Smoke-Filled Lungs and Empty Stomachs
A 21st century corollary to the idealistic hope, “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came,” could be “Suppose everybody stopped smoking and tobacco farmers grew food instead.”
The outlandish idea of devoting millions of acres to feeding hungry people rather than shortening their lives is reflected in new stirrings by Big Government and Big Money.
The House of Representatives will vote this week on a breakthrough bill to empower the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco as it now regulates food, drugs and medical devices, an important step toward bringing a death-dealing industry under control.
Meanwhile, two billionaires–New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Microsoft founder Bill Gates–are pledging $375 million to fight what they called a global tobacco epidemic.
As food shortages rise and health care is unavailable to multitudes, inhabitants of a rational world might see crop rotation from tobacco to food as a logical way of filling empty stomachs and cutting down on cancer and heart disease at the same time.
We are living in a rational world, aren’t we?
Cross-posted from my blog.
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20 Responses to “Smoke-Filled Lungs and Empty Stomachs”
Of course the Bush administration opposes this bill, I'm guessing they've never seen a regulation they liked – even ones that save lives apparently. Hopefully congress will pass it regardless, it's certainly an opportunity for them to demonstrate they can do something worthwhile.
Robert,
The first step in being “rational” is learning the facts and putting them in their proper perspective.
Tobacco production takes an insignificant amount of the total acreage of farm land. On average, 7.5 acres per farm (in a small region of the country) is devoted to tobacco, for a total of about 430,000 acres.
Converting this land over to food crops would make anti-smoking crusaders feel good, but wouldn’t make a dent in world hunger. What would end starvation throughout the world is an educational program that shows how liberal lies have prevented the widespread use of genetically engineered crops, effective pesticides, modern agricultural methods and free trade.
Be rational. Learn that liberalism is the leading cause of poverty, starvation, illness and death on this planet.
“a rational world “
This is misused by lefties frequently to mean something else altogether (ironically, by the same people who are frequently anti-science, anti-technology, and anti-progress, such as the anti-nuclear idiots), and even when used correctly, it simply reveals an age-old conceit that liberalism developed after the Scientific and Industrial Revolution in the middle of the nineteenth century that began to flourish in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, boosted in the 1930s, and warped in the 1960s:
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You cannot design and engineer everything to conform to your sacred ideals.
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(What a Fatal Conceit!)
“Converting this land over to food crops would make anti-smoking crusaders feel good, but wouldn’t make a dent in world hunger. “
Consider similar energy policy goals to force the use of less-economic alternative energy sources, or to de-industrialize and subject the economy to more command and control merely to make global warming fad followers feel superior about themselves and their more “rational” [sic] preferences and policy goals.
Or just trying to ration and distribute scarce oil supplies and control their prices to make just one piece of the economy more “rational” … have they yet plans to improve and to make more “rational” Medicare and health care in this country?
jwest. I'm stunned that you consider 430,000 acres “insignificant”. The total prime agricultural land devoted to food production is 450,000 acres, plus another 500,000 of grazing land, which is not prime agricultural land at all. The 'insignificant” 430,000 acres would essentially double our food production land. CORRECTION: as jwest pointed out, total ag production land is 450 million acres.
Your bashing of liberals as preventing the use of genetically modified crops and agricultural chemicals is also baffling. GM (genetically modified) crops have not proven to be the powerhouse producers you might imagine. Most are simply “Roundup-ready” meaning farmers can knock down weeds with chemicals rather than weeding or discing their crops. This isn't a big productivity increaser, and does not boost yields, just reduces cost somewhat. The only other significant GM crop technology is the incorporation of bacillus thurigensis (BT) toxin into crops to kill insects. This does no more than applying BT directly to crops, except that instead of washing it off before eating it, we ingest it in every bite. The FDA has not approved BT toxin for human consumption. And the “green revolution” of increased agricultural chemical use has been with us for over 50 years now! I believe you are mistaken to think significant gains can still be realized through the use of more chemicals.
Free trade has decimated family and small farm production worldwide, and also does not boost production, just transfers ownership from families to agribusiness corporations.
It appears you are trying to use three questionable policies already used in much of the world (including here) in a weak attempt to accuse “liberals” of suppressing food production. There is no evidence that applying all these policies does anything to boost production.
