In the first half of 2022, nearly half a billion euros was gambled in online casinos, often by young adults. Under the leadership of lobbyist and former VVD MP Helma Lodders, the online gambling market was regulated and legalized at the end of 2021. Last year, when online gambling was still illegal, half a billion was also gambled, but in a whole year. And then the World Cup in Qatar is yet to come.
So get ready for many more commercials featuring Wesley’s and Andy’s trying to convince the Dylans and Melvins in the bank to gamble money they don’t have. Dylans and Melvins who, incidentally, have stepped into cryptos en masse in recent years, an ‘investment’ that should of course also count in the figures about online gambling. But now that the price of crypto coins is deadlocked, the financially vulnerable are starting to gamble again.
The reprehensible profession of the influencers, which stimulates consumerism, fear of missing out and gambling addictions in financially vulnerable young people, has meanwhile found a new revenue model: giving STAP courses. That STAP stands for Stimulans ArbeidsmarktPositie, and is a subsidy scheme that allows workers and job seekers to spend a maximum of 1,000 euros on a training or development process, with which they can increase their chances on the labor market. Unfortunately, the government has once again been sleeping in accepting course providers, who spend this tax money.
Self-proclaimed crypto guru Madelon Vos, for example, was given the green light for a STAP course in which she teaches silly ‘technical analysis’, in other words how to predict the price development of unpredictable crypto coins. How someone increases their chances on the labor market with this is a mystery to me, but that’s not the worst. After all, the crypto community lives on rabid anti-government sentiment and indoctrinates young people with a libertarian and selfish worldview, resulting in a significant overlap between extreme right-wing conspiracy theorists and the crypto community. The government thus subsidizes its own sabotage.
It is not their own fault that young people suffer from a toxic visual culture and an extremely proletarian conception of happiness. Partly thanks to the ‘freedom of education’ of Article 23 of the Constitution, children in the Netherlands are owned by their parents. That works well for the children of parents who can handle money wisely, but is a tragedy for the children of parents who have not learned this. At school almost no attention is paid to the household book and financial education, because in the Netherlands we consider that ‘private’, just like healthy food.
In doing so, we create hereditary financial vulnerability, with disastrous consequences. A large part of our population is absolutely unable to handle money, with the deplorable financial self-reliance of women being an additional concern in addition to wasteful young people. Instead of investing in equality of opportunity and financial knowledge for everyone, we send people into life unprepared and vulnerable, prone to disinformation and often ultimately dependent on benefits, subsidies and family support. That lack of self-reliance is happily passed on to the next generation, who have a 25 percent chance of illiteracy and attend segregated schools.
Class society is alive and kicking, but the masses are numbed by consumerism disguised as freedom. Crises and insecurity are not new, but the unprecedented destructive power of social media is. So do something about that. We are undermining our own youth not only by denying them financial education and equal opportunities, but also by allowing obvious bad things like online gambling. A drama, because a government that does not protect its young people cannot expect those young people to protect that government later on.
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