Once again, sumptuary taxation rears its ugly head.

Sumptuary taxes are taxes designed to change behavior. That’s the theory. In practice it never works and always dumps an intolerable load of unnecessary problems into society’s lap.

Historically, two types of products excite boneheaded do-gooders to impose sumptuary taxes: tobacco and alcohol. The taxes (almost always excise taxes) are staggeringly disproportionate to the cost of the product being taxed. A package of Marlboros in New York City will cost about $11.50, retail, by the end of the year. The actual cost of producing a pack of Marlboros is less than a dollar.

Let’s stick with cigarettes a bit.

The argument is simple: “Smoking is bad for you so you should stop therefore we will tax cigarettes until smoking gets too expensive for you.” Sounds lovely, but it doesn’t work. The gap between the real cost of the product and the retail price is so great that a black market instantly arises and cigarettes are cheap again.

When taxes get prohibitive, the side effects of our own stupid experiment with alcohol Prohibition kick in. (Al Capone rides again!) In the case of cigarettes, black marketers acquire product to sell in several ways: hijacking, smuggling, holdups, counterfeiting overseas and then smuggling, burglary. The crooks’ acquisition cost is very, very low. Counterfeit Marlboros and Salems, mostly from the Far East, taste awful, are much more dangerous and cost American jobs.

These days, we have an additional side effect: Al Qaida smuggles cigarettes around the country and uses its profits to fund terrorism. This happened in, for instance, Detroit when an Al Qaida cell made millions from its state-to-state smuggling operation. Various other criminal gangs have picked up on the idea and are merrily making big bucks in super-high-tax states.

The net effect is that smoking goes on with minor dips in the number of smokers. The underground aspect of smoking acquires the panache of rebel behavior which appeals to kids.

Smoking is bad and must be stopped? A lot of things are bad. Grow up.

Oh, we need the additional revenue to pay the social costs of smoking-related disease: cancer, emphysema, heart disease, etc.? That’s probably hogwash for the simplest of reasons. Smokers tend to die young. Non-smokers who live into their eighties and nineties cost us a lot more than people who die young. This doesn’t mean smoking is good; it means that the increased medical cost argument is probably baloney.

Here in Florida, the retail price of cigarettes doubled last year from about $2.50 a pack to a little over $5.00 if you buy cartons. That makes slightly more sense than New York City’s sledge hammer approach. The problem is that the new price has no effect at all on smoking. People who smoke continue to do so. A pack a day smoker will now pay $1,825 a year for cigarettes, about $912.50 more than last year.

In order to cover the increased cost, the smoker will not spend money on other things: Starbuck’s, a weekly night at the movies, a monthly dinner out with the spouse and the kind of impulse purchases that fuel our DM industry. Not a big deal, except that now an additional $912.50 is removed from the useful part of the economy and funneled into the maw of useless government. And that’s all that happens!

There are about 3,000,000 smokers in Florida, not counting tourists. They probably average something like a pack a day. That means that the additional taxes on cigarettes will divert a minimum of $2,737,500,000 (2.7 billion dollars!) from the real economy and hand it off to the drunken sailors running Washington and Tallahassee.

Smokers must be punished for their antisocial behavior? Trust me, they are.

$7 a gallon gasoline.

Cap and trade, which the House has already passed, will have zero effect on the environment but it might reduce behavior the government doesn’t like, in this case driving. Crooks, thieves, muggers, and hijackers will still have plenty of gas … free gas. The rest of us will divert money from elsewhere in our personal budgets to pay the criminally extortionate taxes.

Right now in Florida, a gallon of gas costs about $2.75. Twelve thousand miles a year at 20 mpg needs 600 gallons which, right now, cost about $1,650. In 2011, at $7 a gallon, the same gas will cost $4,200 a year, $2,550 more – $7 a day more. Seven dollars a day times 6,000,000 drivers is $42,000,000 a day (over 15 billion dollars a year) diverted from the useful economy to the completely useless moron-managed economy.

You don’t want to know what cap and trade is going to do to your house. Just bend over.

The effect on DM?

We’re screwed. Nobody will have any money left to buy anything we have to sell. Buy gold, get a shotgun, vote the bastards out.

Once again it seems potentially amusing to compare and contrast the administration of Direct Marketing with the administration of the United States of America.

As you know, direct marketers ask sensible, relevant questions and nobody gets upset when we ask them. We get yelled at only if we don’t ask questions, and if we keep not-asking we get shown the door.

Direct marketers carefully consider all available evidence. We don’t hide it, paint it over, lie about it, excuse it, spin it, erase it or slice and dice it ad absurdum.

And we don’t bet the farm on new ideas; we test them to see if they work. Opinions don’t matter.

Questions, Evidence, Tests matter. Simple.

When we leave the logical realm of DM, we have to reboot to adjust to a world in which the rule is that the more important the issue, the less rigorous the questioning. Worse, just asking a question is an invitation to a personal attack.

