Scientists already know that nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs next to heroin. Those who are dependent on cigarettes on a daily basis are at risk of being labeled drug addicts. But how easy is it to tell the difference between drug addiction and choice of habit? And what is our obligation as a society to help those who are addicted and prevent others from getting hooked?
It isn’t just that smoking cigarettes is addictive; it is deadly too. And when we start seeing loved ones dying early due to lung cancer then the issue becomes more and more urgent to address.
There is, however, a distinct hypocrisy in how the U.S. government is trying to manipulate others to quit smoking.
On one side of the coin the government knows and propagates much information on the hazards of smoking cigarettes through different ad campaigns, as well legislation that requires cigarette companies to print warning labels on every pack. They recognize it as both a highly physical and psychological addiction, and rightfully so.
Many smokers understand that smoking is bad yet they still can’t quit. But what then does the government do to deter people from this nasty habit?
One popular choice is to raise taxes. President Obama signed a law earlier this year to raise taxes from 39 cents to $1.01 per pack of cigarettes and from 19.5 cents to 50 cents per pound for chewing tobacco, making it the single largest cigarette tax hike in our history. But how effective is this strategy and in what ways does it have unintended consequences?
For many in our country, cigarettes are not felt to be a luxury but a necessity. In economic terms, we would say cigarettes have a low elasticity in demand, meaning individuals are usually willing to pay more for the same quantity. We know full well how difficult cigarette withdrawals can be, we know how addictive nicotine is, yet government puts individuals in a situation where they are forced to fork more money out of their pockets to sustain their addiction. Some of these people are already experiencing difficult financial troubles. Is this right?
Raising taxes on cigarettes does more harm than good. Sure, some may grow the courage to quit. In fact, according to the Washington Post, 17.5% of New Yorkers quit after the first tax increase and ad campaign in 2006, but it doesn’t distinguish which was actually more effective: the tax increase or the ad campaign?
We can’t necessarily trust government pseudoscience on whether or not tax increases actually lower smoking rates. But even if tax increases do help some to kick the habit, the majority of smokers are being taken advantage of. It is even worse for those who are addicted the hardest.
This is no way to help people.
I would like to see society focus more on helping others through education rather than tax coercion. This means respecting others free will and free choice, but still looking out for their best interests.
To start, I appreciate the efforts of both profit and non-profit ad campaigns, education programs, and treatment facilities that help those who are willing to seek it.
But what about those who aren’t yet willing to seek help but may in fact need it? To what extent do we have the right to intervene on someone’s personal habits?
We then find ourselves back at the original question posed earlier: To what extent are individuals smoking by their own free choice, and to what extent do they need to be saved from themselves? What right do we have to intervene? And how much intervention is too much if we want to continue living in a free society?
These are the types of questions that we need to ask ourselves as a society. The answers will have major implications on future government policy – not just with cigarette smoking – but other health risks such as poor eating habits and the obesity epidemic.
How helpful is government force in correcting these problems while still respecting others’ free choice?
Or are there more effective (and less harmful) ways we can move society to a better state of health?
The phrase “free market” gets thrown around a lot. Many people who use this term fail to ever reflect on its meaning. Republicans and those on the right typically claim that we need to preserve the free markets, and that Obama’s current policies are destroying free markets. Meanwhile, Democrats and those on the left like to claim that the free market doesn’t exist, and that it is a fictional utopia concocted by proponents of capitalism.
What both of these parties have failed to do before making their claims is to define what a free market really is. Republicans – what are you saying we should protect? And democrats – what are you saying doesn’t exist?
Definition Of An Ideal Free Market
I cannot speak for others but, like the Republicans and Democrats, I do have some things to say regarding the “free market”. So before I state some of my views I will try my best to first begin by defining what a free market actually is to me.
To me, the free market is when all individuals in the marketplace cooperate voluntarily without the use of coercion. Hence – economic decisions are agreed on freely by only the parties involved in each transaction – and there is no force acted upon by the state, or government.
An immediate stumbling block to this idea is: What if people don’t act voluntarily with one another? For example – criminals or gangs who steal property from others. Because criminals use coercive force to steal properties from their otherwise rightful owner I would permit the state to use coercive force only so much as to protect these property rights as to where they rightfully belong. This is why criminals and people who steal go to jail for the misdeeds. Criminals undermine the free market by initiating force, which is not a valid means of exchange in what would otherwise be only free and voluntary economic transactions.
If a man does not keep his end of a contract, that too is an undermining of the voluntary decisions of individuals. It is a kind of fraud, and it cheats legitimate and honest individuals in the free market system (and thus, cheats the free market itself). Therefore, I also believe it is the job of the state to protect these contracts in order to preserve voluntary, and what I would call true, economic behavior.
Other than these protections by the state (property rights, contract rights and fraud), the state would be out of economic affairs completely if we wanted to call this a pure free market system.
The Ontology Of The Free Market
In what way does this free market exist? As anti-capitalists rightfully point out: empirical reality is much more blurry than the clear-cut ideals of the free market. Free marketers like to tout how free markets are all about a non-coercive economic playing field. But things are not so simple.
The United States current marketplace is very-mixed, quite far away from the pure free market that I described above. In fact our current market breaks just about every free market ideal. We have regulations for almost every industry, subsidies for businesses in various sectors of the economy, an enforced monetary system, as well as government monopolies like the U.S. Postal Service and Amtrak.
The ideal free market that people so commonly support has, for all intents and purposes, never existed in our country’s history. Even by the end of George Washington’s presidential term we had our first central bank – a plainly non-free market institution.
In this sense, anti-capitalists are right: the free market is an abstract concept that has no basis in empirical reality. There is no time in our history, or in the history of any other nation that we could say we have had a free market.
But – was the free market ever intended to identify an empirical reality? Or is the free market merely a theoretical construct that may guide our understanding of empirical information? Certainly there is no economist that can reference a specific economic society and claim: “That was the free market!” But we could – and economists often do – look at particular economies and can make the judgment that they are “more free market” or “less free market.”
Why would an abstract concept be ignored simply due to its inability to be directly observed in the natural world? Is that the very nature of what makes an abstract concept? Is a concept that is abstract mean it is not useful in a epistemological sense? What if that concept is concretely defined?
Take for example the concept of a perfect circle or the number pi. Neither of these can be found in the real world, they are only theoretical; however, we still use these concepts to guide our understanding of real world phenomena!
Final Words
Instead of thinking of the free market as a specimen that can be observed in the “real world,” perhaps we are better off thinking of it as a lens out of which we observe – it’s the free market perspective – and it is a very real way of observing economic behaviors and making sense of them. The free market is a measuring stick, a tool of observation, not a formula for an ideal society. It is a way to determine how much freedom individual’s have in their economic activity. And if you are one to believe that freedom is the key ingredient to peace and prosperity for a society, then the free market perspective is something worth understanding.
“ We are losing the war on drugs. Well you know what that implies? There’s a war going on, and people on drugs are winning it! Well, what does that tell you about drugs? Some smart, creative motherfuckers on that side.”
- Bill Hicks
The war on drugs in many ways captures the essence of how the American Progressive movement claims its moral omnipotence and feels the obligation to dominate man’s ways towards nothing but the elite’s conception of a “moral enlightenment” for society.
These same moral soldiers believe they can make man good through the use of force and persuasion by means of a gun. Thus is what governments seek to do. Thus is what evil men desire: to exercise their will over others, judge right and wrong based on their own disposition, and enact there subjective ideas into civil law.
This is not an argument against governments entirely (although the idea should never be too absurd for debate), but simply an argument against the psychology of governments and what most always drives their existence: the desires of men for more power and more control over other men.
Prohibition is one of the greatest examples of government “good intentions” actually hurting society more than benefiting it. The only reason we have stuck with such a bad idea for so long is because the decision to legalize drugs violates most people’s intuition, and even in the face of countless evidence we feel compelled to stick to the same bad idea.
But prohibition has a dangerous history, and even after Marijuana activists and War On Drugs opponents have reminded us time and time again about America’s past with alcohol prohibition, the public still remains largely ignorant.
The fact that products or commodities that would otherwise be sold freely for profit in a free market are now – by law – off the market immediately creates not only the opportunity, but a societal necessity for a black market, especially with drugs as high in demand as marijuana.
A black market creates criminals out of otherwise productive members of society – those who are merely providing a service that is desired by the marketplace. Black markets are a lifeline for gangs; the same gangs that take the lives of innocent people, and turn our children into violent animals. Prohibition and the black market push low-income families towards riskier behaviors just so they are able to provide food for their children and gives money-hungry gang leaders a safe haven to spread violence and hate.
What do we have to worry about if drugs are legalized? The most common complaint we hear on the news is that more of our children will begin to use them. However, this is fallacious thinking. What is going to stop a drug dealer when he is already breaking countless laws from then selling to children? Drug dealers and gangs are already comfortable with carrying out illegal activity in face of profits, what would stop them from spreading their risk onto children?
However, if drugs (and marijuana in particular) are regulated similarly to how alcohol and tobacco are now, then they will begin to be sold in legitimate stores with safe and sensible regulations including not selling to those under a certain age. The people working these stores already have a safe and legal job – why would they dare risk it by attempting to sell to a minor?
This is the same way stores that sell alcohol and tobacco operate. Sure, children and teens will always find ways of cheating the system, but it is much more difficult when the drugs are being sold from those with clean hands and a clean record then when the hands are already covered in filth and continuous illegal behavior.
And just like that we can take a step forward in protecting our children from health hazards, decreasing the amount of criminal and violent activity in communities, providing legitimate jobs for those that didn’t already have them, and spending less money down the black hole known as the “War on Drugs.”
What could be better? And what a marvelous solution – once again man’s freedom proves to be the best ideal for the growth of a prosperous and peaceful society… far surpassing what the corrupted minds of politicians could ever dream up. The empirical evidence is there for anyone willing to see truth, and I firmly believe that within the next decade – if there is but one issue the American public’s opinion will shift – it is that prohibition and the War on Drugs has been nothing but a complete atrocity to our society, causing an incalculable amount of injustices, including a violation of our inalienable right to own our natural bodies. Prohibition needs to be done away with for good!