Trump’s regulators built a casino out of American life to enrich insiders. I see the mechanics of this at the bench. A neighbor brings me a Husqvarna riding mower that won’t hold a charge, and he isn’t asking for the specs on the alternator anymore. He’s asking if the next county board election will tank the local mill rate so he can sell his half-acre and cash out before the new assessment hits the mailbox. When every public event becomes a wager like the insider trading bans we watched get written in late March, the work itself stops being the point.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is proposing rules this week that will continue to allow most bets on professional sports while blocking a handful of “manipulable” events like player injuries, first-pitch gambling, acts of war, and assassinations. The agency’s Trump-appointed chair, Michael Selig, calls it a permissive framework designed to keep up with a booming market. The Trump family itself has already taken a financial stake in the platforms running these prediction markets, with one of Trump’s sons serving as an adviser to Kalshi. The logic is blunt when you strip the regulatory varnish. When the people setting the parameters own a piece of the table, they have a structural interest in getting everyone else to pull up a chair.
Wendell Berry wrote in The Unsettling of America that a community’s economy is not a machine to be fed, but a membership to be sustained. What the prediction-market architecture does is convert the membership into a ticker. When a U.S. soldier was charged this past April for placing trades around a classified military operation that arrested Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, the market had stopped measuring public outcomes and started monetizing the chain of command. It turns civic duty into an inside edge, even as Washington tries to tighten scrutiny over who can cash those checks. That membership is what my pole barn represents — three generations who stayed put — and it’s exactly what the prediction markets dissolve into a speculative ticker.
I run a one-man shop in Friendship, Adams County, out of a converted pole barn on land my three generations have worked. I cannot hedge my year against the price of diesel by writing a futures contract. I cannot short the Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative when they file their rate case with the Public Service Commission. The people who designed this system have built an economy where the actual physical work of keeping tractors running and wells pumping is the only asset class you aren’t allowed to trade. You fix what is broken, you get paid for the hour, and you hope the price of the parts doesn’t swallow the margin before the weekend.
The rhetoric from the halls of Washington tells working-class families that if you just tighten your belt and ignore the cultural noise, the free market will reward your discipline. But discipline does not matter when the institutional framework is rigged to let the architects bet on whether the machinery will fail before lunch. Bipartisan lawmakers have finally introduced legislation to prohibit U.S.-regulated prediction markets from listing sports and casino-style contracts. That legislation is the first official acknowledgment that when the regulator also holds a piece of the table, the game is not oversight — it’s extraction. You cannot run a functioning country when the governing philosophy is that everything is a derivative.
The proposed rules might ban bets on a starting pitcher’s shoulder or a geopolitical assassination to save appearances from the worst kinds of obvious manipulation. But the rest of the ledger stays wide open. The casino is the economy now, and the working people who keep the actual lights on are just the cover charge.