Buckling Up For Your Own Good (and theirs too)

According to the Brant News today, 16,000 people in Brantford were detained and searched without a warrant this month…impressive.

Of course, that’s not exactly the wording of the original article.

We certainly have short memory spans. As recently as 40 years ago, any kind of “seat belt law” was considered an obnoxious invasion of liberty. But under the guise of “safety”, we have become very accustomed to laws that allow bureaucrats to dictate and mandate the devices we use for health care purposes. The promises of significantly reduced highway fatalities and lower insurance rates quickly found its way into the memory hole as the studies showed mixed results for the former and no impact on the latter.

Worse still, the “safety lobby” got its real start in the early 80’s, a coalition of the auto giants and insurance companies who were faced with pending legislation to install air bags, a hassle and expense they resisted. Transportation regulators hinted that if the safety lobby could pressure the government to pass seat belt laws, the industry could thereby pass the costs of its regulations to the consumer and taxpayer instead in the form of fines and higher insurance rates. This partially backfired for the auto makers and insurers since air bags were eventually mandated anyway, and costly lawsuits for the malfunction of seat belts as well as air bags have resulted (the costs for both, of course, went to the consumer). But it was an unqualified success for the state and an excellent example of the gradual growth of government power.

It began with a compromise, seat belt laws would only impact drivers who were already “bad” (stopped for other infractions) in what was called “secondary enforcement”. But of course, lobbyists continued to chip away at those limitations, and typical of the growth patterns of the regulatory state, soon enough, check points were set up with the express intent of checking specifically for seat belt infractions (and any other violations spotted during the visual search), a free surveillance/cost cutting service for the insurance companies and a permanent source of new tax revenue.

"Illegal Smokes"

Submitted today to the Brantford Expositor___

Every once in a while, an editorial such as Christina Blizzard’s rants about the “dangers” of black market cigarettes (“Revenue and lives up in smoke”, April 10). The motives are usually easy to discern, if not the logic. It’s not about native sovereignty; it’s about nicotine addiction among young children, she claims. Somehow, it is believed that teenage smoking can be reduced by drafting convenience store clerks as unpaid babysitters, an extension of moms “watchful eye”. The problem, of course is that the age verification stickers on the cash registers, and the tax inflated prices of regulated tobacco does not discourage teen smoking, but merely shifts it underground and beyond the view of caregivers.

No doubt, having the government relieve caregivers of their parental authority and responsibility is the bottom line for some, but this alone does not explain a crusade aimed not at tobacco, but specifically against cheaper, unlicensed cigarettes.

There is, of course the “lost tax revenue”; public service propaganda designed to recruit the average taxpayer as a stakeholder in defense of the tobacco cartel, despite the fact that the state can always compensate for “lost taxes” by looting someone else. So who are the real beneficiaries of this hand wringing over the “illegal trade” in smokes, and whose interests are really at stake? Why, it’s the tobacco cartel itself, and its efforts to use the state to restrain the informal, underground trade in cigarettes. It’s a turf war, all in the name of “the children”, of course.

Indeed, Illegal tobacco is big business. But legal tobacco, protected by regulations and licensing, is an even bigger business with the tax funded resources to suppress its competitors. Supported by a coalition of retail, state sponsored charities and corporate interests, big tobacco mounts an impressive “public health” campaign that attempts to teach us all about how a drop in their market share is not just bad for your health, but a threat to western civilization itself.

As the formal, regulated tobacco cartel collapses under its own weight, native “smoke shacks”, as they are called, are part of the process of reindustrialization, of reduced overhead and less burdened supply chains and networks. It is the free market, seeping through the cracks of the corporate state.