We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
The war on… What is it this week? Ah, tobacco again. Now displaying them for sale is to be banned. It is a public consultation – but the point of public consultation is to be able to point to endorsement of policy and to disarm objectors at the point of actual legislation, not to discover anything. Departmental minds are clearly made up:
Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo said it was “vital” to teach children that “smoking is bad”.
“If that means stripping out vending machines or removing cigarettes from behind the counter, I’m willing to do that,” she said.
‘Its-for-the-children!’ – usually delivered in a sobbing voice on the edge of hysteria – remains an unstoppable weapon by which public life crushes private life.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
And next it’ll be alcohol, then “bad” foods. How are the online supermarket sites going to manage it?
Can’t help thinking that every time you make something a little more illicit it becomes a little more popular with rebellious children (and adults).
A pointless move; people will ask for their favourite tobacco just the same.
Let’s face it, organisations like ASH have always wanted to ban cigarettes and this is just a further step in that direction. I recall the lobby group Forest has made this claim over and over and ASH and all the other nannying groups denied it. But they cannot really deny it any longer. The officious wankers.
The Government don’t want children and young people to take up smoking so they believe that by hiding the merchandise children and young people won’t buy them. A logical thought, especially as it has certainly worked with marijuana, heroin, cocaine, crack cocaine, aerosol containers. glue and paint thinners, hasn’t it? I have often wondered just how stupid and tunnel-visioned one has to be before they are chosen for Government office. At last I am beginning to realise the answer. Also no one has yet mentioned how the shortfall of tax revenue from reduced sales is going to be met. Cretins, the lot of ’em.
They are at it here in Oz as well.
Today, the exemplars of tolerance and laissez-fair in Canberra announced they were starting ‘consultations’ about putting scary and graphic pictures on containers of booze.
Don’t forget, they are terrified you might be enjoying yourself.
From the Telegraph’s article–
“Ministers had for years feared more opposition, but the Government feels the change has now been accepted and signals a desire for further changes to try and address the problem of smoking.”
Of course, they know full well that the public are utterly beaten and opposition is impossible. It was impossible to flout the ban since publicans and other business owners are forced to be policemen (on pain of losing their right to trade). They can do anything to us that they like, and they’ll get away with it too.
Notice how the last sentence is used as justification. If your victim doesn’t scream loud enough, that proves they’re enjoying it.
These are evil people. But there is nothing that can be done to rid us of them. Liberty really is dead.
So ciggies will be “under the counter” like contraband.
But, wait, a lot of ciggies smoked in this country already are contraband! I suspect this will be a boon to those smuggling tabs in from, say, Poland.
Why? Because the process by which legit and smuggled fags is bought will be the same and that, I think, is an important psychological difference. Not just psychological though because shops and pubs that sell cigarettes now have to display them and natch those ones have to be legit. Now there is no need for that veneer of respectability if Ms Primnproper’s proposal goes through.
If more and more smokers get cigarettes without Darling getting his pound of flesh all to the good I say.
That’s probably why Europeans have stopped having them. It’s the only effective counter move yet. No children, no need for new restrictions.
Unfortunately that also allows them to crow that tobacco sales are going down, so their policies are “working” so we need more of the same.
Every creature-comfort pronounced illegal simply goes underground…where (in no particular order) the trade falls into the hands of the criminal element, becomes even more expensive, the goods on sale are adulterated, associated crime & violence flourish & the jails become so overcrowded that the real criminals are released into society.
It applies to everything; booze, drugs, prostitution, you name it.
One would have thought that the experience of Prohibition in the US had a lesson to be learned…but no. The quite ridiculous ‘War on Drugs’ is, in fact, a war on a free society.
There are, and always have been, ‘drug’ related casualties. Folk also fall off mountains (they shouldn’t have been there), die in airplane crashes (if God had meant you to fly he……), drown at sea (those are feet, not fins) and, in the absence of a pedestrian carrying a red flag in front of the vehicles, kill & maim each other in traffic accidents (you see!).
Yes but…what about the children……….
I’ve for some time thought that if ever one were writing a Constitution it should include a clause something like this one (IANAL, so I accept my wording isn’t very legally watertight, it’s just the general idea)-
“No law nor regulation may inhibit nor restrict the trade in, or promotion of, or distribution of any legal good or service.”
Define ‘legal’.
and lo and behold, if we all stopped smoking tomorrow, what would they tax instead? I am sick of these people – I gave up the dreaded weed a month ago but if others want to continue, good luck to them.
Anything which isn’t directly prohibited by law.
Like i said, my suggestion wasn’t written in legalise. The intention is that the government should leave the market alone. If it’s legal to sell a particular product, then the government shouldn’t be able to interfere with sales of it, or advertising of it.
For instance, here in the Peoples’ Soviet, they’ve banned cheese(!) from being advertised when children may be watching TV. Cheese.
Cheese!!!
I’m saying that such interference should be unconstitutional. The government could still ban the selling of say nuclear warheads or slavery. But a thing would either be banned, or not. If it’s not banned, it’s no business of the government.
I see your point now.
Cheese?
Yes, cheese.
Apparently it’s “junk food” now.
Sacre maquereux (or are they also beyond nanny’s pale?) & holy suffering cats, IanB…do my eyes deceive my earsight?
At my quite advanced age, due, let me say, to trouble-free lifelong smoking, enjoying as much alcohol as I can without falling over or getting gout and eating all the wrong things extremely well without suffering from obesity…I am quite ready to go, thanking the gods for the opportunity of having lived at a time when ‘Nanny’ meant my dear childhood nurse & fellow dedicated cheese-chomper.
As an aside, I think it’s useless talking about ‘taking our country back’, simply because those we would wish to charge with the task have no idea what we’re talking about; never having experienced anything different.
