The Miami Herald headline honked, "Tax smokers -- and 5 million will quit, health chiefs say"

Really? Who says so? Four former surgeons general say so. Slap a two-buck tax on every pack of butts and smokers will respond by tossing out their ultra lights, their Zippos and their souvenir ceramic ashtrays from Bagel Beach.

Just how did these four former federal fumar-crats come up with this cause and effect scenario? Probably the same way bureaucrats always come up with their brilliant brain spasms -- by blowing smoke. "We will do A and the public will respond by doing B, just as we want them to." These people, remember, are oblivious to the law of unintended consequences. Otherwise they wouldn't be bureaucrats.

If a carton of carcinogens cuts $20 deeper into your household financial planning, do you stop buying them? Or do you cut something else? Stop snapping up the National Tattler from the magazine rack every day. Skip a haircut. Chuck the National Save the Endangered Jellyfish donation form. Skip a trip to the Sip & Nip. Or a thousand other things that people do to adjust to the manipulations of our national mullahs without even consciously thinking about it.

The political plundering of our pockets only hurts the free market. Smokers who don't quit smoking simply quit something else.

These same ex-surgeoncrats also advocate a nationwide counseling and support line for smokers who wannabe usetabe smokers. So enamored with this paroxysm of brilliant braininess was Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson that, according to the Herald article, he immediately dedicated 25 million of our taxbucks, without asking anyone, for a toll-free (i.e., taxpayer paid) national ''quitline.''

Which will, when reality proves that only a minority of the estimated 50 million puffers will actually turn into previous puffers, create a cadre of lifetime civil servant cessation counselors too incompetent to work in the real world.

Anti ash advocates also want "an extensive media campaign explaining the dangers of smoking." Media campaign? Didn't I report on these billion-buck binging boondoggles in an article entitled "The Moneycrats of Oz"? The ONDCP squandered 3.4 million taxbucks on Super Bowl TV ads accusing tokers of being terrorist's teammates. Medicare blew off 20 million taxbucks on their blimp campaign. Treasurycrats squandered 53 million taxbucks on their New Twenty Dollar Bill media blitz. DHS frittered away a "mere" 650,000 taxbucks (so far) pestering computer users to be firewall users. So now it's Tommy Thompson's turn to tap dance in the spendthrift spotlight. The DC moneycrats are still going mad over Mad Avenue.

But there's more, of course. The aforementioned surgeons generalcrat emeritus are pushing a 10-point plan that includes taxbucks for tobacco research, taxbucks for better doctor training (in other words, more wide open bottomless boondoggles) as well as the aforementioned media blitz. Bottom line: the cigarette excise tax should be raised "from the current 39 cents to $2.39, of which 50 percent of the proceed -- or $14 billion -- would go toward paying for the various aspects of the plan."

If even an economic ignoramus such as the person you're presently perusing can see the idiocy of this brain spasm, why can't the DC moneycrats see it? How do you simultaneously tax smokers to get them to quit while collecting taxes on the cigarettes they're not buying because they quit? The taxcrats obviously have a vested interest in smokers continuing to smoke. The anti-smoking campaign is smoke and mirrors. Let's quit taxing smokers and start smoking out the taxers.

But then, bureaucrats didn't get where they are by being brainy. They got where they are by being bureaucrats.

A spokespuffer for Philip Morris blew politically correct smoke by publicly supporting the quitline. But she also warned that "a $2-per-pack excise tax could promote counterfeiting and illegal sales over the Internet as smokers try to avoid the higher prices."

Duh. Not to mention, as she didn't, smuggling. The Haitians and the Jamaicans will love this. (Or should I be politically correct and call them the Jets and the Sharks?) Gangs of cigarette pushers will be fighting over turf like presidential wannabes fighting over delegates. Stories already abound about sleeper cells in America smuggling smokes and funneling the funds to al Quada. Soon we'll be hearing the HHScrats hawking the heresy, "If you're hacking on Benson and Hedges you're helping bin Laden."

To which libertarians can only retort, "Hey, it was your paroxysm of brilliant braininess that artificially pumped the price of Pall Malls in the first place."