No, You Can’t Legislate Morality or Abundance
If you listen to the buzz in progressive state capitols and city halls across the country, or read Ezra Klein’s Abundance, you’d think our biggest problem is a crisis of state capacity. Klein, and a growing number of progressives, share a vision of a liberalism that builds. They argue that the government has become proficient at vetoing things but has lost its ability to get projects finished on time and under budget.
It’s understandable that Klein and the others want to discontinue policies that have unnecessarily increased government bureaucracy and slowed development. But from the perspective of sound governance, they have it backward. We don’t have a capacity problem; we have a scope problem.
By attempting to legislate the results of productivity, Klein inverts the causal order of prosperity. He treats the state as an engine to force social goals rather than the protector of the rights and conditions that allow abundance to emerge. The hard truth is that government cannot create abundance; it can only secure the political conditions for innovation and productivity—which chiefly requires that it refrain from obstructing them.
The Justice Trap
The foundation of Klein’s argument rests on a distinction he makes in the introduction: that markets are “fine for goods where access is not a matter of justice.”
By reclassifying economic outputs—like housing or energy—as issues of justice rather than results of production, his framework treats them as matters of state administration instead of private action.
But justice is not a state-delivered outcome or a curated collection of subsidies; it is a condition. True justice demands the freedom to associate, produce, and trade. When a city decides that housing justice requires overriding market signals and private property, the government stops being a protector and starts being a central planner. We see this manifested repeatedly at the local level in the goals of affordable housing, permanent supportive housing, and economic development.
By declaring production to be a matter of state-defined justice, Klein strips the individual of any claim to their property or associations, if such claims conflict with the state’s goals.¹
The Myth of State Capacity
The book is steeped in a collectivist mindset, frequently using “we” to describe decisions that should belong to individuals. Klein’s framework operates on the explicit premise that “to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need [emphasis added].”² Thus, we must collectively decide what kind of neighborhoods to live in and then build them. But one person wants a quiet cul-de-sac; another wants a high-rise above a train station. When the state steps in to decide how we want to live and what we want to build, it isn’t we deciding—it is a small group of planners overriding the actual preferences of individuals. In almost every instance where Klein uses “we,” you can replace it with “the government.” “We need to build more” actually means “The state needs to mandate that more be built, regardless of property rights.”
Late in the book, Klein argues that the government simply needs to be “better.” But better by what standard, if the government’s original purpose (protecting individual rights and justice) is disregarded?
If we wish to preserve individual rights and individual justice, government is “better” when it engages in proper, rights-protecting activities and rejects the siren song of central planning. To the abundance advocate, however, “better” means a more efficient technocracy. They want a government that is faster at executing on its central planning—one that can override local hurdles not to protect or restore property rights, but to force the state’s preferred version of density. But doing the wrong things faster doesn’t make them right.
We see this most clearly in energy policy: the state seeks abundance for solar panels and transmission lines while restricting the very energy sources—fossil fuels—that power 80% of the world. This is not a quest for abundance; it is a political preference disguised as a supply-side solution. True abundance would require liberating all cost-effective energy, not simply being less bureaucratic about how restrictive policies are imposed and favors are provided. When the state determines the what and the who of production, it is a command economy, notwithstanding how its leaders claim to champion efficiency and production.
This mandate-driven approach doesn’t remain at the state level; it trickles down to city halls in the form of all-electric building mandates and restrictive, often nonsensical, climate action plans. When a California municipality mimics Sacramento by banning natural gas or prioritizing ideological energy targets over grid reliability, they aren’t creating abundance. They are imposing higher costs on local builders and leaving their own residents vulnerable to the instability of a state-managed grid. It is the local taxpayer and energy user who pay the price for this trickle-down technocracy.
