Before It Even Comes Out, the “Bets MP” Already Shows What the State Wants: To Babysit Adults

I had never gambled until I went to Las Vegas. And I confess: I was enchanted. Not only by the lights, but by what it represents. A city in the middle of the desert that reinvented itself, and took an entire state along with it, through an activity that many people still treat as a sin. Nevada legalized gambling in 1931 and was never the same.

Since then, I have gambled only a few times at online casinos. Once, then after a week, then after a month. On sports betting, never. And I won’t pretend the risk doesn’t exist: those who lack self-control can indeed become addicted. But that is precisely why the right question is not whether gambling can do harm. It is: who should decide that for me?

The government is studying a provisional measure (medida provisória, or MP) to restrict or even ban betting sites (“bets”) in Brazil. Minister José Guimarães talks about “a total ban or a more limited action.” The justification is to protect families. The result, if the MP comes, will be the opposite.

And the timing says a lot. We are a few days from the first round of the election. The same government that sanctioned the Bets Law in 2023, that charged R$30 million from each company for a license, and that celebrated the tax revenue, now discovers, on the eve of the election, that betting is an evil to be eradicated. This is not public policy. It is a campaign prop. A stroke of the pen that earns a headline today and leaves the bill for after October.

The numbers are there. According to a survey by Instituto Locomotiva, 61% of Brazilian bettors used at least one irregular platform in 2025. LCA Consultores estimates that 38% to 44% of everything wagered in the country already flows through the black market. The Secretariat of Prizes and Bets ordered the blocking of more than 66,000 illegal domains, against roughly 188 authorized brands. If the State cannot contain the illegal market even with a regulated sector alongside it, what happens when the regulated sector ceases to exist?

Bastiat taught, in 1850, that a law does not produce just one effect. The first is immediate and seen. The others come later, and are unseen. What is seen, in this case, is the minister announcing that he “put an end to the bets.” What is unseen is the bettor who keeps betting, now on a site with no CNPJ (corporate tax ID), no guarantee of payment, no deposit limit, no age verification, and no complaint channel.

The bill is unseen too. The betting companies paid roughly R$9 billion in taxes in 2025, according to the Federal Revenue Service. Each company paid R$30 million for a five-year license; together, the licensing fees total R$2.5 billion, which the government may have to refund or compensate. Who pays? The taxpayer. Including the one who has never placed a bet in his life.

And the economy that revolves around the sector is unseen as well. There is roughly R$1 billion in football sponsorships, and the smaller clubs are the ones that depend on them most. But it isn’t only sports. I was at Rock the Mountain, in Petrópolis, and at Rock in Rio: at both there were betting-house activations. That is money that pays for staging, production, marketing, media, people working. All of it vanishes with a stroke of the pen.

There is also a detail the government prefers not to mention. Betting in Brazil has never been prohibited. You can play the Mega-Sena, the Quina, the Lotofácil. You can bet on horse racing, an activity regulated by law since 1984. And the jogo do bicho, a criminal misdemeanor since 1941, keeps operating on every street corner, in broad daylight, for more than eight decades, without any prohibition having managed to end it. The bill that would legalize the bicho and casinos is stalled in the Senate. What changes with the MP, therefore, is who may offer the game. The State wants a monopoly on other people’s luck: gambling is fine, as long as the money goes to it.

“But what about addiction?” some will ask. It is a legitimate concern, and deserves a serious answer, with data. The III National Survey on Alcohol and Drugs, from Unifesp, estimates that 0.8% of Brazilians over 14 have a pattern of gambling consistent with a disorder. These are people who need treatment and support. But most people who bet do so with no problem at all. Banning it for everyone because of a minority is treating every adult as incapable.

And if the criterion is addiction, what about alcohol and cigarettes? The State doesn’t ban them. It taxes, regulates, restricts advertising, and runs campaigns. Why would it be different with betting?

Lysander Spooner cleared up this confusion in 1875: vice is what a man does against himself; crime is what he does against another. Someone who bets his own money has made no victim. Mises warned about the next step: once it is accepted that the government must protect the individual from his own folly, there is no argument left to prevent the next intervention. Today it is the bets. Tomorrow, what we eat, drink, read, or watch.

I suspect, moreover, that the uproar has less to do with addiction and more to do with the size of the companies. Betting firms are big, profitable, and visible, and that bothers those who see someone else’s profit as a problem to be corrected. The economist Bruce Yandle called this curious alliance “Baptists and bootleggers”: on one side, those who defend prohibition on moral grounds; on the other, those who profit from it. In this case, the bootleggers have names: they are the illegal sites, which get an entire market handed to them as a gift, with no competition and no taxes. And there is a third partner in this alliance: the politician on the campaign trail, who reaps the moral applause without paying the bill.

If the government wants to protect the bettor, the path exists and is in the law: enforce, punish the illegal operators, require responsible gambling, restrict advertising as the Premier League did. And, why not, think big: a casino hub in some city in the Northeast or Center-West, attracting tourism and investment, as Nevada did in the desert.

Banning is the easiest path. And the most expensive. The State is not a babysitter for adults. And every time it tries to be one, the ones who lose are precisely those it claims to protect.