Smokin’

My attention was recently brought to The Tobacco Files, a fearless expose of how the tobacco giants are daring to fund ads in Australia opposing the government’s push for “plain packaging” of cigarettes, the latest in the government’s ceaseless and noble campaign against everything smoking-related (except of course the revenue they extort).

According to Lateline:

Professor Mike Daube was one of the medical experts who recommended plain packaging laws. He believes these documents are possibly the most devastating tobacco industry leak ever seen in Australia.

Why devastating? Because “far from being the innocent retailer’s campaign that it pretends to be, this is a campaign that has been developed, masterminded and run to the finest detail by [international tobacco companies].”

So tobacco companies shouldn’t defend themselves against government attacks against their business? Why not? And clearly the tobacco companies wouldn’t spend all that money if they didn’t believe that these laws would hurt their business. So simple logic (surely not beyond the wit of either eminent Professors or talented reporters to deduce) would reveal that if these laws would hurt the tobacco companies to the tune of tens of millions of dollars – then they must also hurt all those little Aussie battler businesses selling them, just as the ads say.

So casting aside all the distractions, the “scandal” amounts to this. The government initiates yet another attack on tobacco, and the tobacco companies choose to defend themselves purely verbally, using the strategy of pointing out how it will hurt thousands of small businesses – in the process, helping out those small businesses. Yet it is no scandal at all that their anti-smoking opponents can bring the full force of government coercion against them. In my world, when an armed gang is self-righteously standing over victims with no defence but their words – the scandal is that everyone not only accepts it but cheers the bullies on.

Let’s be good reporters and delve a little deeper. Those “tobacco giants” (always use the word “giant” to demonise a company) are putting in about $9M in the first two phases. Philip Morris’s Australian profit in 2009 was about $284M and it has about 40% of the Australian market, so we can estimate total tobacco company profits in Australia of about $700M. Yet in the same year, the government raked in $5.4B in excise. And that’s just excise: let’s not forget GST, company tax and income tax. It wouldn’t be too far wrong to say the government gets more than 10 times more out of smokers than the tobacco companies do!

Not only that: nett health care costs from tobacco use in Australia are around $318M p.a. – 5% or less of what the government gets. Perhaps smokers should get a medal.

But of course the figure the government bandies about is the “total social cost”, which they can ramp up to almost anything they want by selectively assigning as much evil as they can think of: over $30B. One wonders how well that figure would stand up to scrutiny by brave investigative journalists. But even if we accept it, the hypocrisy is stunning. Observe that the microscope of “social costs” is pointed at what the government would like to loot. It is never pointed at what the government does. And the cost of meddling, regulating, taxing government policies dwarfs anything private companies and private individuals can dream of. For example, if the government is really worried about the “social cost” of premature death on the workforce (for once, when it suits them, recognising that people are productive beings, not mere consumers of government largesse) – perhaps they could look at the social cost of their restrictive immigration policies? No, that’s different… And if the government is worried about the costs borne by others to help a sick smoker: look at their own laws that force others to pay for everyone else’s mistakes or problems in the first place.

That leads to the real question. Are we free agents who own our own lives, with a right to live them as we see fit: or are we owned by the social collective, which then (through their rulers, of course) has the right to tell us what to do, whenever they decide we are costing too much or contributing too little? The government, of course, believes the latter. So do their self-serving academic and economic advisers. They see themselves as Plato’s philosopher-kings: they know so much better than us great unwashed, their wisdom is to know what is good for us, and by God they’ll make sure we obey them. And they will do it, they will command as much of your life, in as much detail and as soon as they can – as much and as soon as you, the people, will let them.

Don’t let them. Deny them the moral high ground. Deny them the sanction of the moral right to bully the minority and the individual because “they know what’s best”. Do they? Says who? And more importantly – by what right?

I do not like smoking and I think it is a foolish activity. But so what? To twist the paraphrase from Voltaire:

I disagree with what you smoke, but I defend to your death your right to smoke it.