Bootleg Butts and the Power Wonks

A couple years back I keystroked an article about a little phenomenon known as worldwide cigarette smuggling. And then lost interest in the subject. But the world didn't. Two years later this headline popped out at me from an AP article:

In Major Shift, U.S. Indicates It Will Support Anti-Tobacco Treaty at WHO Annual Assembly

So here's the article, with minor updates, that I wrote back then. Notice how little has changed.

High Tax Blamed For Rise In Smoking

My first reaction to that Daily Mail headline was the classic furrowed-brow slack-jawed squinty-eyed "Huh?" How does raising cigarette taxes cause increased smoking? Wouldn't higher taxes cause decreased smoking? Eventually, 100 watts of GE Soft White winked on above my head. Of course. Smuggling. Seems the Brits had just discovered the Law of Unintended Consequences. Jacking up cigarette taxes made it profitable to sell bootlegged smokes on the black market (or what libertarians fittingly call the Free Market).

But while smuggling makes cigarettes cheaper, how does it increase the actual number of smokers? One way, the article enlightens us, is the practice of hawking cigarettes out the back of vans to school children. Surprise! Smuggling drives out legitimate business and attracts less virtuous entrepreneurs.

This, I speculated, might make a great subject for a column. I dimly remembered stories about cops stopping eighteen-wheelers crammed full of untaxed cigarettes en route from Tobacco Belt states to Rust Belt states. And another story about how Canadian moneycrats licked their lips over massive revenue increases from their massive cigarette tax increases until they figured out that actual tax collections were dwindling because of the (guess what?) unintended consequences of massive smuggling across the US border.

So I typed the search string "tobacco smuggling" into my favorite web scavenger and up popped 2200+ hits, the vast majority of which were anti-tobacco. What follows is a random sampling of attitudes from these rabidly prohibitionist sites. But notice that what they don't say is more telling than what they do say.

Abolitionists are mad as hell about worldwide cigarette smuggling. (But nobody points out that worldwide policing agencies love cigarette smuggling because it expands their power and pumps up their budgets and legitimizes their childhood macho fantasies of lacing on jackboots and smacking people around for the impertinence of offering products to people who voluntarily wish to buy them.)

Governments are angry about losing tax revenue because of smuggling. (But nobody questions whether governments have the right to regulate and tax people on the basis of their personal habits in the first place.)

Do-good organizations complain that cigarette smuggling thwarts public health efforts against smoking. (But nobody points out that smoking, including the secondhand variety, debunked most recently by the British Journal of Medicine, is not a public health issue because you can't "catch" smoking from someone ala AIDS, hepatitis or pinkeye. Nor is it mentioned that the costs of treating smoking-related ailments is a concern only of socialized medicine, since in a libertarian society smokers pay their own health and life insurance premiums or rely on charity rather than extort taxpayers into bankrolling the negative consequences of their choices.)

The U.S. prosecuted an R.J. Reynolds affiliate for cigarette smuggling. (But they don't tell you that the act of smuggling is a victimless political crime that wouldn't exist in a free society.)

The political mentality portrays all smugglers as criminals. (But the same mentality wants you to forget that Joseph Kennedy was almost certainly guilty of smuggling hooch from Europe during the Volsted days or that Harriet Tubman was very certainly guilty of smuggling other people's property, aka runaway slaves.)

The World Health Organization, utterly oblivious to the Daily Mail story, and to reality, claimed in a press release that "Higher taxes are the key to cutting cigarette consumption" and that poor law enforcement, not people's individual desires, are the true cause of smuggling. (And of course they won't tell you that it's you, smoker and nonsmoker alike, who'll be forced to pay for their worldwide anti-tobacco jihad -- for your own good.)

United Nations worldcrats are pushing an international treaty "to try to get everyone on Earth to stop smoking." (But neither they nor WHO will tell you that the three things they really want are power, power and power.)

Smoking is a nasty, deadly habit. International political oppression is a nasty, deadly habit. Can anyone tell me how point one justifies point two?

I need another cigarette.