I completely agree with all the comments about the probable counter-productive effects of this measure, and the utter brainlessness of those promoting it, but I have one further observation.
This is no longer about saving people from themselves (as if that were a legitimate reason for legislation in the first place). It’s about power. It’s become the governmental equivalent of kicking a man when he’s already down. The red mist has descended, and they’re making people’s lives ever more difficult – and ultimately destroying their businesses – because they can.
There can be no other logical explanation. As others have already pointed out: prohibition doesn’t work.
“Also no one has yet mentioned how the shortfall of tax revenue from reduced sales is going to be met. ”
The treasury wouldn’t be allowing them to make this attempt if there were any risk of a tax shortfall. So they already know it will have no effect on that. They are just causing nuisance and expense to retailers so it looks like the government is “doing something”.
I have been either smitten or forgotten…it is, after all, Bank Holiday Monday…and who better to take a holiday than your average bank.
I just wanted to say that cheese is good for you…and the poor children. Think of all that Calcium, Phosphorus & Milk Minerals.
Psstt! Over ‘ere. I’ve got a pint of full fat milk under my coat. Unpasteurised. Five quid, mate, and it’s yours. By the way, we got a shipment of streaky bacon coming in from Poland next week, that’s if the rozzers don’t get a tip off. Do you want me to save you some?
I know at least three US-based brewers who are arready on it. Avery of Boulder, CO, and Stone of San Diego, CA, both put demons on most of their labels.
And if I ever go commercial, I’m planning on registering the trademark “Cirrhosis Fine Ales.”
It’s like Denis Leary talking about warning labels on cigarettes: “You could make the entire front of the pack a skull and crossbones, call it Tumors, and smokers will still be lining up around the block!”
Em. You do not really know what prohibition is, because no one has actually done real prohibition yet. Not in ‘Western’ civilisation, really.
Believe you me, if a State really poured all of its resources into seriously eradicating a particular ‘thing’, it can and it will succeed to a very large degree.
It is my belief that the Americans weren’t really all that serious about alcohol during the 20s; either that, or the 2nd Amendment got in the way.
But I would like to ask smokers; would you voluntarily adhere to certain etiquette? Like, not smoking at a bloody bus stop? I’d really appreciate it.
Years ago I asked someone in a bus stop to stop smoking. She refused, very furiously. I kind of sympathized, although not with the fact that she was much less polite to me than I was to her. Sometimes in life there are conflicts that just cannot be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. It still doesn’t mean that they should be regulated by the government.
You do not really know what prohibition is…
What a nostalgic feeling. I haven’t heard an explicit it-hasn’t-failed-because-it-hasn’t-been-tried-properly argument since the demise of the Soviet Union.
Can you point to any fully successful prohibition anywhere, Gregory?
The policies like these aren’t prohibition, they’re persecution. Tobacco is unlikely to ever be outlawed, same for beer or cheese. But the policy is to make life so difficult for those who indulge, denying indulgers the right to do so in more and more areas, making it harder and harder to get work, a home, (and probably it’ll soon be direct grounds for removing children from parents etc) that people are forced into compliance. There’s a difference. The idea isn’t banning tobacco so much as erasing smokers from public life and interaction with other humans, to make them a kind of “unperson”.
I’m sure it’s illegal to bite virgins on their necks and suck their blood. I don’t remember the last time that’s happened in my neighborhood.
Although I don’t know how much of the success is attributable to prohibition and how much is due to this garlic I’ve been wearing for the last month…
And now that I’ve been a total smartass, here’s the serious response:
No prohibition is 100% successful. However, nobody in the real world expects 100% results. The idea is to simply deter something undesired. Banning driving 31MPH in a 30 zone didn’t eliminate all speeding by itself, for example, but the chance of negative reinforcement[1] delivered by a humorless bastard with hair gel and purple mirror shades causes most people to avoid such undesired conduct.
And someone will correctly note that greater penalties for the possession of, say, >8oz of marijuana than there are for threatening someone with a hockey stick will lead to more threats but fewer people stoned, assuming consistent enforcement. Except enforcement may or may not be consistent. Anyone who’s studied the history of prohibition in the US will know this: people can be bought. Some of the people who are for sale are cops and judges. And the ones on the pad will look the either way or give a competitive advantage to their patron.
That is, when the selective enforcement isn’t being done for a ‘higher’ purpose than merely making money, such as when the Kennedy AND Johnson AND Nixon administrations all used the IRS to harass political opponents for technical violations that were ignored when committed by friends and family.
..which means that some prohibitions just were not meant to be consistently enforced. When I act selectively, I’m sure I act from the highest of motives[2] but someone else might accuse me of playing favorites. Looked at from one perspective (mine) that’s someone trying to make a cheap point about cops all being dirty. Looked at from another perspective…I don’t know. I’m going to bed.
[1] That being what we do: we provide negative reinforcement for those acts which the Peepul, acting through their oh-so-brilliant elected representatives, deem unacceptable. In this case, the negative reinforcement is being told to waste a morning seeing a judge or mail in $65 within 20 days.
[2] Example: 911 call, something about a party in the park, with alcohol. On arrival, I found one teenager sick, possible EtOH poisoning, and another one with him. The second had about half an ounce of MJ on him. Nevertheless, he didn’t run off before we showed up, but instead stuck around until help arrived for his friend. Think I actually charged him for the weed?
I thought it were the virgins who are supposed to wear it?
Good post Guy.
Um… I’m not saying that prohibition is good or bad. I’m just saying that given certain narrow circumstances that you don’t usually see in the West, it can suceed to a large degree.
Bibles in Saudi Arabia. ’nuff said.
No, not 100%. that’s a bloody strawman and you know it, guy.