In the ironically-titled op-ed by nationally syndicated columnist, and supposed economist Walter Williams ("When decent people help the tyrants," The Washington Times 1997 Sun Jul 27, page B3), Williams claims that "What's driving the latest round of political extortion of the tobacco industry is the fact that cigarette smoking has harmful health effects. Those health effects impose higher costs on the socialized components of our health care system -- Medicaid."

This statement is an outright lie. It is founded on nothing but the fallacy, beloved by mentally lazy ignoramuses who neither do their economic homework, nor are capable of thinking a problem through, that if something has harmful health effects, it therefore automatically imposes "higher costs on the socialized components of our health care system," such as Medicaid.

Commentators like Williams must be too servile to the anti-smoker hate propaganda to assert the fundamental fact that everyone dies of something someday, and it generally costs money when they do. And the older they are when they die, the more health costs they accrue along the way.

Dying earlier in old age in fact saves money for those "socialized components of our health care system." And the Medicaid program is an especially flagrant example. Nursing home costs, which are predominantly non-smokers' costs, constitute 43% of the Medicaid budget.

Meanwhile, the supposed "excess" costs of smoking upon which those lawsuits are based, have been fraudulently calculated, on purpose, under the premise that non-smokers' costs don't exist at all. There is no comparison of smokers' versus non-smokers' costs in those estimates, and there never has been. Any belief to the contrary, such as that of bigoted talk show hosts who bluster, "Are you pretending smokers' costs don't exist" at anyone who challenges the official dogma, is sheer delusion.

The supposed "excess" costs of smoking are a mere 4.8% of the Medicaid budget, according to anti-smoking demagogue Stanton Glantz. And this 4.8% is all that those uncounted non-smokers' costs need to exceed smokers' costs to blow the anti-smokers' case to hell. With their humongous share of the nursing home bill, this is a cinch. The anti-smokers know it, and this is why they have pretended that non-smokers' costs don't exist. In fact, it is smokers who have been subsidizing non-smokers all along.

It is thanks to cowardly, slack incompetents like Walter Williams that the anti-smokers have not only gotten away with brainwashing the public with the vicious Big Lie that smokers are an economic burden to society, but also with filing fraudulent lawsuits based upon this lie, using what is probably the most easily refutable case, namely Medicaid costs.

They have literally gotten away with stealing $368 billion from innocent smokers' pockets on the basis of unpunished acts of perjury to Congress. And where has the vaunted tobacco lobby been? They've been looking the other way, rationalizing that they won't pay, we will, and deluding themselves that they can simply buy off the anti-smokers with our money.

No, it is not the phony "fact" of smoking costs that is "driving" the anti-smoking movement. This is a mere pretext, concocted by corrupt, sociopaths in the Centers for Disease Control and the Office of Technology Assessment, who know exactly what they're doing, and deliberately disseminated by their accomplices in the media: Such as, Lauran Neergaard of the Associated Press, who in every single story has lied in the public's faces that the purpose of the Medicaid lawsuits is to "recover," or "recoup," the pretended "costs of smoking-related illnesses" which are actually saving the states money; and every news editor in this country who collaborates in this lie and censors the truth.

It is really naked powerlust that drives them. They are out to ram a tobacco-free society down the American peoples' unwilling throats. And the way to combat them is by exposing their Big Lie, and not, as Williams does, by endorsing and condoning it, and then spouting stale less-government cant that "Americans want to combat those costs by supporting government measures that trash private property rights, peaceable voluntary exchange and limited government in an attempt to alter personal lifestyles."

He and his phony "libertarian" ilk care only about using smokers to grind this pet ideological axe, and refuse to challenge the fraud committed against us. Whereupon the phony "conservatives" supplement this deluded discourse by self-righteously pontificating that smokers, who've been carrying non-smokers on their backs all along, have brought this upon themselves by their "lack of personal responsibility for their health costs," to grind their own pet ideological axe. And the phony "liberals" round out the insanity by pleading that society should be caring and keep subsidizing smokers. And this putrid dementia is all the media conspiracy permits us to hear.

Then, to lard out his commentary, and comprising the largest part of it, Williams slides into that same tired, old threadbare "slippery slope" argument, the first thing that pops into the mind of any ignoramus on the street, with a minimum of thought and no factual data whatsoever, the same line these worthless pretended defenders have been using unsuccessfully, and failing to progress beyond, for the entire ten plus years of the smoking cost libel. And like all the rest, he imagines that he's some kind of tower of intellect for it.

`What about people who eat too much? What about junk food? What about caffeine? What about this? What about that?' All this is just trying to deflect some of the blame onto other innocent parties, while ignoring the guilty:

** WHAT ABOUT THE COSTS OF NON-SMOKERS? **

Counterpoint by

Carol Thompson
Smokers' Rights Action Group
P.O. Box 259575
Madison, WI 53725-9575
Phone: 608-249-4568