georgephillip
Diamond Member
- Thread starter
- #181
Strictly speaking, tobacco is not a narcotic.Corporations routinely privatize profit and socialize costs.
Tobacco is a good recent example where the profits that came from selling a legal narcotic went to shareholders and management while the victims of tobacco poisoning were often required to pay for their own cancer drugs.
While I agree it's always wrong for government to use tax policy to reward campaign donations, I also believe some of government's social engineering is exactly the right thing to do.
Exterminating chattel slavery cost over 600,000 US lives during the Civil War.
Government could have taxed slavery into extinction long before 1860 had it chosen to do so.
Would you have supported social engineering in that context?
Tobacco is not a narcotic.
narcotic - definition of narcotic by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia.
You are also wrong about slavery. If it were possible to shift the costs of maintaining a slave to the general public and paid for out of collected tax funds, we would have chattel slavery to this very day. After all, that's what supports illegal immigration.
"In low doses (an average cigarette yields about 1 mg of absorbed nicotine), the substance acts as a stimulant in mammals, while high amounts (30–60 mg[6]) can be fatal.[7] This stimulant effect is the main factor responsible for the dependence-forming properties of tobacco smoking.
"According to the American Heart Association, nicotine addiction has historically been one of the hardest addictions to break, while the pharmacological and behavioral characteristics that determine tobacco addiction are similar to those determining addiction to heroin and cocaine."
Nicotine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I wasn't referring to shifting the cost of maintaining slaves to the 18th and 19th Century taxpayer.
I was arguing for a 100% tax on all slave produced cotton between Yorktown and Fort Sumter.
What you think of as "illegal" immigration today is really forced migration due to NAFTA and other corporate funded aspects of 21st Century slavery, imho.