The Gambling Act 2005: Regulatory Containment and Market Control

The Act marks a fundamental shift from legislative to market control of gambling. While plans for Las Vegas style casinos and internet gambling sites in Britain have suffered setbacks, restrictions on the availability, advertising and stimulation of demand for gambling, enshrined in the Gaming Act 1968, have been abandoned. In their place, a new regulatory body, the Gambling Commission, has been established to take primary responsibility for ensuring that three licensing objectives are promoted. These objectives are the prevention of crime and disorder, the conduct of gambling in a fair and open way and the protection of children and the vulnerable. The Commission has been given strong and wide ranging powers to regulate gambling, but can the safeguards proposed meet the challenge presented by a gambling industry released from restraints?     

Sanctioned violence: development and the persecution of women as witches in south Bihar

In South Bihar, India, socially sanctioned witch-hunting and persecution led to the deaths of 15 women in 1994 and 24 women and children in 1994. This article presents case studies to suggest that the underlying causes of this behavior are not superstition and illiteracy but are efforts to maintain women's inferior status by enforcing female economic subjugation, sexual exploitation, and the persecution of widows and independent, vocal women. In these cases, superstitious beliefs were exploited by community members with ulterior motives who compensated village witch doctors for collaborating with any accusation made against a local woman. After an introduction and presentation of the issues, the article describes the social and economic context and presents four case studies of women accused of witchcraft. The women involved were either forced to consume human excreta and then banished; raped and left for dead when five other family members were murdered, including a year-old baby; or protected through the intervention of a nongovernmental organization or a district welfare officer. The article then discusses the implications of this phenomenon for development work through a look at the power of social sanction, the role of witch doctors, the gender dimension, the power of the village headmen and the traditional administration system, and the larger motives behind the behavior. The article ends by suggesting interventions such as focusing on eliminating atrocities towards women, forming support groups, sensitizing officials, incorporating gender sensitivity in development efforts, and increasing access to health and education.     

Thomas Jefferson's Liberal Anticapitalism

This article reassesses Thomas Jefferson's political economy in light of debates about the influence of liberal and republican ideas on his thought. I argue that Jefferson embraced liberal premises, but used them to reach anticapitalist conclusions. He opposed neither commerce nor the prosperity it promised; he opposed working for a wage, and he did so on liberal grounds. The first section of this article shows that John Locke's theory of property turns on the justification of capitalist labor relations. The second section establishes, first, that Locke's argument played a decisive role in the development of Jefferson's own and, second, that Jefferson redefined its terms to fashion a forceful critique of wage labor. An examination of Jefferson's writings elucidates a neglected variant of the liberal tradition, prevalent in the United States until the Populist agitation. Its core is the stigma attached to working for hire as a diminished form of liberty, tantamount to wage slavery.