COMPULSORY CIGARETTE CARD?

Our friend Pierre Lemieux sent us these quotations from Jon D. Hanson and Kyle D. Logue, "The Costs of Cigarettes: The Economic Case for Ex Post Incentive-Based Regulation", Yale Law Journal. A cigarette card recording our brands, age, habits, quantities purchased, and much more, all to be fed into computers and manipulated by statisticians subserviant to the regime. There is no limit to the sickness of these control freaks, they can't hear themselves talking, anymore. Goodbye, America, land of the free you are no more... or have you ever been?

For those readers who can understand French, we recommend Lemieux's last piece, entitled "Amerika", in the current issue of Le Québécois libre, a libertarian cybermagazine. There, Lemieux argues that America is becoming the model, for all Western countries, of the administrative tyranny that Tocqueville envisioned.

Jon D. Hanson and Kyle D. Logue

The Costs of Cigarettes: The Economic Case for Ex Post Incentive-Based Regulation

Yale Law Journal, Vol. 107, No. 8 (March 1998), pp. 1163-1361

"One method of overcoming the difficult informational requirements of the allocation models described above is by enacting a requirement that anyone wanting to purchase cigarettes must first purchase a 'cigarette card'. The card, which could be based on the same magnetic strip (or computer chip) technology used for credit cards and ATM cards, would be issued to any legal-aged smoker who wanted to buy cigarettes and would have to be presented by the smoker each time she purchased cigarettes. The card would keep track of a variety of potentially relevant risk factors, such as the number of packs purchased by the smoker, which brands the smoker purchased, and the smoker's age at time of purchase. If that smoker were later to bring a claim against cigarette manufacturers, the smoker's cigarette card information could be used to resolve many of the potentially difficult causal questions. Moreover, the new data could be used by epidemiologists and biostatisticians to expand what is known about the effects of smoking, the effects of different brands (or ingredients mixes within those brands), the effects of different smoking patterns, and so on. Using advanced statistical techniques, we could learn a great more about the effects of cigarettes …" (p. 1292)

"The case for the card system is even stronger when one considers its other potential benefits. For example, the use of the card could assist in imposing age requirements on the purchase of cigarettes." (p. 1293)

"Although the potential advantages of a cigarette card may be enormous, we have thus far ignored a difficult to quantify, but nevertheless real, cost. A reaction of many readers may well be that our proposal gives too much information to government agencies, therefore creating a 'Big Brother' problem. We sympathize with that concern, but we believe the problem is not as significant as it may appear initially. First, it is not clear that the sort of information that the cigarette card system would generate is any different from the sort of information that the American public routinely provides to government and private agencies. In other words, it may be too late to worry about the sort of privacy concern that this proposal raises." (p. 1294)

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