When people complain that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, consider this thread. It has been said by many people over the years that if the government gave everybody a million dollars, it would not be long before some people were broke and others even richer.
It is through the process of earning our money that we learn to respect it. It is through the process of losing our money that we (hopefully) learn to manage what we have.
It seems to me, as others here have mentioned, that playing the lottery circumvents the learning opportunity of learning to respect and manage money, leaving the process of losing that money as the most likely learning opportunity.
I have seen numerous situations in which we value what we have to work for. I have taught guitar over the years and charged for doing so. In those cases, people would do the assigned work and come to a lesson prepared. On one occasion, I taught a couple of older guys for free, thinking that teaching a fun and inexpensive hobby for retirement might be helpful. They just messed around and wasted my time. I will never do that again except that I do volunteer teaching ESL through the local library system, though that is on hold until COVID-19 is dealt with. The immigrant folks I teach really do want to learn our language and culture, contrary to popular media's depiction of them as a whole.
A guy in our condo association used to have a juggling act as a sideline with a co-worker of his. They would volunteer their juggling act for fund raisers and that sort of thing, rather than pursuing a profit from it. He said they were treated like crap, being double-booked and then forced to wait to do their act until the other one was finished, or having the organizers completely forget that they were to appear and just send them home after having spent time preparing. He said that as soon as they started charging these same people even a small nominal fee, the attitude toward them changed completely to one of respect.
I have a problem with guaranteeing everybody a free college education for this same reason. While I think that the cost of a college education is way out of bounds these days, having to pay a reasonable cost would hopefully weed out those who are there just to avoid having to work.
How many of us have had to work a whole summer as kids to get something we wanted such as a bike or whatever, and then actually value it as a result, compared to being given something and not giving it much thought at all?
It is human nature, and I think the lottery plays very well into it. It is a strange thing that we want things to come easy to us, but we tend to value those things that don't and we have to work hard to get or accomplish.
Regarding the lottery, not everybody ends up broke though. The secretary of our tax guy won a lottery and she and her husband bought a trucking company, creating new jobs for themselves and a whole bunch of other people. I don't know how they are doing no, but they were doing fine last I heard. So there are some who seem to benefit from a lottery win, but unfortunately too many are harmed instead.
Tony