By the twentieth century, old theories blaming poverty on poor people's propensity to gamble and drink and on gambling violating the law of labor disappeared from both academic and political vocabularies. But it did not take long for new well-intentioned but inaccurate arguments against gambling to emerge. Some of these new vocabularies and models suggested what other jargons and models had suggested before: that gambling should either be prohibited or be a government monopoly both to prevent too much vice, fraud, corruption, and involvement of criminal elements and to control the populace's occasional irrational urges to gamble.

Other models have condemned government monopolies of lotteries or casinos, though without drawing the arguments to the logical conclusion or providing any alternatives. They condemned lotteries and some forms of gambling not on the grounds that monopoly rents could be spent on bribes or that monopoly prevents the development of a wide variety of innovative financial instruments and innovative betting markets. Instead, they stated that lotteries are both a regressive tax and a nontransparent one.