Butt out of individual choices

ADAM CREIGHTON
August 02, 2013
The Australian

ADOLF Hitler lost the war but his campaign to eradicate smoking and unhealthy eating is still being vigorously waged the world over.

The Rudd government’s decision to ratchet up tobacco excise by another 25 per cent is a cynical cash grab, mainly at the expense of the country’s poorest. But it is surely a supreme irony that it is being sold with the same flawed economic and moral arguments that underpinned Nazi Germany’s policies to stamp out smoking.

German doctors were the first to discover a link between tobacco smoking and cancer in the 1930s. National Socialism declared cancer “the number one enemy”. Along with a passion for the natural environment, the Fuhrer hated smoking — a relic of the sort of decadent liberal lifestyle that undermined the health of the “volk”.

In measures foreshadowing Australia’s own “pioneering” efforts to reduce smoking, Nazi Germany cracked down on cigarette advertising, banned smoking at work, in government offices, and ultimately on buses and trains too.

The Reich itself exhorted Germans to change: “Food is not a private matter” and “You have a duty to be healthy” blared from government placards.

Today’s healthy living crusaders, roused into excitement by any tax or ban that might ostensibly improve people’s health, most obviously do not adhere to the other heinous tenets of National Socialism. But they do share its bizarre and sometimes shrill desire to curtail others’ eating and leisure habits, supposedly in the interests of the individuals concerned and the greater public good.

“Everywhere in the West public health doctrine has drifted from public-good concerns, such as contagious diseases, toward a frontal attack on individual choices and politically incorrect lifestyles,” writes Canadian economics professor Pierre Lemieux of University of Quebec.

Hitler’s Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research helped calculate the “national economic cost of smoking”. But its figures were probably as fraudulent as those routinely concocted today.

The Labor government’s contention that smoking “costs” Australia more than $31 billion a year is rubbish. For a start, about two-thirds of this amount involves the so-called “psychological costs of premature death” and it includes other purely personal costs, such as lower productivity.

These are not social costs unless one assumes, as National Socialism did, that people are the property of a state whose economic, aesthetic and political interests trump the rights of individuals to conduct their private lives as they see fit.

Amazingly — given smokers choose to smoke — popular estimates of “net costs” ignore any personal benefit smokers might derive from smoking. And they disregard the offsetting savings from substantially lower health and age-pension costs as a result of smoking-induced premature deaths.

Hard-headed analyses of the net costs in Australia range from a small fraction of the federal government’s annual tobacco excise haul, which is projected to be around $6bn this financial year, to a net benefit. So far from being a drain on the public purse, smokers are in fact public benefactors, many of them contributing each year thousands of dollars in extra tax.

Government interference that restrains individuals from inflicting harm on others is not fascism. Given the strong statistical link between inhaling cigarette smoke and the subsequent incidence of cancer, banning smoking in public, and even workplaces, might well be acceptable grounds for regulation in a liberal country.

But government should butt out of individuals’ decision to smoke privately, or to engage in any other behaviour that might entail personal costs without harm to others.

It is doubtful the government genuinely believes its latest tobacco excise hike will do much to dissuade hardened smokers from giving up. Indeed, economists typically recommend taxes on alcohol and cigarettes for the very reason that they typically don’t much alter behaviour.

Of course, a growing nanny state is not a sufficient condition for the development of fascism, but the more government grows the more bureaucrats and public health zealots will have the means and the desire to impose their own preferences on others — especially less politically connected groups such as smokers. Note the lack of interest in taxing alcohol — far more popular among society’s elites — despite the obviously massive economic and social damage wrought by it.

In 1932, Italian dictator Mussolini wrote: “If the nineteenth century was a century of individualism, it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism and, hence, the century of the State”. Dissecting the illogical arguments of public health zealots should help ensure the 21st is more like the 19th.