RALEIGH – I’d rather be called a ghoul than a lich.
What’s a lich? In fantasy literature, it’s typically the reanimated corpse of some dead king or sorcerer. Rather than just being an individual menace, the lich seeks to control the minds and actions of vast hordes of other beings.
Naturally, I’d prefer not to be compared to any manifestation of the evil undead. Since I chose a very public career involving political controversy, however, it would be unrealistic not to expect a few demon-baiting insults now and then. Particularly when the issue involves unpopular personal behavior, such as the lawful consumption of tobacco products, passion tends to crowd out propriety.
Regarding two proposals in the General Assembly this year, to raise tobacco taxes and to ban smoking in most North Carolina restaurants, proponents have raised the argument that the state should discourage smoking because Medicaid and other tax-funded health programs spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year to treat smoking-related illnesses. In response, I and other opponents have pointed out that the best available evidence shows that smoking does not impose a net cost on taxpayers, so the neo-prohibitionists’ reasoning is based on a false premise.
For that, we have been called ghoulish.
It’s an unfair charge, to start with. We advocates of personal freedom didn’t start this. We didn’t claim that the state should tax or regulate private behavior based on some utilitarian calculus of social costs and benefits. We believe that individuals in a free society should be able to make decisions on their own, based on their perception of costs and benefits to themselves, their family and friends, and others with whom they interact.
Our belief in freedom derives, in part, from our fundamental recognition that it is wrong to treat fellow human beings as means rather than as ends in themselves. To sacrifice another’s life, liberty, or property to engineer some outcome you want is wrong. If you wish to limit your exposure to tobacco smoke, you have many proper mechanisms at your disposal. You can choose where to live, work, and shop based on posted smoking policies. You can forbid people to smoke in your home. And you can demand reasonable smoking policies for government facilities of common usage, such as courthouses and other public buildings.
But because tobacco smoke is not a general environmental pollutant, wafting over from a smoker’s property to present a significant health risk to others, that’s as far as it should go. You shouldn’t be able to tell others what they can do on their own property. The proper rule, as usual, is to mind your own business.
The neo-prohibitionists don’t respect the equal rights of their fellow citizens. Instead, they see themselves as possessing superior knowledge and wisdom, which should give them the authority to force smokers and restaurant owners to comply. That’s what makes them paternalistic – the prohibitionists see themselves as parents and the rest of us as children.
Recognizing that spelling out their pretensions of superiority might hurt their cause, the prohibitionists decided to concoct an elaborate, plausible justification for paternalism based on an estimate of the costs imposed by smokers on taxpayers. This argument was a major element of state government lawsuits against the tobacco companies more than a decade ago, the settlement of which yielded higher taxes and the abomination known as Golden LEAF. And it’s a claim heard a lot around the General Assembly this session.
The prohibitionists got their math wrong. They didn’t account for the net fiscal impact of smoking, which includes the cost of tax-funded pension payments and of treating other illnesses. As the AP just reported once again, serious analysis does not show a net cost to taxpayers from smoking.
Robbed of their claim to save taxpayer money, the prohibitionists are left with a transparent desire to rob you of your freedom – for your own good, of course. But seeking control over the private lives of others is wrong, regardless of the intention.
They can call me ghoulish if they wish. I’ll call them a lich. What a lovely debate we’re having.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation