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Poor Richard's Print Shoppe

TOBACCO IS HEALTHIER THAN FASCISM


New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg recently forced at gunpoint that city's bar and restaurant owners to run their businesses his way - by criminalizing smoking - thereby joining the states of Delaware and California in deifying Carry Nation. If "at gunpoint" sounds like hyperbole, ask yourself what the result would be of a given establishment's refusal to comply - eventually, armed law enforcement would show up at his door, escort him under force of arms to a court to appear before a judge who has the power to throw him in jail. That is the rotten core of neo-puritanism and prohibitionism.
The jury's out as to whether the people of New York - the smoking capital of the United States - will rise in rebellion to this fascistic edict, but clearly some broad-based opposition to tobacco prohibitionism is needed urgently, not just in New York but nationwide. In form, the bizarre Tobacco Prohibition Frenzy is textbook-case Fascism. It's shocking not just in terms of the government's impudent attack on the right of private business owners to run their establishments as they choose, and not just in its wholesale looting of an entire American industry, but more fundamentally in its all-out assault on the freedom to choose and on the sovereign right to one's own physical person.

As Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote:
"A good case could be made out in favor of the prohibition of alcohol and nicotine. And why limit the government's benevolent providence to the protection of the individual's body only? Is not the harm a man can inflict on his mind and soul even more disastrous than any bodily evils? Why not prevent him from reading bad books and seeing bad plays, from looking at bad paintings and statues and from hearing bad music? ...If one abolishes man's freedom to determine his own consumption, one takes all freedoms away." [from Human Action, 3rd ed., pp.733-734.]

Future Americans will look back with disgusted amusement at the statist oddities of the turn-of-the-Millenium era, tobacco prohibition zealotry among them. They will doubtlessly take note of the fact that reason is the ultimate winner, while irrationality and powerlust are capable only of sporadic destruction.

Tobacco prohibition, like alcohol prohibition, will not be here in the future - but we live in the present, and we have work to do. This visual display of opposition is a great start, along with your 'homework': letters to your elected officials demanding full repeal of confiscatory and manipulative tobacco taxes, along with flat rejection of the new, distinctly fascistic concept of state-mandated "restaurant and bar smoking bans."


Read "Does the State Now Own Your Body?" by Andrew Bernstein, Ph.D.

Information on Jacob Sullum's book:
"For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health"

Click to read David Harriman's article
"The Tobacco Settlement is a Dangerous Assault on Individual Rights"

F.O.R.C.E.S. website


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