Rick Perry has always claimed to be a supporter of states’ rights, federalism, the Tenth Amendment, etc. Yet he wants the federal government to bar states from legalizing online gambling. Perry has endorsed a bill, written by a lobbyist for casino Magnate Sheldon Adelson, that would nullify state-legalized Internet gambling. The Texas Governor claims, in a recent op-ed for National Review Online, that the “expansion of Internet gambling will result in the expansion of government.” The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Michelle Minton calls out Perry for his hypocrisy in a recent piece for Live Free Blog:
He presents only two options when it comes to online gambling: ban it and protect online commerce or legalize it, creating an increase in regulation. A ban—for it to be an actual ban—will certainly require increased enforcement. How many new state and federal employees will we need to track online activity, arrest, and prosecute those who violate a prohibition against online gambling? Perry also conflates the state and federal efforts to legalize online gambling, saying ‘[a]t both the state and the federal levels, Internet-gambling proponents are aggressively lobbying to establish the most far-reaching government regulations of the Internet’…
It’s true that the federal proposals would create new federal agencies, but the state initiatives to legalize online gambling–that is, the only proposals actually passing, would not increase the size of the federal government. These state laws are what Perry is asking Congress to overturn and prohibit.