Super Bowls unleash what once would have been considered a tsunami of sin, and what until recently would have been a sea-to-shining-sea crime wave. More is certain to be bet on the year’s game than the $23.1 billion wagered by 68 million people on last year’s. Nearly seven years after the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on sports betting, this ubiquitous recreation is fueling a $150 billion (the 2024 estimate) and rapidly growing industry.

This alarms many, and inflames some prohibitionists. But Prohibition 2.0 would not be more successful than was Prohibition (1920-1933), which Demon Rum survived. Besides, gambling is as American as immigrants who uproot themselves to wager on the future.

Or as the 1848 Gold Rush, the dream of quick riches. Or as taking a Conestoga wagon to Oregon through Sioux country. Perhaps today the mild risk of roulette satisfies in our tame times a vestigial need of the human nervous system that evolved when stimulations, such as saber-toothed tigers, were plentiful.

In the 1630s, Massachusetts Puritans, who disliked the innate human desire to play, passed a law against gambling. Fourteen decades later, George Washington deplored his soldiers’ rampant gambling at Valley Forge. He liked, however, the lottery that helped finance construction in the city that bears his name. Lotteries also helped fund the Jamestown settlement, the Continental Army, Dartmouth, Harvard and Princeton.

The pursuit of wealth without work is naughty but not new. And most sports betting probably is done as much in pursuit of amusement as of money.

Since the Supreme Court, by striking a 1992 federal law, empowered states to legalize sports betting, 38 states have done so. More will probably seek the pleasure of taxing it.

Forty-five states and the District of Columbia encourage gambling by incessantly advertising their government-run lotteries. Casino slot machines, a gambler’s worst bet, generally keep less than 15 percent of gamblers’ money; state lotteries keep about 40 percent, proving again that the private sector is preferable.

State-run lotteries are gambling for the lazy: Neither information nor thinking helps. Sports betting is different. Much of today’s sports gambling is harmless recreation, and much deploring of it contains harmful insinuations about people.

When the Supreme Court ruled in 2018, Mark Cuban, who was then majority owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, said the value of professional teams would quickly double. He understood that betting on sports would spread rapidly, and that fans would be more engaged with their teams when they had skin in the games. Today fans have casinos (smartphones with gambling apps) in their pockets, so they can place “prop bets” on outcomes within the games: e.g., will Shohei Ohtani strike out two in the next inning?

Banning sports betting was partly yet another example of “Baptists and bootleggers” cooperating: Baptists wanted to outlaw liquor because they considered it sinful; bootleggers wanted it outlawed so only they could supply it. Legalizing sports betting took some clients from organized crime.

Today’s opposition to sports betting flows from a serious worry: the multiplication of problem gamblers — those who become “addicted” to the “high” of gambling’s risks and rewards. Well.

The Lord’s Prayer, which entreats “Lead us not into temptation,” implicitly disparages not only an industry (advertising), but the American ethos, which disparages inhibitions. Americans fled the constraining surveillance of village life for the fun of urban anonymity.

There, gambling, like sex and other (usually) manageable pleasures, can produce elevated levels of endorphins that some people will crave immoderately. Such cravings are frequently termed “addictions.” Clearly, some gamblers — more of them than before sports betting became for millions a weekly or daily activity — need help.

Some members of Congress propose the Safe Bet Act that would ban sports betting nationwide, then allow states to petition the federal government for permission to institute this popular pastime if they comply with many conditions. The act contains a good idea: a national self-exclusion list, whereby problem gamblers can get themselves denied access to casinos and other gambling venues.

The vast majority of sports betters, however, do not compulsively exercise this right. The vocabulary of addiction is used reflexively in our therapeutic culture, which celebrates curing and disparages judging. Character flaws are medicalized: e.g., being a jerk is sanitized as having an “impulse control disorder.” Individuals are absolved of responsibility for their behaviors, at the cost of losing the dignity of personhood.

When genetics and neuroscience are construed to suggest that self-control is severely attenuated, theories of ethics unravel and legal systems totter. You can bet on it.

George Will writes a column for the Washington Post.