As part of its deal to put together a majority coalition (and therefore a government), The Guardian reports, New Zealand’s National Party has agreed to  a demand from the New Zealand First Party for repeal of the country’s “generational” tobacco ban, due to come into force in 2024.

The ban — a “world first” that’s since been emulated by the United Kingdom and lobbied for in other countries — would have forbidden anyone born after 2009 from buying cigarettes. Ever. For life.

The excuse offered by the incoming government is that it needs tobacco tax revenues to “pay for” tax cuts elsewhere.

On one hand, I don’t buy that excuse. Tax cuts don’t need to be “paid for.” Even setting aside the standard libertarian objection to taxation (it’s just plain theft/extortion and can never be justified), a decrease in tax revenues can always be “paid for” by cutting spending.

On the other hand, the smoking ban was a no good, very bad, evil, and stupid idea in the first place.

Repeat after me: Prohibition of substances never works, at least if the goal is to decrease or eliminate the sale, purchase, possession, or use of those substances.

By the time the US repealed alcohol prohibition, a higher percentage of Americans were drinking more (and “harder”) booze than before it began.

By the time US states began repealing marijuana prohibition, more Americans were using that particular plant than before it was banned.

You’ve probably been hearing for some years now about an “opiod crisis.” While that alleged problem is tied to legal prescription drugs, the go-to alternative is heroin, and it’s beyond doubt that a higher percentage of Americans use that drug now than used it as of 99 years ago when it became illegal.

Yes, I’m citing the American experience, but Kiwis are presumably no more prone than Americans to obey laws forbidding them to eat, drink, smoke, snort, inject or otherwise ingest the Evil Substance of the Week.

Making it illegal for those born after a certain date to buy or use cigarettes won’t stop those born after a certain date from buying or using cigarettes. In fact, the evidence of history says that smoking rates will likely INCREASE, if for no other reason than that “black market” cigarettes can be profitably sold for less than the currently “legal” ones, given insanely high tax rates on the latter.

Smoking is already dying out on its own, with no need for laws to force the change. Social stigma is certainly part of that. So is the advent of “vaping” and the use of non-tobacco nicotine pouches. They’re cheaper (although government tax farmers are trying to “fix” that),  so far seem to be far less unhealthy, and don’t stink up the places where they’re used like tobacco smoke does.

Heck, I quit smoking six months ago, after 44 years of tobacco use (40 smoking, four “chewing”). I’m still using low-nicotine pouches but may eventually quit those too.

Taxation is terrible, but probably neither as terrible nor as stupid as prohibition.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On November 20, X Corp. — the corporate entity through which Elon Musk owns X, formerly known as Twitter — filed suit against Media Matters for America, which styles itself a “progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.”

At issue is a Media Matters expose claiming that X, contrary to CEO Linda Yaccarino’s promise that advertisers are “protected from the risk” of having their ads placed next to unsavory content, has been running ads next to “pro-Nazi” posts.

In the wake of the Media Matters piece, a number of big players — including IBM, Apple, and Disney — decided to pull their advertising off the platform.

Musk calls the whole episode a “fraudulent attack” on X.

The ads in question do, in fact, appear next to the content in question in the screenshots that Media Matters published.

But Musk claims Media Matters engineered a highly atypical “user experience” by reloading posts hundreds of times — posts that otherwise had nearly no views or reposts (what used to be called “retweets”) —  until they finally saw the ads they wanted to take those screenshots of.

Is that fraud, or is it just exploiting a convenient algorithmic weakness to produce a technically true/valid result?

I’m personally more interested in the advertiser response than in the answer to that question, because it raises different questions:

What is advertising for? Is the purpose of advertising changing? And if so, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

At least until recently, the purpose of advertising was to sell the advertisers’ products and services, either directly/one-off (“buy this pair of shoes”) or long-term by inculcating “brand consciousness” in viewers (“when you think of shoes, think of us”).

Now, it seems to have become “avoid, at all costs, having it noticed that our ads appear near content that pisses people off.”

Those purposes seem incompatible to me.

I can’t bring myself to believe that Apple really, truly, deeply cares whether the person who purchases a MacBook Air, or Disney gives a flying flip whether someone who uses that laptop to stream Avengers: Endame, is a Republican, Democrat, Nazi, mail carrier, stamp collector, or Rotarian. Their money all spends the same.

From the consumer point of view, when I check out at the grocery store, I have no idea — and can’t be bothered to care — whether the cashier or assistant manager might be a devil-worshiper, wine aficionado, pedophile, NASCAR fan, or Trump voter. I was there to get my groceries. I got my groceries. End of story. Why would I care one way or another whether the laptop or streaming service I’m seeing advertised is also being advertised to those other people?

Yes, such “brand associations” can be (to use a current buzz word) weaponized to power boycotts/ buycotts among people with too much time on their hands and too few real worries.

But should advertisers play the game of attempting to appease that approach? That seems like poor long-term business decision-making.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

When I think of Thanksgiving, I seldom think of the Pilgrims and Wampanoag people dining together (likely sans turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin pie) in Massachusetts in 1621.

Rather, my thoughts wander to Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation inviting his fellow citizens “to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.”

What was Lincoln thankful for? “Fruitful fields and healthful skies” …  and Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg.

“In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and provoke their aggressions, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict; while that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.”

Wartime Thanksgiving holidays are the rule, not the exception. As Christian Oord reports at War History Online, the United States has enjoyed a whopping 17 years of peace in its 247 years of existence. It’s been at war 93% of the time since 1776 (that article was written in 2019, but nothing’s changed in a big way since then).

America’s wars are seldom formally declared. Nor does the US regime always go whole hog — in many cases, it fights through proxies, arming, funding, and looming threateningly behind client states (as in Ukraine’s war with Russia and Israel’s war with the Palestinian Arabs).

I’m not thankful for America’s wars.

I suppose I SHOULD be thankful that it’s been more than two decades since those wars last  came closer to my home in the form of major “blowback,” but I find it hard to dredge up much gratitude.

The deaths, injuries, and dispossessions caused partially or wholly by US foreign military adventurism — the toll comes to millions even if we write off everything prior to 9/11 — constitute a huge karmic debt, put on all our tabs in a perpetual dine-and-dash by the American political class.

We may not be noticeably paying that bill down now, but we’ll beyond doubt pay eventually, with interest … at which point the warmongers who brought the next terrible thing down on our heads will whine bitterly, from their secure bunkers in undisclosed locations, that the debt collectors “hate us for our freedom” and that the only solution is yet another round of war.

Is all that a little dark for a Thanksgiving column? Yeah, I guess so. But it’s where my thoughts are turning this week, which also marks 60 years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, likely by elements of the very national security state that keeps the US constantly at war and its people constantly in danger.

I am, of course, thankful for my family, my friends, my readers, etc. And as the American holiday season kicks off, my wish for all of you is that ever-elusive goal: An America, and a world, at peace. Happy Thanksgiving.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY