Cite? More to the point, video footage of you attempting to leave a Nevada casino without paying your gambling debt? How do you leap to the conclusion that gambling debts incurred at a legally operating casino are not valid?
It’s a blackletter principle of the common law, Otto, although I’m sure that Nevada has modified this by statute. But traditionally, gambling debts were not enforceable at law or equity; this was a policy choice made to discourage gambling by making it impossible for gambling establishments to collect and therby making the business less viable. Of course, one of the side effects is to encourage “extra-legal” methods of enforcement of gambling debts.
Cite? Hmm… 'Cuz my Contracts prof. said so?
–Cliffy
Don’t forget that the daffy proposed legislation agrees that the US Constitution forbids them from coining/minting their own currency, whether just for their own state or elsewhere.
The imbecilic bill then goes on to make the claim that Congress isn’t really minting U.S. currency, because they supposedly illegally pawned that job off on the Federal Reserve. Then the moronic bill asserts that since Congress did not legally fulfill their duty, that means that the State of Nevada can print their own currency.
So, in other words, the megalomaniacal sponsors of this bill are saying that Constitution of the U.S. should be considered void and unapplicable whenever they make their own personal judgment that it’s not being legally followed by some agent of government.
To extend this way of thinking:
If a police officer fails to show a subpoena before searching my house, then I can take the officer’s car for my own personal belonging. If the officer breaks the law, then it no longer applies to anyone.
I think anyone from the third branch of the federal government is going to find the bill null and void.
Peace.
And if a president declares war without an act of congress, then I am now free to declare my ‘justly claimed’ police car a sovereign nation.
Of course you’re right that gambling debts incurred through illegal gambling are legally unenforceable (just like drug debts, payoffs to hired killers and any other illegal contract) but smiling bandit claimed that gambling debts are never legal obligations in a thread about Nevada so it struck me as completely reasonable to expect him to cite law or precedent that Nevada gambling debts can’t be collected.
Yes: any such law would be laughed out of court.
Inherant in the language of this bill are arguments about the nature of money which are near and dear to cranks of various stripes who are convinced that banks are in and of themselves a dark conspiracy, and that the U.S. income tax is some kind of elaborate hoax.
In particular, the bill contains a rant about the very nature of The Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve has long been a boogie-man for right wing conspiracy theorists of various stripes who construct arguments that paper currency is not “really” money and that therefore people do not “really” have to pay income taxes on earnings measured in terms of dollars.
Such arguments are remarkably insincere. It has been my observaton that such “monetary realists” are as likely to bend over to pick a dollar bill up off of the street as anyone else.
To understand something of where they are coming from, herewith is a not-very-expert history of the concept of money:
There was a time–in fact, most of human existence–when economic exchanges were made entirely by barter. A farmer had strawberries, and a blacksmith had nails. They would strike a bargain on what was the fair price for a nail in terms of strawberries and strawberries in terms of nails depending on how availiable one commodity or the other was at the time, and how seriously the farmer needed a nail or the blacksmith wanted to eat strawberries.
This was, of course, often a miserably confusing and inefficient system. Some ancient peoples, such as the nation of Lydia, fell upon a solution. They devised a policy whereby their traders would sell commodities for gold when possible, and took to using that gold as a medium of exchange when needed to buy commodities. Gold didn’t wear out, it was easy to carry, it had a limited supply, and it was possible to press into standardized units so there wasn’t a lot of argument about how much gold, exactly, one was exchanging in a transaction.
(The Lydians had a king named Croessus; hence 'as rich as Croessus").
This was the birth of money. It was also the birth of standardized prices.
An odd outcome of this is that many people took to thinking of gold as having a fixed, absolute value and other things as having a value only relative to gold.
People were always able to recognize that there were limits to this idea–hence the story of King Midas–but people came to think of a nation as being successful and prosperous purely because it had a lot of precious metal in reserve. This theory was known as “Monetarism”. Adam Smith undertook to refute this in his classic The Wealth of Nations, where he showed that wealth in fact lay in the ability of a society to acquire and use resources to make and do things people valued. That, in essence, is the whole point of economics; studying the interrelated systems people devise to do this.
In the Rennaissance Italian goldsmiths took to holding people’s gold for them in their safes, and issuing receipts. These receipts were printed on sturdy material so that people could trade them back and forth without having to redeem them for metal.
Since people were more interested in being able to buy things they needed than in actually having their gold in hand (which was risky anyway), people took to trading the notes from the goldsmiths back and forth without ever (or hardly ever) redeeming them for gold.
