Stupidest Legislation Ever?
Certainly not the most evil, but just the plain dumbest? Sullivan details how governments ban the safer e-cigarettes but leave the much more dangerous real ones on the market here.
In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
For some reason I refuse to believe that it was only the anti-smoking groups lobbying for this.
ReplyDeleteYes, I can well imagine groups whose interest is tied to tobacco-cultivation might lobby against this as well!
DeleteDing! Ding! Ding!
DeleteA few years ago we had these ads in Ohio saying something like, "cigarettes, cigars and smokeless tobacco are taxed very highly to dissuade usage, how can we sit back and watch these e-cig users, roll-your-own tobacco users and snus users skate by without paying their fair share", or something like that.
Anyhow, it turned out that it was an anti-smoking group that funded it, and wouldn't you know it that this "anti-smoking" group was funded by a particular tobacco company. Incidentally, the group that funded it was formed due to a particular court case and subsequent legislation some years back that dictated tobacco companies must fund anti-smoking efforts.
Apparently, people make a pretty decent living doing this.