Julie Novak, and the Institute of Public Affairs at it again with their nanny mongering ...

(Above: the pause that refreshes. Would you like some sexism along with your cigarette and lung cancer?)

And now for the thought bubble of the week:

... it is incorrect to regard the pecuniary effects of private actions as an externality and thus it is unclear that the fiscal implications of tobacco use should be of concern to government.

Some damn post modernist French semiotician working hard for a grant, or a wretched hippie scribbling about externalities in private actions as an extension of modalities or noodle-alities, as part of a PhD?

Nope, it's Julie Novak, who goes by the honorific, Research Fellow, Institute of Public Affairs, Melbourne, gaily scribbling away in Nanny state's thriving on tax harvested from smokers.

The tag for her smugly notes for the record that she's a non-smoker, but a better declaration of interests might have been a statement of the amount of money the Institute has accepted from tobacco companies over the last decade, and most particularly Philip Morris and British American Tobacco.

Why not take a look at the Institute's funding here?

As for the rest, it's the usual blather about personal freedom, and the nanny state, and the right to blow cigarette smoke in someone else's face, and did we mention personal freedom and the nanny state? Nanny state, nanny state, nanny state ...

There that should cover it, and talk about a knock down lay 'em out, holy misere Batman, argument it is.

Nanny state.

Be warned. Before you know it, you'll be living in 1984, except it'll be 2012, but it'll look like 1984, if you catch the drift:

So, like to indulge in an occasional flutter on the pokies or a punt on Black Caviar? Enjoy a burger with fries on the weekend?

Governments are increasingly interfering with our choices in these areas, too, which in some instances could never have been contemplated even in the recent past.

Many of us may not agree with the habit of smoking, but there are inherent risks in the majority of us consenting to the fiscal and regulatory exploitation of a minority of smokers.

This is because, just as the economist Buchanan warned over twenty years ago, we just might find nanny governments gradually taking away our rights to choose in many other areas of life.

The right to choose.

Sheesh, if I hear that American phrase or "nanny state" one more time, I'm likely to indulge in a screaming fit. Because it's my right to choose to discuss issues at the level of an adolescent.

Oh wait, I see the Government has just now devised the Anti-Screaming Tax ... and now I can't even choose to scream. Let alone choose from the 1,001 preferred forms of crap Americans fancy constitute an attractive kind of coffee.

Oh dear, those clever paranoid types at the Institute have turned out to be remarkably prescient.

Then it came to me in a flash. For some bizarre reason I choose to read this crap.

I must like self-abuse and self-torture because there's really no other reason to flagellate oneself in an ongoing way by reading Institute propaganda. Or get infuriated by the fuzzy, self-serving logic. Like this:

This comes on the back of reports earlier this year of apartment owners in Sydney’s inner west which are looking to ban smoking inside flats and even on breezy balconies.

These ideas flagrantly violate the age‑old notion that one’s home is one’s castle and that anyone who seeks to violate what we do in our own private home space is tantamount to raiding our castle.

Uh huh. But what if I consider my home my castle, and the infiltration of it, the violation of it, by cigarette smoke is tantamount to raiding my castle?

In much the same way, I have to confess, that I considered the noise being made by the rock and roll band living next door at 3 am in the morning as a kind of mental torture, and so took steps to oppose it.

For one thing, they kept on trying to play Dave Brubeck's Take Five, which is in 5/4 time, when they couldn't manage to join in together on the downbeat. Someone, anyone beat them to death with a Paul Desmond saxophone, please. (And if you've got nothing better to do, well at least nothing better to do than think about Institute propaganda, why not add to the List of musical works in unusual time signatures, where 5/4 is just old school).

That's a level of sophistication we simply can't expect from the Institute propagandists, as it involves the notion that there might be conflicting or competing rights, and nothing is ever as simple as it seems, as anyone who's shared a fenceline and then tried to work out the design and the materials and the costs between the owners will have an intimate awareness of ...

Noise pollution rarely gets a guernsey when it comes to this kind of debate, and so you get this kind of blather instead:

While most non‑smokers might look dimly on the rights of smokers to indulge their habit, there is a fundamental issue at stake affecting all Australians.

At what point does the government stop interfering with individual rights to enjoy pleasures, even guilty ones that cause individual harm in some cases?

Bottom line?

All this rhetorical nonsense isn't about the government stopping smokers smoking, or banning cigarettes, or interfering with the right of smokers to kill themselves slowly, or even, this week, increasing taxes on cigarettes.

It's just shrieking and howling by the industry, and by fellow travellers, because the government's determined to make the packaging plain and ugly ... to bring it into line with the addictive habit.

Solution?

Throw away the pack, and invest in an elegant silver antique cigarette case. Here at the pond we can provide links to thousands and thousands of them for sale, right now, so there's an abundance of choice, a total and comprehensive freedom of choice the nanny state can't do anything about, and we know from past experience with users that the case actually enhances the deep manly flavour, while incidentally providing excellent protection for the muck that kills the lungs, the body, and life itself.

But hey, it's your choice, so how about this for a nicely engraved sort of holy chalice?

Can't afford the ritzy Stuart 'Waggers' Wagstaff image? Amazing you can afford to smoke then ...

Just another lumpenproletariat being driven into the grave by a cigarette company that couldn't give a stuff about you personally, or your right to choose, so long as they get you hooked and mainlining the muck for their profit and pleasure, like any other peddler of drugs and addictive substances? Thought about giving up?

It's your choice .. unless of course you happen to be addicted, though for years, the tobacco industry pretended its goods had nothing to do with addiction, and that targeting adolescents was the last thing on its mind. Serial liars ... and now with bonus tar and serial apologists paid to tart up tired old apologist lines, or should that be externalities and fiscal implications.

Okay, okay, enough already. Will somebody please throw ten bucks in to the Anti-Screaming Government Tax jar?

It's time for me to let out a long hard scream, and the neighbours are going to cop an earful.

Fuck you, Institute of Propaganda, and your specious logic, and capacity for nonsense, and your endless rhetoric about the nanny state, which is a mere disguise for the real hidden agenda, which is dedicated to the greater glory and ongoing filthy lucre profitability of big tobacco. May it get smaller by the year.

Go off and punt on the horses all you like - backing the favourites is a mug's game - and eat your fries and bloat up and die, but leave my castle and my aversion to cigarette smoke wafting through it alone.

Remember, my home is my castle, and anyone who seeks to violate my space is tantamount to raiding my castle. As you do, oh Institute, with your endless paid for ranting on behalf of special interest groups and companies with a buck to spare ...

Phew that felt good.

Now I must go and put on Dave Brubeck's Take Five, and play it loud enough to make the hounds of hell howl in despair ... at 4 am of course ...

That'll learn the neighbours who think they live in their very own castle.

(Below: even Bugs Bunny found it hard to quit. Won't someone think of the wabbit?)