of micro and very small businesses, pre-reagan. When Sinegal partnered, in 1983 he brought a decidedly anti-reagan management philosophy and it has been key to their success.

Costco doesn't keep spending (losing) millions of dollars every year on their hot dog sales because their customers need the break. Lots of their most valued customers need that high-quality hot dog and a coke for $1.50.

Everybody knows how casinos work and the inevitable results of patronizing them too frequently or enthusiastically.

So why are these people, like the drug addicts they are compared to here, doing something that they know is not good for them? We've read some of the reasons, lonely, bored, feeling useless or abandoned, and so on.

We are a profoundly unhappy people. Hardly any of us wouldn't rather be doing something else. "Life isn't fair", "Why do you think they call it work?" Is there anybody that hasn't heard these and similar admonitions their whole lives? Why are you spending your all too short life doing something you'd rather not? How do you think you will feel 40 years from now as you look back and realize that you've lived your life without doing the things you really wanted to and now it's too late? Or maybe that you sacrificed what you were doing in order to "raise a family" only to now have that family look on you as a burden or to feel that way about yourself?

Yes gambling is a problem, but it's mostly a symptom of living in a world not of your own making, where you are forced into spending your only life working to achieve somebody else's dream and in the end they aren't even grateful.

to build the means to extract that nation's natural resources, while paying a tiny fraction of its worth further enhancing the debt cycle, qualifies as assistance so much as sabotage.

Add that to the fact that most of the places that need help need it because of our actions, and your premise becomes iffy at best.