This was the birth of paper currency.
It eventually occured to some of the goldsmiths and other people who traded in gold and certificates for gold (called “bankers” for the benches they operated from in marketplaces), that since people were willing to keep the notes without actually trading them in for gold, it was possible to issue more and more notes which were backed by gold without adding proportionately to the gold that was kept in storage to redeem them.
This was the birth of banking.
In Great Britain one bank was better at doing this than the others, and was given an official license to issue the banknotes which would be used as a common medium of exchange. This was the origin of The Bank of England.
National banks were also established, frequently as agencies of the government, in other countries. The Bank of England was eventually nationalized, though only after World War II.
Historically the U.S. has been resistent to establishing a national bank which would be a central, stablizing source of banking credit. Twice the U.S. established a national bank which was struck down on Constitutional grounds. In the 19th and early 20th Century paper money contained notations that it could be redeemed (exchanged for precious metal) at some bank or other somewhere in the country.
During the Wilson presidency a compromise was struck on. The Federal Reserve System was established as an alternative to a full-fledged national bank. The Federal Reserve keeps effective control over the size of the money supply by being the primary supplier of credit to independent member banks throughout the country. This is why interest rates set by the Federal Reserve have such a pervasive effect on the economy.
Just as it is possible for a bank to issue credit without having gold in its vault (or credit on its books) which matches one-for-one, it is possible to operate a system where the bank notes aren’t, ultimately, redeemable in the form of anything except more credit.
That is the situation in The United States when, as now, there is no gold standard in effect. If you cash a check at the bank you get paper money. There was a time when this paper money was considered valuable because, if all else failed, you could trade it in for precious metal. Right now, you can’t trade in a dollar bill for a quality of gold or silver–you can only swap it for another dollar bill. But it still spends just the same.
A good many otherwise educated adults do not grasp that banks in effect create money when they make a loan, and that they don’t actually “have” all of the money that they issue as credit, (even when there is a gold standard in effect) or that the money supply mostly represents credit that has been issued, rather than reserves that are kept in banks.
When some people finally get wind of this they get terribly agitated and think that they have uncovered some kind of conspiracy or scam that other people don’t know about it.
Timothy McVeigh was evidently one such person. He once tried to pay a bill using a check drawn on “The Fractional Reserve Bank”, an unlicensed financial institution established by cranks who had a right wing orientation similar to his own.
Their “reasoning”, as I understand it, was that since The Federal Reserve System doesn’t have to give you gold for your paper money, they could issue their own bank notes which were also backed by nothing in particular.
The point that people around the world recognize and use U.S. currency, and that the exchanges banks make are carefully accounted for and controlled to keep the money supply from becoming meaninglessly inflated, was overlooked. It appears they honestly could not grasp that a bank vault full of air could not become the equivalent of the most powerful economy in history just by wishing.
The arguments being used here are about semantics rather than substance. At the time the Constitution was written people mostly thought of precious metals when they spoke of “money”, so perhaps, as a banking law text I used in law school said, it is more appropriate to speak of a dollar bill as being “specie answering the purposes of money”. The fact remains that it still spends the same.
A small hijack: does anyone remember “mills”?
In my early, pre-inflationary, youth (the late 50s), the State of Missouri had a sales tax system which sometimes obliged people to pay a percent of one cent. The state issued little plastic coins called “mills” which could be used to do this; you got ten red ones or two green ones for a penny. Possibly they had actually already gone out of use by the time I was born; I only remember them because I had a stash of them I used as play money. What other states had similar systems, and when did the last of them go out of use?
The argument may be that the U.S. does not issue specie coins as contemplated by the Constitution – which is true; the term specie (no “S” at the end) refers to money which is worth its face value as a precious metal. It still violates the Constitutional prohibition on state coinages, though, IMHO.
Are gambling debts legally enforceable?
Like so many other things in the law, the answer is: “it depends…”
This is an issue of contract law. For a contract to be valid and enforceable, it generally requires consideration (roughly, a thing exchanged) an offer, an acceptance, legal capacity on the part of the parties entering the contract, and legal subject matter.
It is this last point, legality of subject matter–which can be a stumbling block in the case of gambling debts. If it was not legal to gamble in the first place, then you can’t expect a court to enforce collection on the bet. If the gambling was legal–for instance, gambling in a Nevada casino–then collection on the debt can be legally enforced.