BrianGarst.com

The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids is throwing out press releases left and right (like this one for North Dakota) highlighting all the money state government’s could soak up if they slapped a $1 tax on cigarettes.  If states did this, they inform us that all kind of wondrous benefits would follow, such as fewer kids taking up smoking and more adult smokers dropping the habit.  Oh, and we’d save millions in health care costs!  Reuters took up the call and trumpeted that the tax “could reap billions” for states.

So what is the problem?  It’s two-fold, as I see it.  One, raising revenues is not going to make a difference in budget outlooks if lawmakers do not also adopt a fundamentally different approach to governing.  Business as usual would just mean spending any additional funds to buy new votes.  There is simply no reason to believe the money would be spent only for the purposes for which government was actually instituted.  In fact, government has enough money for those purposes already.

Second, nanny taxes like these (which are just excise taxes targeting particularly unpopular or risky activities) limit individual freedom and start us down a slippery slope of deciding what activities people are allowed to partake in.  Some people do things, like smoke, which involve some harm to themselves.  But it also clearly provides a benefit, or they wouldn’t do it, and the only person capable of weighing the cost and the benefits of an individual activity is the actual individual.  After all, the pleasure we take from any particular activity is subjective to ourselves and cannot be universally measured.  I take no pleasure in smoking, but others do.  That is their right, and they should not be targeted for punishment under the guise of balancing budgets.

If it’s smokers today, who might it be tomorrow?  Motorcycle riders? Hunters? Fast food eaters?  …Blog readers?

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