How Slot Volatility Shapes Player Experience According to Bestcasinoph
Slot machine volatility — sometimes called variance — is one of the most consequential yet least visible mechanics in casino game design. Unlike return-to-player (RTP) percentages, which are frequently displayed in game information panels and regulated disclosures, volatility operates as a structural property of the mathematical model underneath a slot’s surface. It determines not what a player wins over millions of spins in aggregate, but how that winning is distributed across individual sessions. Two games can share an identical RTP of 96% and deliver completely different experiences: one might pay out small amounts with high frequency, while the other might go hundreds of spins without a significant win before delivering a payout that dwarfs anything the first game would produce. Understanding how volatility works — and how it interacts with session length, bankroll size, bonus mechanics, and player psychology — is essential for anyone who wants to engage with slot games in an informed way.
The Mathematical Foundation of Volatility and How It Differs from RTP
Return-to-player percentage describes the long-run theoretical payback of a slot machine. A game with a 96% RTP will, across a statistically sufficient number of spins — typically in the hundreds of millions — return 96 cents for every dollar wagered. This figure is audited by independent testing laboratories such as eCOGRA, iTech Labs, and BMM Testlabs, and it is mandated by licensing bodies in jurisdictions including Malta (MGA), Gibraltar, and the United Kingdom (UKGC). RTP is a population-level statistic. It tells you nothing about what will happen to a specific player in a specific session.
Volatility, by contrast, describes the distribution of outcomes around that mean. In statistical terms, it is related to the standard deviation of the payout distribution. A low-volatility slot has a tight distribution: most spins produce small wins, losses are modest, and the game rarely strays far from its expected value in any given session. A high-volatility slot has a wide distribution: most spins return nothing or very little, but the tail of the distribution extends far to the right, containing rare but very large payouts. The mathematical mechanism that creates high volatility is usually a combination of a low hit frequency (the percentage of spins that produce any payout at all) paired with a high maximum win multiplier — often 5,000x, 10,000x, or even 50,000x the base bet in contemporary titles.
Game developers began formally categorizing volatility in their published documentation around the mid-2000s, coinciding with the growth of online casino platforms and the associated need to differentiate products in a crowded digital marketplace. Providers such as NetEnt, Microgaming, and Playtech were among the first to include volatility ratings in game sheets distributed to operators. Today, virtually every major studio — including Play’n GO, Pragmatic Play, Hacksaw Gaming, and NoLimit City — publishes a volatility classification, typically on a three-to-five-point scale. However, these scales are not standardized across the industry. A “medium” rating from one developer may correspond to a “medium-high” rating from another, which creates interpretive challenges for players comparing games across platforms.
The mathematical relationship between volatility and RTP is also frequently misunderstood. Higher volatility does not mean higher RTP. A high-volatility game can have a lower RTP than a low-volatility game. What volatility changes is the shape of the experience, not the underlying expected value. This distinction matters enormously in practice: a player with a limited bankroll who selects a high-volatility game expecting better returns is making a category error. They are choosing a higher probability of total session loss in exchange for a lower probability of a large win — a trade-off that may or may not align with their actual preferences.
How Volatility Shapes Session Dynamics and Bankroll Behavior
The practical consequences of volatility become clear when you model session behavior across different volatility tiers. Consider a player with a session bankroll of 100 units betting 1 unit per spin. In a low-volatility game with a hit frequency of approximately 35-40% and a maximum win of around 200x, that player will experience frequent small returns that extend their session significantly. The variance in their ending balance after 200 spins is relatively narrow — they might finish anywhere from 60 to 130 units in most scenarios, with extreme outcomes being rare. The session feels consistent and controlled.
Apply the same bankroll to a high-volatility game with a hit frequency of 15-20% and a maximum win of 5,000x or more, and the dynamics shift dramatically. Extended losing streaks of 30, 50, or even 80 consecutive non-winning spins are not unusual — they are mathematically expected. A 100-unit bankroll can evaporate before the game’s bonus feature triggers even once. Conversely, a single bonus round in such a game might return 300, 500, or 1,000 units. The session outcome is binary in a way that low-volatility sessions never are: either the player hits a meaningful feature and finishes well ahead, or they exhaust their bankroll before the game’s payout distribution delivers its rewards.
