THE HIGH COST OF THE NANNY STATE

"I heartily accept the motto, - 'That government is best which governs least.'" ~ Henry David Thoreau

We are nearing the one year anniversary of the death of Eric Garner on July 17, 2014. Garner’s death was one of many involving law enforcement officers and unarmed black men that sparked numerous protests and riots across the United States in the past few months. The details of the case have been played, replayed and overplayed in the media since the tragedy. I’m not here to talk about racism or police brutality today. I want to look at an underlying factor in the Garner tragedy – something that may have made the entire incident preventable.

It’s about cigarettes and smoking believe it or not. Garner had been arrested 30 times since 1980, in some incidences for violent crime, but many of those times involved the selling of individual cigarettes, or “loosies”, in New York. To the uninformed it all sounds silly. The police that confronted Garner did so over suspicion he was selling “loosies” on that fateful day. How can this be such a big deal that it involves somebody being taken down in a choke hold?

New York City has become the poster child for the nanny state. In March of 2013 a law actually went into effect banning the sale of soft drinks larger than 16 ounces. The New York Court of Appeals struck the law down in June of 2014. I’m deeply concerned about any city that classifies me as an outlaw because I either sell or purchase 44 ounces of Mello Yello at the local Sonic drive-in. The point of the law was to legislate good health. Somehow the political champions of the nanny state do not realize people will find a way to satisfy their deepest desires of indulgence. I can always roll up and order me four frosty 16 ounce Mello Yellos in a drink carrier and truck on down the road to my sugar and caffeine overloaded heart’s content.

It’s not hard to imagine an even more draconian approach in such a place towards cigarettes and nicotine. Instead of any outright ban, the city and state of New York have tried levying extreme taxes to deter the purchase of tobacco products. That works out to $4.35 per pack in the state plus another $1.60 inside the city limits. That makes a pack of smokes in NYC run up to $14. Instead of deterring the average smoker, it creates a black market for untaxed cartons, packs and singles. The industrious underground entrepreneur can hop over to a place like Virginia and buy cartons wholesale, breaking them up into packs and singles and sell them on the street at a good profit for himself, and a good price for his customers.

Who does this affect the most? The little man – the guy at the bottom of the totem pole in the strata of society. These types of taxes are called regressive taxes. What does that mean? People in the bottom quintile of income pay a tax rate on tobacco products at a whopping 583% higher than people in the upper quintile of the income bracket. So the average Joe who just wants to go home and enjoy a smoke after a long, hard day of work is brutally taxed by the state. In the words of country singer Johnny Paycheck in his tune “Me and the IRS” – “The little man pays while the big man plays.” Such taxes have little impact on higher income individuals. But amidst lower wage earners it becomes an undue, and indeed unfair, tax burden.

So how does this all relate to the tragedy in NYC? Because of the excessive taxation of tobacco products, the NYPD has developed an aggressive no tolerance policy towards individuals working the tobacco black market. Suddenly you have a man with a record of selling untaxed “loosies” drawing attention from an overzealous group of law enforcement officers tasked with shutting down this type of operation. My question is this – is it really worth risking the life of a citizen for a non-violent crime? Is it worth risking the life of law enforcement officers? Even more importantly, is it worth taking the eyes of law enforcement off of much more dangerous criminal activity and focusing them on people peddling Pall-Malls?

Back to my original point – building a nanny state has severe consequences. When the government feels it must regulate how much soda I drink, how many cigarettes I smoke, how much water I can flush through my toilet and how many watts my light bulb can burn and how much water my water heater can hold things have gotten totally out of hand. I have been in the plumbing industry since 1990 and I can vividly remember when the US Government outlawed 3.5 gallon per flush toilets and mandated 1.6 gallon per flush toilets. People were smuggling the old 3.5 gallon models over the border from Canada because the new 1.6 models would not flush consistently good (so much for conserving water).

Is the nanny state an effective way to regulate such things as health? One such law provided a potentially underlying cause in the death of a man named Eric Garner. Such laws also inflate our jail and prison populations unnecessarily. All because some bureaucrat somewhere wants to save me from lung cancer. Is that really freedom? Is that really America? I’m afraid if our Founding Fathers could see all the regulations and taxes we are burdened with today they would shake their heads and wonder how it all went so wrong.