Then build a refinery and expose the shell game.

3 billion to build a refinery is a pittance in our capitalistic society...

$3 billion may sound like chickenfeed to you, but I'm afraid my credit won't stretch quite that far.

Besides, you know it can't be that simple. Refineries owned by the major oil companies are part of a vertically-integrated system. They process crude supplied by the company's extraction division, and distribute the finished products through the company's network of distributers and company-owned gas stations. Being and independent refiner in the middle seems like the weakest place to be, since you have to build your input and output relationships from scratch. An independent producer (should such a thing still exist today) only has to find a refinery to buy its products; and as a gasoline distributor or gas station you only have to offer to buy somebody's finished product.

Gotta agree with your comments on our society's skewed value systems. I'm not aware of any tax incentives targeted specifically at casinos, though. Rich individuals like Steve Wynn (Vegas) and Donald Trump (Jersey), and huge corporations like Bally's (everywhere) have no trouble at all finding capital to build.

The casinos in Nevada benefit from favorable treatment from the state and local governments as a result of Nevada's historical corruption by the casino industry. What the casinos want, the casinos get; and the result is that casinos in Nevada have a lower effective tax rate than almost any other type of business, despite being essentially the state's only significant economic base. Casinos shift the costs from themselves on to the general taxpayer for things like roads and other infrastructure improvements. If you've ever been to Las Vegas, you can see the results in insanely-bad traffic, air pollution, declining water table, and universally-poor maintenance of the civic infrastructure; the town is a shabby hellhole once you get past the glare of the lights on the Strip. But all in all, the situation in Nevada has nothing to do with government policy, and everything to do with the simple economic power of the casinos to corrupt the government. (Well, OK, maybe you could call corruption a government policy in Nevada, but that's just Nevada.)