Tobacco industry gives the lie to benevolent government

A group of influential Canadian doctors and other health experts will begin a lobbying campaign on Monday to try and influence the government towards “denormalization” of the tobacco industry, or to put it another way, “demonization” of the tobacco industry.

Of course, this is just giving the lie to the concept of benevolent government, as my title suggests. As long as the tobacco industry exists, nobody can say that the government truly has our health and our interests at heart. Certainly, they can ban candy, unhygienically processed meat, baby walkers, used infant car seats and a plethora of other non-acting agents doing dubious harm to our health and safety, but as long as tobacco, a heavily contributing factor to the most common causes of premature death in Canada, continues to have government sanction, it remains obvious that our health and welfare are not the first items on the agenda.

The only way to justify the claim of benevolent government would be to ban tobacco, and this opens the door to a whole swarm of other concerns. Firstly, there is no degree of interference that is logically too great. Once it has been established that the government could or should mollycoddle us all through the perils of life, we can only say that we have gone far enough when we are all safely ensconced in padded cells, wearing body armor and crash helmets - and are you sure the foam in the padding is hypoallergenic?

Secondly, what is the government keeping us safe from? Ourselves, of course. How fortunate, then, that we have these gods amongst men in Ottawa who know what we truly want more than we do, who are so much more wise than we that they know what trades and transactions we truly want to make in life, rather than the ones we mistakenly think we want to make. Lysander Spooner said, “vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness”, but why would politicians be immune to error? Going on past experience, it would seem that they are at least as prone to error as the rest of us, with the caveat that their errors cause far more damage.