Posted on 03/15/2008 1:35:06 PM PDT by USFRIENDINVICTORIA
Rudyard Griffiths, co-director with Patrick Luciani of The Salon Speakers Series, sent me a copy of Czech President Vaclav Klaus' address delivered at Prague Castle this week.
"Future dangers will not come from the same source," said the Czech head of state, speaking at the 60th anniversary of the communist takeover of the former Czechoslovakia. "The ideology will be different. Its essence will nevertheless be identical: an attractive, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice a man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality.
"What I had in mind was, of course, environmentalism and its present strongest version, climate alarmism."
Indeed. There are many systems of social philosophy built on the proposition that public causes transcend individual freedoms, interests or morality. Lying in a good cause is OK. So is coercion. The main champions of this proposition used to be Marxists and Nazis, but it doesn't take a Marxist or a Nazi to bully and lie. Just about any "activist" can do it. So can any official, carrying out social policy. The current champions may be the climate alarmists of the environmental movement, but anti-smoking crusaders come a close second.
Take extortion. After British Columbia, New Brunswick has become the latest province to try its hand at it: extortion masquerading as a lawsuit against the tobacco industry. The Ontario government is mild in comparison: It merely proposes to outlaw smoking in private cars while transporting children.
For the record, I don't smoke, don't allow children in my car and own no tobacco stocks. I believe staying away from cigarettes would save lives (as would staying away from fast-food, fast sex and fast demagoguery). Educational efforts to gradually phase out smoking are fine by me.
What isn't fine is bullying and lying. In reverse order, actually, since the anti-smoking lobby has to lie before it can bully. A key lie continues to be that the health hazards of secondhand smoke have been scientifically established.
In 1986, when then-U.S. surgeon-general C. Everett Koop wanted to see cigarettes banned, he made a flat statement, backed by the considerable weight of his office, that the effects of second-hand smoke were responsible for 2,000 deaths in the United States. Challenged by scientists, he blithely retreated, saying that while he may have pulled the figure out of a hat, it was all in a good cause. The principle was right.
But the principle wasn't right. A 1987 study by the American National Academy of Sciences found no evidence that second-hand smoke jeopardizes the health of non-smokers. As even Koop admitted, the majority of 16 studies on environmental tobacco smoke and lung cancer found no statistically significant relationship. (One field study concluded that a nonsmoker would have to sit behind an office desk for 550 continuous hours before being exposed to the nicotine equivalent of a single cigarette.)
If your aim is to ban or regulate smoking, you must show that smoking harms non-smokers. And if you can't show it because the evidence is equivocal, you must create an atmosphere of hysteria.
In 1993, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) went one better than Koop. They took the official position that second-hand cigarette smoke is a health hazard, responsible for 3,000 lung cancer deaths in the U.S.
Five years later, a federal judge in North Carolina found the EPA made serious mistakes evaluating the risk of second-hand smoke. Federal District Judge William Osteen ruled in 1998 that the "EPA publicly committed to a conclusion before research had begun," and that the "EPA disregarded information and made findings on selective information."
The EPA defended itself by saying it had never claimed that minimal exposure to second-hand smoke posed a huge individual cancer risk. It only said that, while the lung cancer risk from second-hand smoke was relatively small compared to the risk from direct smoking, unlike a smoker who chooses to smoke, the nonsmoker's risk was often involuntary.
It was a splendid illustration of how regulators, whose stock in trade is removing people's choices, can blithely cast themselves as protectors of volition. Don't smoking bans replace volition altogether? Oh well, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. (For eggs, read liberty -- piffle compared to the sacred cause of public hygiene.)
I have nothing against the EPA's agenda; I only dislike coercion and lies. I'm not in favour of environmental smoke, only opposed to environmental hysteria. And I marvel that we don't even blink anymore as government metastasizes into such private spaces as our cars.
Unhealthy as smoking is, it's not half as unhealthy as politicized science. When the Czech President raised the alarm this week about the cause-driven state "that transcends the individual in the name of the common good," he was only reminding us that in order to survive cancer or global warming, it's unnecessary to succumb to tyranny.
Jonas has expressed my thoughts on this very well indeed. I wish I'd written something like this years ago -- as a catharsis if nothing else.
BTW, I like this line: “For the record, I don’t smoke, don’t allow children in my car and own no tobacco stocks.”
read later
Tell the Czech president to come to the US and move into the White House.
He’s much better than anything we’ve got (or may be getting).
Very good article! Hooray George Jonas! Thanks for posting, FRIEND.
Thank you for the article and your comment.
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