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The Excessive Taxation of cigarettes
Mendham:
Logic:
The Excessive Taxation of cigarettes
     By . . . on Monday, June 19, 2006 - 7:15 am: |
Putting out cigarettes has the American Rome Burning.
Cigarettes have through carelessness started lots of fires, and it seems a perfect irony that a careless and irresponsible effort to put cigarettes out would be responsible for burning our beloved America (Rome) into just an ash shadow of the shining principled city our forefathers' built for us. That may seem harsh metaphorical rhetoric to use to describe the "good doer" effort to win the war against the cigarette menace, but there is no smokescreen thick enough to hide the truth from anyone really looking for it.
What made America, America, was the respect for personal liberty, and justice, that went into the construction of its democracy and its constitution. Unfortunately, that construction wasn't perfect and a vulnerability to burning corruption by ignorant mob rule, where cheap reckless answers are chosen over real principled solutions, has been exposed over time.
Through democracy a 1776 America intended to establish a "we the people" representative government. The ideal was to create a system of government that gave fair and proportional political/legislative voice to the diversity that was an inevitable consequence of embraced individualism. In 1776 America, where people lived in homogenous colonies, with meager transportation and communication technology, the ideal of real representative government could be achieved through a "geography based" system of elections. With the passage of time, and technological progress, America has become socially integrated. Our ideological diversity is now no longer regionally locked in colonies or geographic groups and "we the people" can no longer acquire fair representation in government through geographically biased elections.
Pointing this little civics lesson at the subject at hand, It is a plain simple fact that if we retained respect for the ideal of "we the people" representative government, and modified our democracy to logically and properly account for ideological integration, the current persecution of cigarette smokers could not happen, as cigarette smokers as a group would have the raw, and rightful, political power to stop it. It is undeniable fact, that regional elections, in an integrated America, just give the same mob majority the right to "take" every election where the regional population is well integrated. Being that cigarette smokers are perhaps more integrated than any other minority group they have basically been denied all political representation and stripped of their reality as Americans.
Considering that the "good doer" mob is exploiting this democratically disenfranchised minority with preposterously excessive taxation-- the old "revolutionary" battle cry of "no taxation without representation" isn't just applicable, it is probably more appropriate than when used in its original context. The fact is British tyrants committed no evil of excessive taxation that even comes close to the 800% tax the current "good doer" mob sees justice in extorting from their addicted victims. (Just for historical context, the tea tax was one penny, and the tea floating in Boston Harbor wasn't overtaxed tea, it was cheaper British subsidized tea, destroyed in a free trade dispute between the British and colonial import companies.)
Although it can't be assumed, that the founding fathers anticipated the problem of eventual social integration (melting pot), and its ability to glitch geography based representative democracy, they did understand the danger of a unprincipled majority that thinks no farther than "might makes right". The American Constitution contains a bill of rights that was intended as a final inpenetrable defense of personal liberty against even a neighborly tyrant vulnerable to being possessed by popular unjust, whim, bigotry, or hysteria.
The Bill of Rights was basically composed to immortalyze two Jeffersonian cornerstones of civilization; The ideal that one man's liberty should only end where another man's begins, and the even more obvious principle that law, when necessary, should be even, and justly equal, in purpose and application. As a practical truth, the bill of rights attempts to establish as a guarantee the "pledge" of "liberty and justice for all".
Again, unfortunately, unanticipated corrosions of time, and neglect, have left what our ancestors worked so hard to achieve ripe for burning through lazy convenience. The system failure in this case was the unanticipated catastrophe that we would allow something besides the best and brightest to sit on our courts, and define and enforce our laws. Law is no longer practiced by intellectual giants, and now is just a bastion of corrupt self-interest shysters with the intellectual mentality of common arrogant thugs.
Horrible as it is that we have filled our courts with judges of low or absent intelligence and integrity, the system could have survived to serve its purpose if these traders were stopped from destroying all mechanisms of accountability that would force them to substantially comply with constitutional intent. The idea of legal precedent when consistently applied limits a court to two choices, conform the justice provided to the established standard, or change the standard to be applied in all future cases. In essence injustice becomes inpractical, if it is not allowed to exist without degrading all justice, for all people.
Our corrupt legislators have, over the past few decades written laws that render themselves, and the courts of their corrupt composition, legally immune to prosecution for malicious violations of the sacred oath to the Constitution they swear. This immunity from punishment, combined with the right to erase from the precedential record all evidence of their crimes against constitutionally mandated equal justice, steals from the system any balancing check against ideological or politically partisan corruption.
The blatantly unequal and exploitively excessive taxation of tobacco can easily be proven unconstitutional. It is obvious fact, that addicted perpetrators of this, century's old, human vice are being treated differently, than other perpetrators of even more socially destructive human vice, for no other reason than because of their minority, and therefore abusable status. Unfortunately the two-party corrupted courts won't allow the argument to be made, and answered, as such a fair contest could produce only one logical conclusion.... and it is a conclusion popularity placating politics refuses to permit, inspite of what devotion to fundamental American principle demands they provide.
We are at a sad place in American history where much public policy (even war) is built out of nothing more than propaganda and lies. The fact that their apparently aren't enough real Americans in America to demand, or fight for, better than that is a sad disgrace to the sacrifices made-- especially considering all the insincere tributes and banner waving. The "good doers" of the war (including the war against cigarettes) are in fact nothing more then 1984 style "doublespeak" imposters who do not love freedom, or even minimally respect a man's right to it. Their ambition is no grander than simple, convenient, and self-interest crude-snake-oily, exploitation! |
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