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Creating new criminals
Some toad in England has come up with a brilliant idea to force smokers to have to buy a smoking permit and if they don’t they don’t get to buy their cigarettes; and I imagine cigars as well.
Julian Le Grand; the chairman of the English government agency Health England, calls his idea libertarian paternalism. I call it more of telling me what I can and can not do. I realize that smokers are the newest and easiest social pariahs to kick in the nuts every time you want votes or score some easy money for the government but come on when is enough going to be enough.
Especially when such a authoritarian idea comes from a country that continually treats its citizens as fodder for governmental controls. One has to wonder if England has become nothing more than a giant example of an ongoing Orwellian social experiment of how far people can be pushed before they break.
Normally I wouldn’t care about things like this but as we have seen the ideas being tested in England soon find their way over the pond and into US and Canadian society. While we are taxed to death over cigarettes and looked upon as the scum of the gene pool the only thing any measures to further ostracize us has done is create a new class of criminals.
Whether it be the single person going to the Indian reserves to buy a few bags of cigarettes the the growing black market that has been created and grows with every new government measure smokers have become a new criminal class. Now some dipwad in England wants to further propagate the problem by making us buy permits.
Well I have one thing to suggest to Julian Le Grand - shut the fuck up; because sure as shit this idea gains any traction in England and some do goodie two shoes here will think it’s a great idea and the next thing you know some government looking for easy votes will pass it as a new law.
What’s next - needing a permit to eat that extra hamburger at McDonalds or how about having to make sure you have that permit that allows you to buy that bottle of booze. Think not? … bet you thought he same thing about cameras on every street corners. Cameras that have not proven one bit to beat back crime .. except now they’ll be able to use them to catch those society destroying smokers.
There are things that make you go hmmm.