GreenDreams,
You wouldn’t be thinking of the 430 MILLION acres of farmland currently under cultivation, are you?
“three questionable policies[:]“
“genetically engineered crops, effective pesticides, modern agricultural methods”
“There is no evidence that applying all these policies does anything to boost production.”
Are you typically being left-irrational (these policies are not “questionable” even if you hate them for whatever reasons) or playing a clever game and saying we've done no study that validates the combination of all three of those policies at once?
“how liberal lies have prevented the widespread use of “
… food irradiation, to greatly reduce loss of food from spoilage and pest attack, and to greatly reduce the incidence and spread of disease from contaminated food, to name another example.
“NO! IRRADIATED MEAT” [butcher holding green glowing piece of meat with crooked rays eminating from the meat] is an irrational sign I used to view and laugh at with scorn when I was living in the St. Louis area. (Not Wild Oats and not Whole Foods but small Mom-n-Pop store. Not all organic, either.)
“Be rational. Learn that liberalism is the leading cause of poverty, starvation, illness and death on this planet.” – jwest
Hard to imagine your credibility could suffer anymore at your own hand, but your statement above shows it's not impossible.
Robert, it will be interesting to see how congress treats the tobacco lobby this time around. One would think the proper direction would be obvious. We shall see…
“[I]t will be interesting to see how congress treats the tobacco lobby this time around. One would think the proper direction would be obvious.”
An attitude like that all too often is not only improper but seeks the wrong thing, I've observed, but some reform seems in order. Ending all subsidies and tax breaks for tobacco, in addition to all other agricultural interventions, is in order, as is some kind of realistic level of taxes on tobacco, not so high as to risk smuggling, nor as another scummy social engineering “disincentive” game, but merely to try to recover some of the costs associated with the known health problems of the use of tobacco, from the purchase and use of that product itself. (The same should be done with alcohol.)
“Be rational. Learn that liberalism is the leading cause of poverty, starvation, illness and death on this planet.”
No _Bush_ is, as we've been reminded time after time, including here.
DLS, you imagine that one form of hyperbole excuses another. Back to your drawing board.
JSpencer is right. My statement:
“Be rational. Learn that liberalism is the leading cause of poverty, starvation, illness and death on this planet.”
was overly broad and not accurate.
It should have read:
“Be rational. Learn that liberalism is the leading cause of poverty in the U.S. and preventable starvation, illness and death in Africa.
Poverty in the U.S. is a direct result of ignorance. Liberals have perpetuated the failed public school system for decades in trade of the support of the teacher’s unions. With only one in five students in the inner city districts graduating high school (even less actually knowing how to read, write and do basic math), it is unbelievable that any liberal could sleep at night knowing they are responsible for dooming these children to a life of poverty.
The starvation is due to the reasons outlined above in a previous comment. Illness and death in Africa (300 million ill, 1 to 3 million deaths per year) are the results of liberal knee jerk reaction to the book “Silent Spring”, leading to the demonization of DDT.
I fully understand that liberals don’t mean to ruin lives, make children suffer and cause needless deaths, it’s just that they don’t consider the consequences of their actions.
Jwest, the reason I'm right isn't because you were “overly broad”, but because your facts are skewed. DDT has been in used in Africa to fight malaria for some time and continues to be used. The situations where it isn't used is due to concerns about resistant strains. As for Rachael Carson, her legacy is primarily of creating an early awareness of the importance of ecology, and not so much as a mass murderer. That portrayal, along with your portrayal of liberalism in America, is nonsense.
J. Spencer, you and logic diverge again.
Bush routinely is blamed for all kinds of things, including Bhutto's assassination.
JSpencer,
Then you should sleep well tonight knowing that you are not the problem.
Just because malaria has been totally eradicated where DDT was properly used and Africa is still suffering because its use was greatly curtailed due to U.S. and U.N. pressure, there is no reason to believe it’s more than coincidence.
The inner city schools will work someday – too bad though, for the kids today.
No need to introduce draught/insect resistant crops in sub-Saharan Africa. They should just shop at Whole Foods like the rest of us.
Liberalism is bliss.