This dynamic has significant implications for responsible gambling. Regulatory frameworks in the UK, Sweden, and the Netherlands have increasingly focused on features that accelerate play and obscure loss rates — autoplay restrictions, spin speed limits, and mandatory display of session losses are all now required in various forms under UKGC regulations updated in 2021 and the Swedish Spelinspektionen’s guidelines. High-volatility games are particularly relevant here because the long dry spells they produce can encourage players to increase bet sizes in an attempt to recover losses or to trigger features more quickly. This behavior pattern — known colloquially as chasing — is more likely to emerge in high-volatility environments precisely because the feedback loop between play and reward is so extended.
Operators and review platforms have developed more nuanced approaches to communicating volatility to players. The Bestcasinoph website, for instance, incorporates volatility classifications into its game reviews alongside RTP data, helping players in the Philippine market contextualize their game selection relative to both their bankroll and their preferred session style. This kind of layered information presentation reflects a broader industry movement toward transparency that has accelerated since the mid-2010s, driven partly by regulatory pressure and partly by the growing sophistication of online casino audiences.
Bankroll management strategies must be calibrated to volatility. A common recommendation from experienced players is to hold at least 100-200x the base bet in reserve for medium-volatility games, and 300-500x for high-volatility titles. These figures are not arbitrary — they are derived from the probability of ruin calculations that account for the expected length of losing streaks at different volatility levels. For a game with a 15% hit frequency, the probability of going 20 consecutive spins without a win is approximately 3.9% per attempt; over a 200-spin session, a player will encounter multiple such sequences. Adequate bankroll depth is the only mechanical defense against ruin before the game’s positive tail can be accessed.
Bonus Features, Mechanics, and Their Relationship to Volatility Architecture
Modern slot design has moved well beyond simple reel-spinning mechanics. The proliferation of bonus features — free spins rounds, pick-and-click games, cascading reels, multiplier trails, buy-a-bonus options, and hold-and-spin mechanics — has created a complex ecosystem in which volatility is not a single fixed property but something that can shift dramatically depending on which game state the player is in. Understanding this layered volatility architecture is essential for interpreting how different games actually behave.
The base game and the bonus game of a modern slot often have entirely different volatility profiles. A game might have a low-to-medium volatility base game — producing frequent small wins that sustain the bankroll — paired with an extremely high-volatility bonus round where the majority of the game’s RTP is concentrated. Pragmatic Play’s Gates of Olympus, released in 2021, is a prominent example: the base game produces modest tumble wins with some regularity, but the free spins round, with its unlimited multiplier mechanic, is where wins of 1,000x or more originate. The overall volatility rating of the game is “very high” precisely because such a large proportion of its theoretical payout is concentrated in rare, high-value events.
The introduction of buy-bonus (or bonus buy) features — which allow players to pay a premium, typically 50-100x the base bet, to immediately enter the bonus round — has added another dimension to volatility analysis. These features, offered by studios including Hacksaw Gaming, Big Time Gaming, and Relax Gaming, effectively allow players to skip the base game entirely and access the high-volatility bonus state directly. From a mathematical standpoint, bonus buy options are priced to maintain the same expected value as triggering the feature organically, but they concentrate variance into a single large transaction rather than distributing it across many base game spins. Several European regulators, including the UKGC, banned bonus buy features in 2019 on the grounds that they accelerated the pace of play in ways that could be harmful — a decision that reflects the regulatory community’s growing awareness of how volatility mechanics interact with player behavior.
Cascading or avalanche reel mechanics, popularized by NetEnt’s Gonzo’s Quest in 2011 and now ubiquitous across the industry, introduce a form of within-spin volatility: a single spin can produce multiple consecutive win events as winning symbols are removed and replaced. When combined with multipliers that increase with each cascade, these mechanics can produce enormous wins from a single spin activation — but they also mean that the variance within a single spin event is itself high. A player might pay for a spin that produces one small cascade win, or one that produces six cascades with a 6x multiplier, with the distribution of outcomes being extremely wide.
