Should smoking be illegal?

The constitution was, at the time, a bad thing. Henry, Smith, Lee, and the other anti-Federalists were correct. It consolidated too much power with the Feds.

I agree that they never could have seen the extent of the damage since then - eg: an interpretetation by SCOTUS that growing your own wheat for personal consumption substantially affects interstate commerce - but they did point out a lot of the flaws and they have held - they rightly criticised the commerce clause as a source of unfettered Federal power for instance.

The Articles had no such clause.

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The separation of powers has not worked to keep the government accountable. Eg: Congress has delegated most of its power to the executive branch (power to declare war, the massive executive bureaucracy which controls everything and is neither subject to judicial review.

Legislatures have an incentive to delegate powers to a bureaucratic class which is unaccountable to the people. It means that the reps aren't held responsible and can cruise to incumbency. This would have been difficult to predict.

In 1783 the states had near complete local autonomy and in NH representation was 1 legislator for 2300 citizens. That's how a Republic best works. History shows that when Republics become too large they become empires unaccountable to the people.

There were certainly issues with all this in practice, but they should have worked to retain the Republican, confederate character of the Union rather than moving to a federation with strong national power.

 

Thus it should be banned along with other drugs.

 

I have smoked occasionally for 20+ years. The damage to my health is done.

 

The fact that most narcotics are banned has saved millions of lives.

 

You make some very good and prescient points. Another piece in the puzzle of how our system became so corrupt and jaded.

 

Shouldn't you pay higher health insurance premiums? If not, why not.

 

Well according the the national addiction center, you're wrong.

Who you gonna believe folks?

 

More communistic thinking, IE no freedoms. Look, you are going to die someday, you only get one life, so do with it as you wish. You want to smoke, do drugs, etc, and it doesn't hurt anyone else, ENJOY YOUR LIFE. And since the end of life costs are usually the last year of life (or less), it is cheaper to let you die younger, say 54 Years old with cancer than 94 years old with cancer, as the cost of SS, Medicare, are spent on the 94 year old, but "0" most of the time on the 54 year old.

I have never seen so many communist/socialist who think quantity if better then quality as this board. It is your life LIVE IT AND ENJOY WHAT YOU WANT TO DO AS LONG AS YOU DON'T PHISICALLY HARM OTHER.

 

Someone who is not making a living off of the addictions! >)

Do you believe serial killing is an addition? How about child molesting? Serial abortionist? Serial rapists. You cannot jail them because it is an addiction!! Are you saying like the old Flip Wilson line "the devil made me do it".

 

I think you need to relax and sit down. So you just make it up as you go. Typical.

Yes, I believe medical experts over pseudo scientific internet know-it-alls.

 

I have been doing boards like this for 20+ years. I have heard about any angle you can have on about anything as a subject. It was made up long ago.

 

The Articles of Confederation read like they were written by a bunch of stoners!

"Hey man, wouldn't it be cool if we did this? Yeah, and let's do this too. Everybody will be so happy that we will all live together in a big commune where everyone just does their own thing without hassling anyone else. And no government telling us what we can't do either. Cool bro, now stop bogarting that doobie!"

 

Asinine false equivalency!

 

I doubt they were smoking cannabis but they were indeed growing hemp. In fact, early drafts were even written on hemp paper.

You're right that this is all very hippie. Progressive historians like Merrill Jenson often feel democracy to be better realised under the Articles. It's not necessarily a right wing thing.

Democracy on a scale representative of the people.

But you were wrong that there was no government, just very little central government. States were quite involved in the lives of their citizens.

 

Have you actually ever tried to make sense of the AoC? Only a bunch of stoners would publish something that off the wall.

That the AoC failed so miserably was NOT only the abysmal lack of a STRONG central government with the power to Tax and Spend. It also lacked a federal level of judicial authority to uphold the Law of the Land and proper representation of We the People at the federal level. The AoC failed to provide any actual means to protect individual rights either.

Little wonder that the entire thing was scrapped and the Founding Fathers put down their weed and started all over again from scratch. Curiously enough they then borrowed heavily from the lessons of Magna Carta and the English Civil War as the means to provide strong central government WITH representation of We the People at the Federal level and a Court system that was based upon the unique concept that the Federal Constitution was the SUPREME Law of the Land.

