Sinful education
What can Las Vegas teach liberals and conservatives who fear and loathe it?
BY MIKE ZIGLER

In the free market, people are free. People invest their money, make their profits, and enjoy fewer taxes and regulations. It is a relatively better place to invest than most others. So in a forum at Reason’s Dynamic Cities Conference dubbed “What can Las Vegas teach liberals and conservatives who fear and loathe it,” three panelists gave their answer — don’t regulate people’s desires.

Tim Cavanaugh, web editor for monthly magazine Reason, detailed what Vegas represents culturally — it’s a place where adult pleasures come first. 

“What’s important is the normalization of adult fun and the idea that you don’t have to be ashamed of grown-up pleasures even if shame is part of what makes it pleasurable,” Cavanaugh said. “Even Vegas’ Chamber of Commerce has recognized this. Vegas did a complete reversal, a 180-degree change to its PR campaign, to abandon its effort to be a family resort and proudly embraced its Sin City reputation.”

But both the family and sinful campaigns presented similar challenges as gambling is essentially legal throughout the rest of the country, Cavanaugh continued. Vegas doesn’t have a beach like Atlantic City and it’s not located in a highly populated part of the country. So the city needed to creatively sell itself. 

“That’s the genius of ‘What happens here stays here,’” he said. “It doesn’t specify what will be happening in Vegas. It’s not gambling; it’s not prostitution; it’s not drug use; it’s not sex with a dominatrix. All we know is that it is something you want and it is something you would be ashamed of anywhere else in the country. And it is something you will get in Vegas without interference, without judgment and without any hard feelings.”

But it’s not only the left and the right who can learn from Las Vegas. Journalist Marc Cooper said Libertarians can too. For example, most casinos in Las Vegas are owned by two corporations, MGM MIRAGE and Harrah’s. 

“You would have to be very well-capitalized to come into the Las Vegas gaming market,” said Cooper, who was featured on the “American Experience” two-part series on Las Vegas. “So I’m not quite sure how free that market is.”

Cooper said what the right gets wrong about Las Vegas is the economic free market, which they support, can produce a culture that is not conducive in the conservative culture.

When in Las Vegas two years ago writing The Last Honest Place in America: Paradise and Perdition in the New Las Vegas, Cooper was down to the final chapter — and without any material to close. 

“After a couple months of writing, I was down to write the last chapter and I was here in Las Vegas,” he explained. “It sounds like a stereotype, but I was gambling too much, staying up too late, losing a lot of money and not working the way I wanted to. I had nine-tenths of a book done and I could not for the life of me figure out how to finish this last chapter.” 

His plan: wake up, have a cup of coffee, pack up and head back to Los Angeles. 

“I sat down at the coffee shop inside the Main Street Station, opened the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and and there on the front page read: ‘Virgins convention opens tonight in Las Vegas,’ and God had provided me with a final chapter for the book. There was this divine inspiration that if you went to a convention of virgins in Las Vegas, there had to be a story there.”

Cooper interviewed the virgins, asking them what the hell they were doing in Las Vegas. Of course, they were here to save the city. That night they went out and instead of passing out cards for hookers, they passed out cards with a web address that had stories about good girls — so you can go home and look up their virginal stories. 

“What these rightist virgins didn’t understand is that the economic free market, which they support, can produce a culture that is not conducive in the conservative culture,” Cooper said. “The punchline to this is that I happened to follow the virgins out that night while they passed out these cards. They were passing out cards that read ‘Good Girls,’ and I swear to you one guy picked up the card and said, ‘I wonder if they cost more.’”

While Vin Suprynowicz, columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and published author, discussed Vegas’ sinful success, he elaborated on how bogus regulations can affect Vegas’ fairly free-market friendly environment.

When growth happens as quick as Las Vegas has experienced over the past 50 years, the families who once controlled certain industries during a period when the population was only 150,000 eventually conflicted with outsiders who increased the population to 1.5 million.

Take, for example, auto dealerships. When Vegas’ population was low, every time someone would own a Toyota franchise, the guy who owned the Chevy franchise was in a position to put out a bid for it. 

“Vegas had a relatively small number of families controlling huge numbers of car dealerships and they kept adding franchises,” Suprynowicz said. “So eventually you go to the Lincoln/Toyota/Isuza/ Mercedes dealer. It’s all the same.”

Well, when Vegas reached 1.5 million residents, something started to happen. Outsiders arrived and decided to build new car lots and new franchises. Capitalizing on a free market, the new guys decide to be open every day of the week to gain an edge on existing auto dealers. 

The old families who operated car dealerships ran to the Clark County Commission and complained. The complaint: “These guys are open on Sunday and we don’t like it. For 50 years, we’ve been open six days a week with Sundays off. We don’t want to start paying our employees time-and-a-half to sell cars on Sunday. We want to ban Sunday auto sales.” 

So the county commissioners did, Suprynowicz explained.

“We are pleading people to flee New England and the Bible Belt to come to the land of freedom where you can buy booze on Sunday,” Suprynowicz said. “This is a town that stays wealthy on the free market. The correct answer to these old auto dealers is you’ve got your choice — you can stay closed on Sunday and lose some sales to your competitors, or you can open on Sundays and say to the public that we have more shopping choices.” 

Instead, the commissioners agreed with a bogus argument that the noise of the car dealerships which stay open on Sunday will destroy the religious faithful who want to spend time with their families.

Incrementally, Las Vegas has the apparent reputation of every alley of low tax and low regulation. But now the city is gradually throwing it away because its leaders don’t seem to understand where that came from, Suprynowicz said. 

Nevada is not a low-tax state. The tax burden per capita is around 22nd. 

“For those of you unfamiliar with math from your public-school education, that’s bad, and it puts us in the wrong half,” Suprynowicz said. “And most of the time we stick it to the tourists through room taxes and rental car taxes. Well, the biggest growth in this town has been neighborhood casinos so local people can go gamble. So directly there, we are paying a gaming tax.”

Cooper contended that there is a different work ethic in Las Vegas that makes it pop. Las Vegas has an enormous high-capacity industry based on customer service. 

“People here do not ignore you, they are courteous,” Cooper said. “There are reasons for that. One is because there is a lot of tipping that goes on, but it is also because the politically correct winds are not high, especially in the service industry.”

Raining on the free-market parade, Cooper admitted that one of the reasons wages are high is because union density is high in Las Vegas. Suprynowicz pointed out that the service industry isn’t the only industry with high wages — public employees in Nevada enjoy some of the heftiest paychecks amongst their peers in other states. And, down the road, that could possibly burst this thriving state.

“The guy who pulls you over and writes you a ticket will soon receive a 40-percent raise and be making six figures,” Suprynowicz said. “That is not a captain or a lieutenant, that is a traffic officer who writes you tickets. I see that as a bad thing when government is growing hand over fist and if that isn’t stopped, Nevada is going to become a high-tax, less-workable place to do business.”

Suprynowicz’s bottom line was bigger government is evil and intrusive in itself. Bureaucrats are always looking for behaviors to regulate. Las Vegas should teach us that if another generation is educated in “government-propaganda camps,” remain economically illiterate, and do not know how to preserve the free market that brought them their prosperity, their way of life will be shredded away.

The War on Pleasure (3 of 3)
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