Hold-and-spin mechanics, which became widespread following the success of Aristocrat’s Lightning Link series in land-based casinos and were subsequently adapted for online play by developers including Pragmatic Play (Fruit Party, Starlight Princess) and Red Tiger, represent yet another volatility architecture. These features typically require landing a specific number of special symbols to trigger a respin sequence in which only those symbols are held while the remaining reels spin for a fixed number of attempts. The jackpot or maximum win is only achievable if the entire grid fills with special symbols — an event with a very low probability. This creates a bimodal outcome distribution: most feature triggers produce modest wins, while a small fraction produce very large wins. Players who evaluate these games based on average feature wins will systematically underestimate the role of variance in determining their actual outcomes.
Player Psychology, Volatility Preference, and Responsible Engagement
Volatility preference is not uniform across the player population, and the factors that drive it are more complex than simple risk appetite. Research in behavioral economics — including work derived from Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory, which describes how people evaluate potential gains and losses relative to a reference point rather than in absolute terms — suggests that players systematically overweight the probability of large wins relative to their actual mathematical frequency. This cognitive tendency means that high-volatility games may be intrinsically more appealing to many players than their expected value alone would justify, because the possibility of a large win is psychologically salient in a way that the high probability of session loss is not.
Casino game designers are aware of this dynamic. The near-miss effect — in which outcomes that fall just short of a major win (such as two jackpot symbols on a payline with a third just above or below) produce heightened arousal and increased motivation to continue playing — has been documented in academic literature since at least the 1980s. In high-volatility games, near-miss events are structurally more frequent because the game must produce many non-winning or small-winning spins in order to maintain its mathematical model. The psychological impact of these near-miss events can sustain engagement through losing streaks in ways that may not reflect the player’s rational assessment of their situation.
Bestcasinoph, as a platform focused on the Philippine gaming market, has addressed these dynamics in its editorial content by providing volatility-aware guidance that goes beyond simple game ratings. The platform’s approach reflects a broader shift in how informed casino review and comparison services communicate with their audiences — moving from promotional content toward genuinely educational material that helps players understand the structural properties of the games they are choosing. This shift has been driven partly by regulatory pressure in mature markets and partly by the demonstrated appetite among experienced players for substantive information rather than surface-level descriptions.
The relationship between volatility and session satisfaction is not linear. Studies conducted by casino operators and academic researchers — including work published in the Journal of Gambling Studies — have found that player satisfaction is influenced not just by whether a player wins or loses in absolute terms, but by whether the session experience matched their expectations. A player who selects a high-volatility game expecting frequent wins and experiences a long losing streak is likely to report lower satisfaction than a player who understood the game’s structure and accepted the trade-off. This suggests that volatility communication is not merely a regulatory compliance issue but a genuine service to players.
Practical strategies for engaging with high-volatility games responsibly include setting strict session loss limits before beginning play, selecting base bet sizes that allow for at least 200-300 spins before the bankroll is exhausted, and treating the bonus feature as the primary event rather than an unexpected windfall. For low-volatility games, the relevant discipline is different: because the game produces frequent small wins, players may be tempted to extend sessions well beyond their intended duration, gradually eroding a bankroll through accumulated house edge rather than through a dramatic losing streak. Both volatility profiles carry distinct risk patterns that require different behavioral responses.
Slot volatility is ultimately a design parameter that encodes a specific theory of entertainment — a particular answer to the question of how wins should be distributed across time and players. Low volatility encodes a preference for consistency and longevity; high volatility encodes a preference for the possibility of transformation. Neither is inherently superior, but the consequences of mismatching a game’s volatility profile with a player’s bankroll, session expectations, and psychological tendencies are significant and often underappreciated. As the online casino industry continues to mature — with more sophisticated regulatory frameworks, more transparent game documentation, and more educated player communities — volatility literacy is becoming an increasingly important component of responsible and enjoyable engagement with slot games. Players who understand what they are choosing when they select a game by its variance profile are in a fundamentally better position to make decisions that reflect their actual preferences rather than their assumptions about how the game works.
The Productivity of the Untied Hand
Klein himself states the truth about halfway through the book, noting that affordable housing is built more cheaply and swiftly when public funds are avoided.³ He calls this fact “damning,” an example of the failure of state efficiency. In reality, such results demonstrate the inevitable success of the private sector, something that we should encourage and celebrate. The private sector does amazing things precisely when its hands are not tied by mandates, prevailing wage requirements, and the twenty-page social engineering checklists that govern 21st-century construction.
When local governments try to engineer abundance—whether through municipal fiber networks or subsidized housing—they take on economic risks they are ill-equipped to manage. They aim at a metric while violating the principles that produce actual prosperity. These projects carry a long fiscal shadow. When a private developer fails, the investors lose; when a city-led abundance project fails, the taxpayers lose their future. This failure is inevitable because when a municipality adopts abundance as a goal, it shifts from a principled organization to a metric-driven one. Fixated on a specific number—like “10,000 new units”—the city becomes willing to violate the very principles that produce actual prosperity.
This logic is the driving force behind Klein’s “Invent” chapter, where he advocates for the state to take the lead in funding and directing innovation. However, just because the government uses tax money to fund something that some people want or find useful doesn’t make the act right or the project sound. When the state funds research and development that would have occurred anyway, it simply adds layers of bureaucracy and political favoritism to a process that was working.
Perhaps more concerning is when the government funds projects that would not be funded voluntarily. In a free market, profit is a sign of sustainability; if greedy capital won’t touch it, it is a red flag that the project is not a value-creator. When the government overrides such judgment, it isn’t creating abundance; it is subsidizing inefficiency, or perhaps pet projects, at the expense of the taxpayer.
This same gatekeeping mentality—where the state picks winners in the research lab—extends to how cities manage land use. We see this in the surge of development agreements where cities essentially sell permission to build in exchange for political tribute. The city isn’t protecting your right to use your land; it is gatekeeping the market. If you want to build, you must first fund a park, provide below-market-rate units, or adhere to a specific aesthetic. This isn’t abundance; it’s a toll booth. By the time the goal is met, the underlying right to property has been replaced by a system of political patronage.
A city that functions as a gatekeeper eventually finds itself with less to gatekeep.
Conclusion: Freedom is the Source of Abundance
The Abundance Agenda amounts to a conceptual bait-and-switch. It takes abundance—the natural fruit of liberty—and tries to sell it back to us as a product of the state. But abundance is a byproduct, not a goal; it is what happens when people are left free to produce. Our history has shown that when the state stays in its lane, people satisfy their needs—and then some.
If we make abundance our political target, we invite technocratic schemes that inevitably stifle the very innovation we claim to want. We don’t need a government that aims at abundance; we need one that understands its proper scope: securing the conditions that produce it—namely, the freedom to associate and the right to use one’s property as one sees fit.
A true inquiry into abundance would ask: “What policies maximize human flourishing?” The answer is never more central planning; it is the restoration of the rights-protecting activities that allow people to build. No, you cannot legislate morality or abundance. But if you protect the freedom to produce, abundance will take care of itself.
¹ “State’s goals” is a fuzzy reference because it can mean whatever those in the position of influencing the state’s agenda decides them to be.
² Klein and Thompson, Abundance, 4.
³ Klein and Thompson, Abundance, 104.
Mark Moses is a senior fellow with the California Policy Center. He has thirty years of experience in local government administration and finance. His book, The Municipal Financial Crisis – A Framework for Understanding and Fixing Government Budgeting, was published by Palgrave Macmillan and is available from major online booksellers.
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