I think it's time for you guys to update your anti-liberal talking points. I'll assume you know where you left your radios…
OK, what about the right of adults to enjoy vice, even vice that may be harmful? We cannot legislate away the natural urges to engage in activities that the nannies among us would like to eliminate.
I am sick of the 'cost to society' argument that tries to legislate 'goodness' into society. People, at least a significant portion of people, need outlets and the right to do what they damn well please.
jwest, you're correct. I'm off by a factor of 1,000 on food production. We're talking about 10% of our land used to grow tobacco. But the FDA will not get to regulate tobacco as a drug. The world's biggest corporations oppose that, and they have the power to stop it. I guarantee it.
I have done development work in Africa for nearly 30 years, and I have to assume that the lack of understanding displayed here about African problems results from our media's lack of focus on that continent.
Africa certainly has not been ruined by liberalism. It was taken over by Europeans during the colonial era, and since that time, used as a resource base. The policies of the World Bank and the international monetary fund as well as our agency for international development and the aid agencies of European and Asian nations have been focused on building infrastructure and a business environment to extract and transport raw materials out of Africa. It's all about obtaining cheap raw materials from which American, European and Asian companies can profit.
“Value-adding,” which would create African businesses to process and profit from their raw materials has never been a key goal and is hampered by our own policies: tariffs (such as those that keep us from buying foreign sugar, cotton, finished products and clothing, etc), embargoes, “quarantines” (such as the one that protects our orange growers) and other policy tricks. We implemented all these to satisfy our corporate buddies, who want to sell things like agrichemicals into Africa, while paying slave-labor wages to get cheap ingredients out.
This has benefited the companies receiving those raw materials, and the intermediaries who control commerce in them. The majority of impoverished farmers in Africa have not seen benefits. They are born into poverty and stay there, and every effort by every advanced nation has been merely to extract wealth from Africa, not to improve the lives of those at the bottom of the food chain. Our “free market” policies, coupled with corrupt African governments has left the bulk of the population out of any “growth” while African leaders, by and large, have engaged in the same greed and cronyism we see here at home and throughout the world.
As for DDT, and malaria, give me a break. First, DDT is just a chlorinated pesticide that takes a very long time to break down. Equally effective pesticides that break down faster–such as Malathion–work and are being used in Africa. Budget more and they can spray more. Insect repellents can be quite effective too, but no one's writing the White House to insist we give them some. We have not chosen to provide the drugs or foreign aid targeted against this problem because we are selfish. The very liberalism you falsely accuse has argued for greater aid to Africa for decades. Now, China is feeding Africa money, with no more benign intent than our “aid”. They intend to lock up Africa's natural resource wealth for their own growth.
I'm going to be charitable and say that conservatives are just misinformed about the policies of conservative economists and what they have done to Africa. Conservatism has consistently meant “you're on your own” with no government “handouts”. Conservatives work for, and have achieved, phenomenal concentration of wealth in the fewest possible hands. Congratulations.
Acting like they care about the fate of the “riff-raff” is insulting.
GreenDreams,
Not that I want to turn this discussion into a math quiz, but if you check the numbers, less than 1/1000 of our cultivated land (excluding grazing land) is used for tobacco. That isn’t 10% or 1%, it is .1% – a miniscule amount.
Africa would have benefited from another 100 years of colonialism. By that point, at least the infrastructure, education and societal culture could have advanced to point that independence would work.
Aid to Africa is one of the legacies of George Bush. No president has ever extended the amount of aid as the Bush administration, trebling what the Clinton administration promised and delivering. Not only did he dramatically increase the aid, he put the policies in place that insured that the aid money would find its way to the people and not into the pockets of its corrupt leaders. I assume your praise for our president is located in other comments.
If all liberals could just put aside their mistaken prejudices about conservatives for a moment and reflect on their own misshapen policies, I am convinced they have the capacity to realize the harm they do on a global scale. You spend your lives looking for villains, but you only need to peer into the mirror.
AustinRoth:OK, what about the right of adults to enjoy vice, even vice that may be harmful?
A vice is different from a ridiculous bad habit.
Fine, so long as you don't blow toxic clouds of second hand carcinogens in my face if I'm walking behind. Not unless you mind me spitting at your feet.