Sin City Delights in Sins Distracting From Its Own, by Anthony Esolen

All things hidden will come to light, and with what measure we measure, so shall it be measured out to us.

As every American football fan knows, the coach for the Las Vegas Raiders, Jon Gruden, was fired recently for having made hurtful comments about a variety of people, in several emails over the course of seven or eight years. The Las Vegas Raiders, as every fan also knows, are the erstwhile Oakland Raiders, who left a city that very much needed them for a city that very much did not. Cherchez l’argent.

Las Vegas, jocularly called Sin City, includes in its metropolitan area more than two million people, 15 times as many as lived there in 1960, and eight times as many as then lived in the whole state of Nevada. They use up water, per capita, at three times the rate of residents in Oakland. The only reason why there is a Las Vegas at all is that casinos set up shop there, with legalized prostitution. It might be interesting to find out how many human lives are destroyed yearly by the gambling that the casinos feed upon. It might be interesting to find out how many of those ruined people were not rich to begin with. …