What issues don’t get questioned? Government healthcare, massive deficits and debt, rapidly expanding government intrusion in our lives, public service pensions, abandoning allies, butt-kissing enemies, and the dreadfully stupid cap-and-trade fandango all come to mind. But they’re not biting us in the ass, not for a few months yet, anyway.

Right this minute, though, (mostly Mexican) illegal immigration is biting us, biting hard, and millions of Americans are irate because of questions not asked, like:

1. Why does the Federal Government flat out refuse its constitutional duty to secure our borders?
2. Arizona stepped up to protect itself with a new state law. Regardless of what is actually written in the law, the left (including most of Congress as well as the Presidents of the USA and Mexico) speculates that cops will racially profile anyone who looks like a Mexican. Since that’s specifically against the law, any cop who did it would be fired and probably sued. So racial profiling is a negligible risk. How does that unlikely risk compare to the ongoing reality of swamped schools, overrun hospital emergency rooms, rampant crime and a border wide open to terrorists?
3. How is it possible that Napolitano and Holder had opinions about the Arizona law without reading it? If they’re interested, it’s here: Senate Bill-Arizona
4. Which Democrats in Congress stood to applaud the President of Mexico when he lied in criticizing Arizona’s new law? Why was the hypocrite not escorted out of the country for his flagrantly outrageous behavior?
5. What is so awful about Mexico that millions of its citizens flee to a foreign country? There is no logical reason Mexico can’t prosper. All evidence points to a problem that is entirely political. Mexico is run by jerks like Calderon.

6. How do the 15-20,000,000 illegals in the US affect the immigration chances of people trying to get here legally from the world’s other 190 or so countries? Are illegals jumping the line and is that fair to everyone else?
7. Mexican, like American, is a nationality, not a race (just look at a photo of the nearly all honkie Mexican cabinet), so how can it be racist to be against illegal immigration from Mexico?
8. There is a virulently racist organization in this fight. It’s a thuggish California-based group called La Raza, Spanish for The Race, a misnomer Hitler and Goebbels would have loved. Why do our leaders and media coddle this bunch?
9. What is the scope of the attendant problems of illegal immigration: diseases, terrorists from the Middle East, drug smugglers, rapists, murderers, thugs, drunk drivers, etc.?
10. What is the financial plus/minus score of illegal immigration? The plus is the opportunity to exploit Mexican workers. Yuck. Minuses include billions of US dollars sent back to Mexico, huge social, medical, welfare and education costs, destroyed farms especially in AZ.
11. Why do we allow people to conflate legal and illegal immigration so that being anti-illegals means being anti-immigrant? New York’s nanny mayor, for example, can’t seem to tell the difference. Could we make it clear that America is a country of immigrants, we love immigrants and we want more – legal immigrants?
12. Is the left trying to keep us from solving this problem in order to eventually increase the size of its constituency – selling out America for political gain?
13. The current and most recent past Presidents of Mexico (the honkie-esque Calderon and Fox) demand that the US treat Mexican citizens illegally in this country with kid gloves and what amounts to amnesty and welfare. Mexico itself deals with other countries’ citizens illegally in Mexico quickly and viciously followed by immediate deportation. Why do we pay attention to anything Mexico’s two-faced thugocracy says about this issue?
14. What is wrong with our own media when it comes to this issue?

These are just questions. Maybe there are good answers but I doubt it. Almost nobody asks questions like this, not even the soi-disant courageous “speak truth to power” press. The few people who do ask get excoriated. Meanwhile “The American public has been kept in the dark on this whole issue.” God bless Channel two in Atlanta for this: Investigates U.S. Border Security

There is a neat solution to the problem of illegal immigration. We could trade our highly educated, energetic, focused and oh-so-precious progressive lawyers, academics, politicians, media people, activists, etc., for Mexicans who want to live here and become Americans. We’d acquire hard-working, pleasant people and Mexico would gain the services of an army of forceful thinkers with big ideas to help fix their broken country. We can worry about rescuing Mexico from our elitists later.

In the meantime, what are the answers to the questions? We may never know. One potential reason comes from British journalist Melanie Phillips, author of The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power. In an interview, she said:

“ … in this supposed age of reason, there is such an implacable refusal, over a wide and disparate range of issues, to acknowledge the authority of factual evidence over opinion, or distinguish truth from propaganda and lies, or differentiate between justice and injustice, victim and victimizer.

“More than that, this phenomenon is confined to the supposed custodians of reason, the intelligentsia; and some of the most prominent of these often-militant “rationalists” propound assertions that are demonstrably irrational.

“Even more striking is that this repudiation of reason is associated with the most fashionable and progressive causes — anti-imperialism, anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, environmentalism, moral and cultural relativism, multiculturalism, scientism.

“Yet they promote not just irrationality but a return to primitivism, pre-modern levels of social disorder, and the persecution of dissenters.”

In other words, as we compare and contrast the administration of Direct Marketing with the administration of the United States of America it is important to remember that facts don’t matter in the administration of the US of A. Only the fact-free opinions of a savage elite matter and we question those at our peril.