It doesn't make any difference.....
Posted on 12/05/2014 7:47:19 AM PST by SeekAndFind
After news of the baffling decision by the New York grand jury not to indict a police officer in the killing of Eric Garner, I sent out a (slightly) hyperbolic tweet that wondered why Americans would want to entrust their free speech and health care to an institution that will kill you over failure to pay a cigarette tax.
Since then, I’ve seen numerous tweets arguing that bringing up the tax is preposterous, that it’s akin to blaming jaywalking for the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) touched on the issue in an interview with MSNBC yesterday and was, unsurprisingly, ridiculed for it by liberals — because mentioning the circumstances of a violent act is preposterous, apparently.
Though it certainly isn’t close to being the most important aspect of this inexplicable case, the role of the cigarette tax is not something we should dismiss so flippantly.
Garner wasn’t targeted for death because he was avoiding taxes, but nonetheless, prohibitive cigarette taxes unnecessarily generate situations that make events such as this possible. We frame violence in this way all the time. We often talk about unintended consequences. When we discuss how women who immigrated to this country illegally can be the helpless victims of domestic violence, we are also blaming unfair laws for creating the situation. When talking about the war on drugs and how it creates millions of nonviolent criminals and needless abuse by the Drug Enforcement Administration and others, liberals have little problem blaming the underlying policy that makes all of that possible — with good reason.
Some pundits have similarly blamed broken-windows policing for Garner’s death. Those policies, whether or not they work, are aimed at protecting property and people. In the case of Garner, police were enforcing a law that has nothing to do with violence, not in the short or long term. It exists to shield people from their own lawful habit. High cigarette taxes were cooked up, for the most part, to artificially inflate the price of a product politicians and voters dislike so that others would not be able to afford it — for their own good.
New York has by far the highest cigarette taxes in the nation: more than five bucks a pack. Unsurprisingly, the policy has spurred a black market. In March, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the formation of the “Cigarette Strike Force” to crack down on illegal tobacco trafficking. A strike force. As writer Robert Tracinski has pointed out, the Garner case should remind us that “government is force” and that more government has predictable returns. If you believe cops are racists or generally out of control, why give them more opportunity?
Last month, a man was arrested on Staten Island with 500,000 untaxed cigarettes in his van. (Don’t worry; New York State resells most of the cigarettes for revenue.) The more profitable it becomes to circumvent taxes, the more dangerous this mini-prohibition will be. Garner was selling single cigarettes, incidentally. Does anyone believe that isn’t a waste of time for police and prosecutors?
Even if your position is that government has an important role in deciding what you should ingest, cigarette smoking has been dropping for decades around the country. It was dropping before sin taxes. It’s dropping in places where there are no sin taxes. Other than inconveniencing poor people, sin taxes offer us nothing. Well, maybe a little tax revenue. A bit of social engineering. And sometimes a death.
— David Harsanyi is a senior editor at the Federalist and the author of The People Have Spoken (and They Are Wrong): The Case Against Democracy.
I wish this writer had his facts straight. Mr. Garner was not killed by a police officer. He was not killed by a so-called choke hold. The first time he said “I can’t breath,” the officer let go. Within 10 minutes, he was still breathing, still talking, and put in an ambulance. He died of an heart attack on the way to the hospital.
When people repeat a lie often enough.....
I think I am going to be pasting this in a lot of threads today.
It doesn't make any difference.....
When everything’s a crime, police have probable cause everywhere all the time.
Now stop resisting.
Let me get this straight. If I were to violently resist arrest for not paying income tax, a socialist tool if there ever was one, I can shift the blame to the cops by criticizing the tax?
No, you shift blame to the people who enacted the law. Any time you make something illegal, or legally obligatory, your law is backed up by a guy with a badge and a gun and the very real threat of violence if you resist.
Some things are worth committing violence over. Some are not, but our lawmakers and the people who vote for them seem to have lost track of this distinction.
There are a few FReepers that have openly stated that smokers SHOULD be put to death. The war on tobacco has been succesfully won and many will never see beyond the word tobacco in order to understand the underlying point of the article.
“There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted and you create a nation of law-breakers — and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system.”
Quote by: Ayn Rand
(1905-1982) Author
Source: “Atlas Shrugged”, Part II, Chapter 3
The broken glass theory where cops keep order by enforcing the lowest type crime to keep higher crime in check worked. That is until politicans put the glass on the sidewalk where you have a good chance of it breaking when you walk down the street.
Too many laws of nonsense. Someone(s) should run on the promise of repealing Federal 3,000 laws in his first term.
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