Dumber Than a Sack of Hammers

The Wondrous Works of the Wizard

Prohibitionists believe they have made great strides in New Zealand with the passing of mandatory plain packaging legislation for tobacco products.

When the State is the de facto deity--as increasingly is the case in the secular materialist West--the law in all its forms becomes equivalent to the powers and efficacy of  a god. Passing and administrating laws will bring society to immaculate perfection, where all "sin" is abolished, health is perfected, and mankind will last for eternity upon the earth.  Oh, what a lovely god we have.

Unfortunately the god is a tad ignorant.  Some would say the god is Dumb and Dumber.  In many cases the god's laws, rules, regulations, and administrations end up doing far more harm than good.  The fishhooks lie nestled in a bed of unexpected and unintended consequences.

Australia is beginning to learn that nirvana lies a bit further off than first thought.  It has had tobacco plain packaging legislation in place for a number of years now.  How's it going in the Land of Oz?  Is the Wizard doing his stuff?

Australia is beginning to suffer under the law of unintended consequences, which show every indication of turning out much worse than the cure intended.

In Australia, in the few months following the implementation of plain packaging, tobacco companies could only compete on price – and lo and behold with reduced prices came increased consumption. This spurned the Australian government to introduce three major tax hikes, with one more on the horizon.  [Breitbart News]

Plain packaging had the unintended consequence of making tobacco a commodity.  When a good or service becomes a commodity, the only way to compete is on price.  So, lower prices all around.  But as tobacco became less costly, demand roses.  Who would have thought?  Under plain packaging, tobacco consumption inevitably rose in Australia.  The actual effect was the direct opposite of the intention.  Around about a month after the imposition of plain packaging the rubes in the street were lighting up and perceptively concluding that the god of Australia was dumber than a sack of hammers.  And they would be right.

But there is no fury to match the incendiary rage of a thwarted demigod.  So in Australia the price of ciggies was jacked back up by excise taxes in an attempt to reduce the rising consumption.   Tobacco companies responded by taking cases to the international free trade regulators.  They have routinely lost--not (it seems to us) due to lack of merits of their case but to the reflexive prohibitionist urge roiling in the bowels of the West.  In other words, the international trade authorities have played fast and loose with their own laws and regulations to make an exception in the case of Big Tobacco.  The "greater good", don't you know.  But in so doing they have laid down legal precedents--which will now be applied rapidly to trade in other goods and services.  We expect that free trade will quickly decline as more and more legal cases are taken and won--using the precedents established over tobacco.

The relevant rules of the World Trade Organization are pretty straightforward:

One hoped the WTO would see a bit more sense. It seems directly against the principles of Article 20 of Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) from the 1986 Uruguay Round.

The clause is quite unambiguous: “The use of a trademark in the course of trade shall not be unjustifiably encumbered by special requirements, such as use with another trademark, use in a special form or use in a manner detrimental to its capability to distinguish the goods or services of one undertaking from those of other undertakings.”  Also cited were other aspects of TRIPS. A number of countries including Ukraine, Honduras, Dominican Republic, and Cuba lodged objections [to restrictions on trade resulting from Plain Packaging laws].

But we expect these countries will lose their case.  The rules will be bent in favour of the Western governments, including Australia and New Zealand.  The War Against Tobacco must be won and the West's demigod honoured.

This will be followed by retaliatory trade actions.  Indonesia is a big tobacco exporter.  It is now moving towards banning all alcohol in that country.  Once again the pretext is public health: dodgy grog in Indonesia kills far too many people.  They are taking a leaf straight out of the anti-tobacco brigade in the West.  Doubtless the huge alcohol exporting countries (Britain, Scotland, Australia, the United States) will protest that their products don't cause harm, if properly used.  Sound familiar?
Indonesia will consequently face tremendous pressure to drop its draft legislation to ban alcohol within its borders.  Its fallback position?  Well, it has heaps, but now it also has precedents.  We expect that it will consent to allowing some alcohol imports, but only plain packaged, non branded ones, all festooned with grisly health warnings.  And who, pray tell, in the West will be able to object?

This is unintended consequence Number Two: the weakening, compromising, and eventual abrogation of international free trade agreements and a rise in global protectionism around the world.  Who would have thought that the War on Tobacco would have resulted in such destruction?  What was our god thinking of?

The first egregious consequence in Oz was to see smoking rise as Plain Packaging resulted in cheaper smokes.  The second unintended consequences, is now underway--the deconstruction of international trade agreements.  The third unintended consequence is also merrily making its way around the world.  Criminals have new contraband to flog to enrich their coffers.  Tobacco smuggling around the world has ratcheted up.

On the subject of smuggling let us first look at who is involved. State funded anti-smoking charity Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) Scotland wrote in 2011:
Aside from the KPMG paper on the rise in smoking, but as I wrote for Breitbart London:

“Asked about plain packaging, he said, ‘I support the UK government! …We will make more money. We can make it cheaper but sell for the same price. It’s good for you, good for me.’”

“The Taliban, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) are involved in smuggling cigarettes as is the Columbian FARC. Both the Provisional IRA and the splinter group the Real IRA have been linked with tobacco smuggling as a way of raising money to fund their activities. Chinese Triads are central to the traffic to the UK of counterfeit cigarettes produced in highly sophisticated factories in the Far East”.

“Brian Flynn and Darren Fletcher, posing as buyers, visited Indonesian black marketer on the island of Java to see what he can offer. Many will be shocked. His factory churns out 20,000 cigarettes a minute and is ‘getting through 100 tons of tobacco every two to three days’.  

This kind of unintended consequence has been seen repeatedly.   The criminals get to control the trade precisely because it is illegal and that's what they excel at.  But the trade is illegal only due to arbitrary legislative fiat.  It has been made illegal because our demigods demanded it.

In Sydney, down on Circular Quay, the dawning sun has just cast its beams over the Opera House roof.  The gathered crowd commence the regular Matins service.  The gentle cadence of the hymn floats eerily across the dawn waters.

Oh great god of State, our Baal, our holy Wizard.
How we love you.
Your works are wondrous.
We thank you for keeping us all safe.

Everyone feels so righteous and self-affirmed.  Life is so much better now than when Big Tobacco was ruining other people's lives.

A watching navvy shakes his head as he takes another puff on his unbranded Indonesian contraband ciggie.  He has plenty left.  Later in the day he will sell a few under the table and make enough profit to buy a couple of fresh packs.  In a couple of months, he reckons, he will be making more money than he gets from his day job.  The gods must be smiling upon him.