few among us can acquire the wisdom you need to manage millions in the time it takes to select the numbers on a ticket.

So think: it could be you. But thank God it isn't.