That is what has worked so well up until the Elite 1% found out just how easy it is to buy our representatives.

 

Nope, totally correct. The government has an addiction, to our money.
I think that the articles of confederation were too loose, but the constitution is too tight. The only saving grace until the last 100 years was the bill of rights, and the 10th aemdment the crown jewel. We now have a central government that is WAY to powerful, and states that are way too powerful. If you read the constitution as written, without making Sh*t up by the courts, it would and could still work. The failure of this nation was the 16th amendment without limits. It was originally to be set at 2% taxation but some said a limit was not necessary, and it was only on the rich. Once the government got addicted to our money, it needed a stronger and stronger dose to quell the addition. In now taxes us to death.

Thus taxes ARE theft, and should be thought about in that manner so that they are kept low and only the absolute needed to power our nation.

 

Off topic drivel duly noted and ignored.

There is a thread devoted to your FALLACY so take it elsewhere and stop trying to DERAIL this thread.

 

Congratulations on your promotion to moderator.

 

Yes, as long as the risk assessment is reasonable and reality based. [Almost??] all insurance has risk adjusted premiums: house, auto, life, medical. The problem is making logical and realistic risk adjustment assessments. This is not necessarily the case. Both insurance companies and governments are notoriously poor in doing that: governments make risk adjustments based on ideology; insurance companies on what they think they can get by with. Obamacare's singling tobacco out from all other risks is a prime example. (In the same vein was Obamacare's singling out tanning salons for a special tax.) Both fit the governments ideology and were readily acceptable -- meaning they could get by with it with little push back. Auto insurance is poorly done. Some things are realistic, like the number of past accidents or number of traffic violations. Another was the clear evidence that young men were much more prone to have an accident than young women were and were charged higher premiums. But that ran into ideology and there is no longer any premium differential between men under 25 and women under 25. Others risk assessments were not so good. Many years ago hair stylists were singled out as higher risks and charged more. Today there is a premium differential based on FICA credit scores even though there is little correlation and no cause and effect to support that, e.g.
The smoking premium allowed under ACA is an excellent example of ideologically based risk "assessment." There is no science or assessment that supports anything near a 50% premium surcharge for smokers. In fact there are credible studies that show smokers medical costs over a lifetime are less than non smokers. Certainly not enough science to warrant a smokers discount, but it helps put the 50% surcharge into the idiotic category.

 

The choices are 1. the current zealots, and 2. the accepted science prior to the government ideological interference in the 80s. Zealots by any other nice sounding name are still zealots.

 

I disagree. Smokers should help pay for other smokers.

 

That's the point. They should have amended them to provide for more robust central taxation powers for the limited, enumerated powers of the central government. Instead they threw out the confederation and unilaterally decided to abolish the unanimity rule, gave the Feds broad, near unlimited power. It's a real shame, I feel the AoC was the closest government has come to ideal, it needed slight tweaking, not abolition.

Anyway, this discussion is very interesting but getting off topic. Perhaps we should create a thread about it, it's something not a huge amount of people know and even less care about.

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As far as smoking goes, I feel that people will mostly switch to vaping as the old smoking generation dies out. It's more fashionable, you don't smell like a smoker, it doesn't affect those around you nearly as much, and while there are concerns about the health impact of propylene glycol, I don't think anyone seriously believes that the health effect is even on the same order of magnitude as inhalation of tar from burnt plant matter.

Cigars will always be popular as a premium product, like Scotch compared to Bourbon.

Cigarettes will lose popularity because they are an inferior product for degenerates.

Clearly the government agrees with me, because the Australian government has decided to get in front of the issue and ban e-cigs. It's not about health, it's about control. Smokers already pay enough tax to cover the entire Australian healthcare budget (in a nation with nationalised healthcare). It's getting ridiculous, a pack of smokes runs upwards of $40 now. The black market is thriving. Something's got to give.

And I think that's something is me. Leaving this Godforsaken, patronising country. For 6 months of the year, summers here are too good to pass up, and we've got plenty of spare land!

Might summer hop Australia -> US or Switzerland.