Scam Alert: If you receive a call, email or letter claiming to be from the Wisconsin Lottery, this could be a scam. For more consumer protection information, visit the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection website.

State lotteries began in the early modern era, when states needed more money. Lotteries seemed like a way to raise revenue without putting more burden on middle and working classes. They also appealed to a widespread belief that gambling is inevitable, and that people will always play, so we might as well create games for them to play.

In the 17th century, Europeans were accustomed to public lotteries where people would buy tickets for a variety of prizes, such as dinnerware and furniture. The first recorded lotteries offering tickets for a cash prize were in the Low Countries, where towns used them to raise funds for town fortifications and to help the poor.

Lotteries became extremely popular in colonial America, where they helped to finance a range of public and private ventures including churches, libraries, roads, canals, bridges and even the founding of some of America’s first prestigious universities like Columbia, Princeton and Dartmouth. However, the continued issue of crookedness eventually led to the complete prohibition of lotteries in the United States by 1895.

Today, lottery commissions communicate two messages primarily to their players and voters. The main one is that playing the lottery is a great experience and it’s fun to scratch a ticket. This coded message obscures the regressivity of the lottery and obscures how much people are spending on it. The other message that lottery commissioners deliver is that they’re raising money for the state, a notion that obscures how much of their own salaries are coming from player contributions.