If you can rent a power mower instead of a manual mower, you are essentially investing after-tax income on the chance that it will increase your earning power. If you dream up a better way of building a power mower, and can get it patented, you can sell it or lease it to thousands or millions of grass cutters, and you will become enormously wealthy, with more money than you can possibly spend on haircuts or anything else in your lifetime. Gambling resorts provide services that are the equivalent of hair cuts. Part of the interest goes to the bank, part to the bank depositor. If you are looking for an argument against gambling in the economic realm, you are more likely to find it in the tax codes.
All growth is the result of risk taking.
If the after-tax return on a bigger shop is small or negative, you may decide to hell with it, and go to Vegas to attempt quickly to increase your wealth by a streak of good luck. In this model, you can see that lowering the tax rates on investments in barber shops, as well as lower tax rates on people who need haircuts, will cause the gambling that people do at casinos to drop off and the gambling they do on the productive efforts of each other to increase. In this sense, you can do battle against Sodom and Gomorrah by cutting tax rates where they most discourage people from investing in each other. There is nothing that would do more to reduce gambling as a prosperous industry than a cut or elimination of the capital gains tax. The prospect that President Clinton and the GOP Congress will do this next year is already having a dampening effect on stocks traded on Wall Street that are related to casino gambling.