This time, I’m not talking about the latest “Oh, will someone think of the children!?” nonsense that’s fronting the movement to install age-gates on your personal computers.
Or whatever’s behind the recent movement to force your 3d printer to ask permission from the State before it makes your doodads for you.
Or the incoming requirement that your car make you take a breathalyzer test before allowing you to drive.
No, today let’s talk about cigarettes.
And booze and other regulated “vices”, but mostly cigarettes.
Because, after New Zealand tried a novel way of banning tobacco completely a few years ago, this idea seems to be in the regulatory zeitgeist these days too.
New Zealand’s ban was an amusing one: they set a specific date, and banned selling tobacco products to anyone born after that date. It was widely lampooned by comedians joking about how this would eventually result in 50-year-olds trying to get 51-year-olds to buy them a pack of smokes.
Which it would.
The governing party in New Zealand changed at the next election, and that ban was repealed, but the idea seems to be catching on elsewhere. The U.K. is reportedly developing a similar law at the moment.
So it’s time to bang this particular drum again.
Vice taxes, and bans on an activity that harms only its user, are flat-out wrong.
The State should not be allowed to make those decisions for the people.
Yes, tobacco harms its users. This is undeniably true.
But that doesn’t matter.
It does not necessarily harm anyone other than its user.
And the right to make your own choices about your own self is fundamental and must be absolute. Any other position calls into dispute every other right.
You cannot, for example, make a coherent argument in favor of open-access to abortion that doesn’t also require open-access to tobacco.
Yes, smoking may harm or annoy other people.
And it is appropriate to regulate it on that basis.
Make it only available to adults, since only adults can legally consent to things that harm them.
Require private-but-open-to-the-public spaces to post their policy on whether to allow it or not, so people can make informed choices.
Forbid it completely in enclosed public spaces, sure.
But you can’t ban it without infringing on the citizens’ rights to self-determination and bodily autonomy.
And this is important.
Not for the smokers; for all of us.
Because a state should operate by coherent principles, rather than by the whims of whoever has the conch at the moment.
You cannot have a fair State unless you keep the State completely out of each citizen’s decisions about issues that only affect themselves.
