A simple position on the issue of the sale of cigarettes is almost impossible to formulate, due entirely to the bureaucratic, irrational, and downright illogical positions and policies of the federal and state governments regarding tobacco.
Laws regulating when and where smokers may use their products are almost as trendy as multibillion-dollar government bailout plans these days. In many states and jurisdictions, smoking in any public place—including bars—has been banned entirely, almost universally against the will of the owners of these private establishments. Another progressive measure the government loves to take in order to protect its citizens from the evils and dangers of tobacco use is the spending of billions of dollars in public money to support smoking prevention and cessation programs.
However, with all the logic we have come to expect from government and lawmakers, the only legislative action more trendy than spending money and passing laws to do everything possible to stop smokers from smoking is taxing tobacco to truly draconian levels in order to fund supposedly crucial government programs (for example, the recently passed State Children’s Health Insurance Program). SCHIP’s funding is provided for in no small part by more increases in taxes on tobacco products. That’s right: In order to provide funding for health insurance programs for children, the federal government had better hope that the billions of dollars they spend on smoking cessation propaganda goes to waste; these programs would be in quite a financial mess if, all of a sudden, the huge influx of tax money they get from tobacco products stopped.
But anti-smoking activists don’t claim that these legislation-associated tobacco tax increases serve only a practical financial purpose. No, they say, smokers deserve this extra tax: after all, eventually their habit will give them lung or heart disease, and their hospital bills are going to be footed by the taxpayer anyway. I will try to avoid the argument of this particular claim becoming effectively null were the government not in the ridiculous business of providing free healthcare on the taxpayer’s dime in the first place, and will instead ask where this argument ends. Do we tax car dealers to pay for the costs of hospitalization due to auto accidents? Do we tax overeaters to pay for their diabetes, the slothful to pay for their heart disease, sunbathers to pay for their melanoma, or drinkers to pay for their liver disease? This argument used by anti-tobacco advocates is just one more of many slippery slopes leading, if we allow them, to the complete government regulation of all aspects of private life.
This semester, Father’s Marketplace in the Rensselaer Union ceased the sale of tobacco products. As a private establishment, it is of course entirely within the rights of Father’s (that is, RPI) to stop the sale of tobacco on campus. This exercise of capitalistic decision-making is not, however, why I fully support the store’s decision to end the sale of cigarettes and similar products. Instead, I applaud RPI removing itself from the hypocritical and dangerous farce that the government has made of the tobacco industry.
