That Howling You Can Hear Are the Vested Interests

The unhinged left and the professional bludger class who take government money to lobby the government are struggling to understand why the new government is reversing Labour’s tobacco prohibition measures.

The same people who pontificated throughout Covid, arguing for lockdowns, masks that didn’t work and mandatory vaccines, are now telling us the world is ending because David Seymour, Christopher Luxon and Winston Peters are reversing their prohibition on tobacco.

The good and great who think they know best can’t seem to understand that cutting down the number of sellers of cigarettes creates a huge opportunity for criminals. They will raid the small numbers of stores that have licences if Labour’s harebrained scheme becomes law.

Prohibition, which never works, would lead to the obvious; criminal gangs selling tobacco and New Zealand ending up like Australia or Ireland where criminal gangs provide 20% of the illicit supply. Prohibition will work about as well as it does with cannabis, funding the criminal organisations that National has promised to crack down on.

Eric Crampton is enjoying himself pointing out their stupidity:

They are also unhinged about the removal of the low-nicotine cigarette regulation, despite the technology not being available to produce these cigarettes. That “world leading” law change was based on the theory that no one could produce them so it would be effectively prohibition.

These people have failed to comprehend that cigarette sales are falling rapidly and not because of plain packaging or price increases. They are falling rapidly because there is a substitute that allows smokers to transition away from cigarettes to products that do not have carcinogens because they do not burn tobacco.

Unlike proper scientists who test a hypothesis and modify it according to data, the bludger class are ignoring the great progress we have made in reducing the number of smokers. Twenty years ago if they had been offered products like vapes that would dramatically reduce the rate of smoking you would hope they would have promoted it heavily. Instead, they probably would have moralised and insisted that we all listen to them like they did during Covid.

The tragedy of all this, just as with the tragic nanny state COVID response, is that the people who are promoting the cause aren’t run out of town on a rail. Their side lost the election and they are sore losers, attacking the government for not listening to them.

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