A Learning Experience 2: Hard Lessons by Christopher G. Nuttall Read Free Book Online Page B

don’t give a damn about the rabble.  Their only interest is in keeping and expanding their own power.  As such, they will use whatever justifications they can invent to ensure they keep power, all for the good of the People.  The core of the problem, therefore, is an alliance between two sets of dictatorial politicians; the ones who mean well and the ones who have no qualms about doing whatever it takes to maintain their power.
     
    “You may ask why they bother searching for justifications at all.  But you’ll be amazed at just how easy it is to come up with a justification that is hard – almost impossible – to argue down without looking like a complete bastard.  How many of you have actually smoked?”
     
    A handful of hands, including Martin’s, rose into the air.
     
    “Smoking is actually quite illustrative of how those politicians take power and manipulate public opinion,” Scudder said.  “In the days before nanotech, smoking actually did do considerable damage to public health.  The smoker himself risked cancer, which would be his own stupid fault, but anyone near him breathing in the smoke also risked cancer.  It was not hard for politicians, with the best possible motives, to start asserting control over the smoking industry in the hopes of stamping it out of existence.”
     
    He paused, then stood and assumed a thinking pose.
     
    “But wait?  How to justify this assault on civil liberties?
     
    “Public health, of course.  They took a very strong argument – that public smoking was bad – and then hammered it into every crack they could find.  Non-smokers largely backed them because they disliked having to breathe in second-hand smoke.  Smoking was rapidly banned from public places, then smokers were hit with other issues that forced them to consider abandoning smoking altogether.  Those with children, for example, actually ran the risk of having their children taken away from them, on the grounds that smoking regularly made them unfit parents.
     
    “In the meantime, the tobacco industry was hammered with repeated penalties that crippled its profits and eventually drove it into the gutter.”
     
    Martin stuck up his hand before quite realising what he was doing.  “If that is true,” he said, “how did I manage to get my hands on a smoke or two?”
     
    “They were smuggled in, I imagine,” Scudder said.  “You see, the politicians failed to take human nature into account.  When a market was declared illegal, as alcohol was during Prohibition, criminals would lunge forward to take advantage of the demand, a demand that could not be satisfied legally.  The number of smokers in the United States declined, I suspect, but not as much as you might think.  And can you guess, young man, at another unintended consequence of banning smoking?”
     
    “No, sir,” Martin said.
     
    “Criminals don’t normally bother to regulate their production,” Scudder said.  “The chances were that your cigarettes were much more dangerous, much more unhealthy, than anything that was once produced legally and sold without restriction.  There’s no actual data, for obvious reasons, but judging by the health of some of the new emigrants, the law has actually done more damage to the population than the tobacco industry did before the politicians started trying to destroy it.”
     
    Yolanda leaned forward.  “Why didn't anyone see this?”
     
    “They did,” Scudder said.  “But their arguments were squashed flat by raw emotion.  Won’t someone please think of the children ?  It was hard to argue against regulations – and then more regulations, and then more regulations – when raw emotion is involved.  But politicians can use that emotion as a weapon against common sense.”
     
    “I have a question,” Jane Robertson said.  “My father used to drink heavily, even though there were limits on how much alcohol he could buy at any one time.  I loved him, but I hated his