If you got it you would think twice about playing the game.
Let me rephrase it, what you are basically doing with this lotto thing is the equivalent of meeting with a bunch of friends, putting money in the middle, letting the guy with the dice take a large chunk of it and giving the rest of the money to a guy who is chosen by the dice.
You are paying for one of you to become king and somebody else to organize the coronation.
The entertainment is in the process, not the outcome. The lottery adds intangible value to the transaction simply by being a high-profile media event that occupies national mindshare.
Another example would be playing your dice game in a casino, as opposed to just among friends. Playing in a casino can be fun because of the added intangible value created by the setting.
To use your analogy, you think the spectacle of a coronation just plans itself for free?
I loved playing stochastic games like roulette and so on as a kid. But even back then I knew that in the real world where such games are not played with kid-style fair rules this is a path towards poverty and not richness.
The empty dream of becoming rich has intangible value? Perhaps to some, in the 'opium of the people' sense.
If anything the existence of the lotto game shows that people aren't rational which has some interesting implications for economics, in particular making it more complicated, that will not be delightful to rightwingers.
Of course people aren't rational; their inherent irrationality is precisely what breaks Ricardian Equivalence and supports fiscal illusion, for example. As someone who would prefer lower taxes, I find this effect of population-level irrationality personally tiresome, but then again, population-level irrationality actively benefits me in other ways, so it probably balances out somewhat.
I've always found the "opium of the people" metaphor interesting. It's usually used negatively but in fact, most people actively
need some metaphorical opium in their lives. It's frequently a good thing, increasing their level of happiness temporarily. All societies need pressure release valves.
There is no political system capable of satisfying universal human happiness, and I would suggest that all of them (whether of the left or the right) would inevitably lead to a large majority of the population having a limited range of action in practice. The nature/context of that oppression would vary, but so what, really? Moreover, a majority of people also lack the intellectual capacity to escape into a more internally-derived freedom, regardless of the society they're embedded in, whether that internal freedom be Stoic or Epicurean.
If the large majority will always be oppressed, they may as well enjoy the bread & circuses that come their way. And in fact, on a very practial level, the truth is that for most people, their entertainments are more than enough to keep them happy enough to remain within their societal system, as evidenced by a low rate of revolution. Representative Democracy is just as much of an opium in that sense as is a lottery; far more so in fact, but I suspect from reading between the lines of your posts that you would not argue against that particular narcotic.
Point is, lotteries are enjoyed by many: the intangible benefits are very, very real to them. You can read the proof of that in the thread. People are satisfied by the process of participating and the shared enjoyment of the dream, and then afterwards continue functioning productively in society.
So where's the harm?
