I?m sure they?ll all come bearing down on Erap for suggesting it, and say it?s to be expected since he is the epitome of vice after all. But he has the most intelligent proposal for jueteng, also known as the poor man?s numbers game. That is to legalize it.

The practicality of it is patent. Erap himself estimates that underground gambling raised as much as P5 billion for him when he was president, which is probably a gross underestimation. It should be far bigger now after Arroyo and inflation, whichever inflated it more.

You legalize gambling in general, you get to regulate it with the same efficiency you regulate any business, making allowance for the corruption regulation always produces. You legalize it, you do away with the gambling lords who rake off billions of pesos and get to corrupt the world by buying off the law enforcers and moral watchdogs. Half the time, they get to put sundry officials in office, even a president as Bong Pineda allegedly did. You legalize it, and you put the billions of pesos in the hands of a cash-strapped government. Who knows? Maybe you won?t need VAT at all, which is really a case of making the poor pay more (each time they buy something) since the BIR can?t get the rich to pay their due.

Can you stop jueteng by fighting it?

Maybe jueteng, in particular, if you?re lucky but not gambling in general. If gambling could be stopped, it would not be there now. It has survived theocracy and democracy. It was there at the time of the friars, it will be there in the time of the bishops. It?s the second oldest profession. You can no more stop gambling than you can stop alcohol and tobacco. The United States tried to stop alcohol during the Prohibition and all it did was to produce moonshine and the Mafia. It legalized it and all it did was produce bartenders who became the poor man?s psychiatrist, such as you would call the bedraggled mass that repairs there at the end of a long day poor.

Unless you propose to stop gambling altogether, stopping jueteng will only produce double standards. What?s the difference between the janitor and messenger laying bets on a combination of numbers and the executive upping the ante with his full house or the faithful coming off from church on Sunday and faithfully gathering a quorum to play mahjong? Unless your argument is that only the fairly well off are fairly well equipped to withstand the corrosive effects of gambling and not the ragged masses, stopping jueteng will only produce more disparities in life.

Far more to the point, stopping jueteng will be a massive waste of time and resources. It will be conscripting the forces of the police and the local governments to fight off a dubious evil rather than more patent ones. We do not lack for crimes in this country, many of them heinous such as rape and massacre. Those are the things that need mustering the energies of the police for. You legalize jueteng, you won?t have to run after it at all.

Now as to the question of morality, which is really all there is to the objections to legalization.

Is gambling an evil? Possibly. But no more than that drunkenness is an evil, and we do not outlaw it. We frown on it, we discourage it, we censure it, but we do not outlaw it. As moral torpor goes, I don?t know who gets to be more in the throes of it, the tricycle driver who, while waiting for fare, hies off to a nearby OTB and places a few pesos on a number suggested by a dream or by the neighborhood tipster, or the cop who comes home drunk and beats up his wife because she is reluctant to copulate with him in that state.

I myself have never been bitten by the gambling bug, but that is because I have better things to do. Gambling has always seemed to me an utter waste of time and money, time being the more valuable to me. But which is really the point: Gambling would not flourish if people had better things to do. That is to say, the only really effective way to lessen gambling (you can never hope to stop it) is by education and economic development. People are busy improving their minds, they will not have time for gambling. People are busy working their asses off, they will not have time for gambling. People have better ways of diverting themselves, such as with better TV or movie fare, or Peta plays, they will not have time for gambling.

That is the only way you can stop gambling. Not by the use of the police or local governments which will only add more layers of corruption to an already corrupt environment.

One argument of course is: Why not legalize prostitution as well if you want to legalize gambling? Well, why not? Amsterdam has done it, and that has helped to prevent the spread of diseases, quite apart from the battery of the women. But that?s another story.

My point is simply this: The only things you really may not legalize are those that are patently evil in the eyes of God and man and do the country a world of harm. But which the bishops have been tacitly legalizing all this time. You may not legalize stealing the vote, which Arroyo did, but the bishops legalized it by saying, ?Everybody cheats anyway.? You may not legalize corruption, but the bishops legalized it by accepting bribes, a great deal of which came from jueteng money. What do you think paid for their support for Arroyo? You may not legalize disguised extortion in the form of badgering the faithful to part with their hard-earned money to give to the churches on pain of eternal damnation. That, by the way, goes for the other churches, great or small, that make it a point to do so and that moreover command their flock to vote en toto for a candidate also on pain of enduring the torments of the afterlife.

You figure the bishops will agree to this?

I wouldn?t bet on it.