Peter Skurkiss: 'Smoking and Individual Liberty'

Source:Temple News- Americans have the individual right to smoke.

Source:The New Democrat 

"This April, Temple University President Richard Englert announced that United States campuses would be tobacco-free by July 1, banning all tobacco use, including cigarettes, Juuls and other vaping products on any of Temple’s campuses, he wrote in an email to the Temple community."  

From Temple News 

"This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the date when the surgeon general at long last admitted that smoking was a clear and present health hazard (1), particularly as it relates to lung cancer. And even though great strides have been made against smoking since then, much more needs to be done. More than 400,000 Americans still die prematurely each year from smoking."

Source:American Thinker- is a populist, right-wing publication.

From the American Thinker 

"Say "tobacco farming" and people usually think of leafy fields in the south and southeast. But Connecticut farmers have been raising a particular type of tobacco for more than a century."  

Source:America's Heartland- talking about tobacco farming.

From America's Heartland 

What this attractive woman in this photo is doing is obviously smoking tobacco. Not a choice I would make as a free American, but it's her lungs and as long as people want to grow and sell tobacco in this country, and Americans want to smoke, or at least enough to keep tobacco in business, we're going to have a tobacco country. It's not what we do to ourselves that government should be prohibiting or regulating, but how we interact with each other. 

Just when I thought the American Thinker couldn’t be more religious-authoritarian and big government enough, I read an article on their blog today from writer Peter Skurkiss who I’m sure means well, but a lot of bad things come from good intentions. To quote the great Professor Milton Friedman: "The road to hell was paved with good intentions." Which sums up most of the big government prohibition proposals in the same of morality and social security. 

The Peter Skursiss plan to outlaw tobacco in the United States is a perfect example of that. And why would we do it now when first of all it is already legal. Second, we already tax and regulate the hell out of it and perhaps we should do even more short of outlawing it. Like moving the legal age from eighteen to twenty-one like alcohol. But third, smoking has already come down so far in this country from what we’ve already are doing right now to it.

Look, if we as a society do not like the actions others take and primarily the reasons for that is because we do not want to pay for their mistakes, remember a lot of America is about our economy and money, so if we do not want to pay for others mistakes, gee here’s an idea: let’s stop doing that. And let stupid people pay for their stupid mistakes instead. 

We should not just tax tobacco, but tax it to the point that smokers will have a decision to make: “Do I really want to spend so much money on a product that could kill me?” But second to transfer that tax revenue to the health care that smokers will need to pay for their smoking.

Alcohol prohibition didn’t work, the War on Drugs has failed. Just look at all the ruined lives from it as a result. Like people not being able to get good legal jobs because of a drug conviction. Even though they didn’t actually hurt anybody. Same thing would happen with tobacco prohibition. Arresting people for what they do to themselves and overflowing and already overcrowded criminal justice system.