Trap,
For the most part, I will let degsme continue the argument. However, I did want to say a couple of things about your casino metaphor. Loosely speaking, a casino is a reasonable metaphor for a rigged system. The one place that I would argue with you is your assertion that the "government is the house" and the game is rigged to benefit the government.
If you're saying its not a perfect analogy, I agree. Nonetheless, the government controls the nation's currency and to one degree or another, it can control even the oligarchs via taxation, tariff's and regulation of interstate trade.
Regulation is not necessarily a slippery slope to central planning.
True - not all regulation leads to central planning. But to achieve central planning you must have a high level of regulation first, and so we should cast a wary eye on each step in that direction.
In the United States, you could also make the case that "the big business oligarchy" (de facto if not de jure) controls the government and institutes rules that allow them to control the house. The government serves to enable the big business oligarchy. In the era that you seem to admire - the Gilded Age - this WAS largely the situation. Now, you admire the Gilded Age and so domination by a big business oligarchy may seem appealing to you.
There are a couple of problems here -- first and foremost, I don't "admire" the Gilded Age. I merely fail to hate it. For all the criticisms of that era, and the boom and bust economic cycles that were commonplace at that time, the nation grew in both population and GDP, and America was the leading innovator, worldwide, in the most significant industries facing the world. We built the biggest railroads, the best steam engines and the only truly mass-produced items from clocks to firearms. America doesn't have a single figure as famous as the British Isambard Brunel, and we didn't need one, we had a dozen Brunel's with names like Edison, McCormick, Westinghouse and Whitney. We had income inequality, but we weren't poor. We had sweatshops -- but the law couldn't force anyone to work in them. We had all the problems of sanitation and worker safety outlined in "The Jungle," and we still were the "butcher to the world." I think in looking at that era most people, especially most liberals, see only the negatives and fail to see the stellar growth and achievements that occurred. I know this is true of Degs, who can't even get past the racism of the era to see the accomplishments, and ignores that the same racism was common worldwide, and not unique to America, at the time. In examining the Gilded Age, you're ignoring that not all of the gilding was gilding metal -- there was a significant amount of actual gold. I think most people fail to recognize that.
This all really just gets us back to the old "tyranny of the mob" versus "tyranny of the oligarchy" argument that we have had many times. The mob versus the oligarchs argument really involves determining who the government works for. What you are concerned with is whether the mob controls the house or the oligarchy controls the house.
At this point in our history, I don't worry much about that. I don't think the statements "the oligarchs ran the government" was true even when the oligarchs included people like J.P. Morgan who used his own money to bail out the government. What I'm concerned with is simply individuals, black or white, rich or poor. We can't have a system of laws that treats individual A differently from individual B because of income, race, religion or what have you. What I see coming from the left is that it wants to treat certain individuals, those that have a lot of money, differently than other individuals, whether this is via taxation or other regulations. I don't think that's the right ideal for our system of government to pursue.