Nanny Bloomberg and smoking

From what I read, Eric Garner had been arrested 8 times for selling cigarettes without paying the five dollar something tax that in his infinite intrusiveness Nanny Bloomberg–the prick–instituted to busybody his way into the lives of every New Yorker who smoked.

Not only was this law put on the books–for the alleged good of New Yorkers–but the Chief of Police gave it priority and strongly encouraged beat cops to make arrests.  This is idiocy.  This is taking the War on Drugs to its absurdist extreme.  If they wanted to punish him, fines would have been quite sufficient.  It is not a big deal one way or the other.

And I can totally relate to why he was pissed with them.  I would have been pissed too.  He had figured out a way to make money that, at worst, led to New York collecting slightly less in taxes.

Now why was Garner doing this?  TO FEED HIS FAMILY.  How complicated is that?

And why were people buying from him?  Simple: Socialists ALWAYS create black markets by charging such high taxes that avoiding them becomes profitable in and of itself.  As I noted the other day, utopian Denmark has a thriving black market, with half of Danes admitting they buy things under the table to avoid taxes.

So you have on the one hand an idiot law, passed by idiots for idiots, and enforced by a combination of drones and idiots, and at least one man dead for it, and children who NOW will either go without or be forced to USE some of that tax money these jackasses are collecting to make ends meet, in the form of social welfare benefits.

Dumb top to bottom, side to side.

And I can’t resist adding that this overall war on Tobacco is another source of irritation to me.  If people want to smoke, and they tell their insurance carriers the truth, they are COVERED.  It’s nobodies fucking business. It’s something many people like because it calms them down.

And I have long felt that these stats on second hand smoke exposure among adults are BS.  Yes, people should not smoke in malls or at work, but a few whiffs here and there is not going to affect anyone.  No, you should not smoke around your kids, but if they get a whiff every now and then, that’s not going to hurt anything either.

Did you know chronic smokers only have a 1 in 20 chance of getting lung cancer?  The rate for the population as a whole is 1 in 100.  This makes smokers 5x more likely to get lung cancer, but only 5% of them actually will.  My own guesstimate is that roughly 1 in 2 smokers never suffers anything more serious than a smokers cough.