Complex Numbers

Freedom Freeze

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46137121

A sudden cold snap in the Pyrenees cost a young man his life as he slogged through the snow, smuggling cigarettes for a few €10 notes.

The 20-year-old Algerian was found unconscious in the snow by a French police patrol last week. He died of hypothermia.

Note that the article isn't unclear about who's being assigned the blame for this death:

"Traffickers are the ones who benefit from these weak people who are impoverished, and who are ready to take any risk for a few dozen euros," Perpignan prosecutor Jean-Jacques Fagni told France 3 TV.

But let's be clear on this: the ultimate blame lies with government.

Look, I'm no fan of unregulated free markets. There needs to be some oversight, or unscrupulous vendors could sell whatever they can while misrepresenting the product. Sure, people in government can be corrupt, too, but it's still an additional layer of protection for the consumer. I just wanted to state this up front lest I be mistaken for a pure libertarian.

The only reason I know of to smuggle like this is to get around taxes and/or tariffs. The health risks of smoking are well-documented, and so governments slap taxes on cigarettes ostensibly to discourage their consumption. They do the same thing with alcohol. Other drugs are banned completely, which, as we all know, doesn't stop people from using them. We tried that with alcohol here in the US, and they tried it in other countries as well, with disastrous consequences.

But if the purpose of such a tax is to reduce health problems, then a) it utterly failed in this case, because here's a dead dude; and b) why, then, don't these taxes go directly toward mitigating the health problems caused by the product in question?

I get that secondhand smoke is an issue, but ultimately, the choice of how to treat one's own body is a personal one - whether the product in question is alcohol, nicotine, methamphetamine, opiods, or kale. Sure, it can take a toll on one's friends and family, but Western concepts of personal freedom and choice dictate that we allow people the liberty to make their own decisions, though it's perfectly acceptable to encourage or discourage certain behaviors - and necessary to provide education on consequences.

Had the laws been devised with an eye toward personal freedom, there would be no incentive to smuggle smokes, and this guy might still be alive, if possibly earning less money. But that's the free market for you - when there's a demand, there's going to be a supply; and market efficiency will dictate the remuneration for products and services.

All prohibition does is encourage this sort of illicit behavior - whether said prohibition is all-out banning, or excessive taxes. I've seen it here in Virginia, where someone will buy multiple cartons of smokes at a convenience store, then load them into a truck with, say, New York plates, New York being a state with draconian taxes on cigarettes.

The tax thing raises another question of governmental ethics, as well: governments come to rely on whatever revenue they receive. If they're putting the taxes into the general fund, or using them for anything other than mitigating the health risks involved in whatever they're taxing, then they start to need that income just as surely as a junkie needs that next shot of heroin. Everyone, whether private citizen, corporation, or government, responds to incentives - this is a basic axiom of economics. And with all that sweet, sweet sin tax revenue, governments have less or even no incentive to discourage the use of whatever substance we're talking about. They'd rather make a big show of discouraging it through excessive taxes, while actually promoting it in order to keep the revenue stream alive.

So yeah, shame on the crooked traffickers for paying a pittance to impoverished people who have to make a mountain trek in snowstorms, but mostly shame on the governments involved for setting up a system that results in that situation in the first place.

Solution? Any such taxes should be reasonable, and the proceeds should go exclusively toward healthcare and education.

In other words, that'll happen in the US about the same time as Hell freezes over, trapping cigarette smugglers crossing the borders between its various circles.