RALEIGH – Get out your phony-baloney detector. North Carolina state legislators are preparing to debate a state-run lottery, once again, and meats of questionable provenance will be served up to ravenous reporters and peckish pundits.

Here are common arguments for the idea that should be immediately rejected as offering little policy sustenance:

• “It’s wrong to keep people from playing the lottery. Isn’t this is supposed to be a free country?”

Yes, freedom should be of paramount importance, and in my view it is wrong for government to attempt to protect adults from their own foolishness. But the proposal before us has nothing to do with freedom. It is to set up a state-run gambling monopoly to allow North Carolinians to play only the games a government contractor runs. The odds of winning will be atrocious, thanks to a lack of competition, and players will be subjected to misleading advertising about the odds, thanks to the government’s exemption from liability for fraudulent claims.

Moreover, freedom swings both directions. By putting the government in the gambling business, you are forcing citizens who believe gambling is abhorrent or sinful to associate with it or derive revenues from it. That violates their personal freedom. You are also putting the government in the position of exhorting people to gamble, including my own children, to which my answer (and that of many others) will be “shut up and mind your own business.”

If you buy the freedom argument, you should favor legalized, private gambling at places such as horse tracks and the weekly poker game at Charlie’s. You should not favor a state-run lottery.

• “But every other state around us has a lottery. Aren’t we suckers to allow hundreds of millions of North Carolina dollars to flow over the border to build schools in Virginia and South Carolina?”

In a word, no. When you account correctly for the cross-border flows in each direction (if North Carolinians buy lottery tickets, they win prizes) and administrative costs, the real “revenue loss” from not having a North Carolina is too small to worry about. It is certainly not large enough to justify setting up our own game, the administrative costs of which would be greater each year than the current annual revenue loss.

• Legislators often say, “I’m not voting for a lottery. I’m voting for the people’s right to decide. Why are you against a public vote?”

The proper answer to this argument is, frankly, unprintable on a family web site. Lawmakers who hide behind such a transparent rationalization are, with few exceptions, grossly hypocritical. They have been blithely voting for years to taking away the public’s right to vote on issuing debt. They have no interest whatsoever in allowing the public to vote on public-policy ideas that get higher ratings in public-opinion polls than a lottery does, such as tax cuts, spending caps, or term limits.

Since these proposals typically score in the 70 percent to 80 percent range in approval, here’s a deal to offer: I’ll agree a public vote on a state lottery after we hold a referendum to impose term limits on state legislators and a Taxpayer Protection Act. Do we have a deal?

Didn’t think so.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.