The Abolition of Cash

National Review, April 11, 2016

Government gathers power sometimes in great swoops, sometimes by stealth, and sometimes in slow, sly increments, foreshadowed by position papers, op-eds, and regulatory tweaks designed to address an “issue” that a careless citizenry has overlooked.

It’s this slower, slyer approach that is now in motion as Big Brother’s smaller brethren take aim at cash. An advance guard of regulation has paved the way. Deposit more than $10,000 in cash into a bank and the feds have to be told. Bring that amount into the U.S. and Customs has to be told. Get stopped by the police with “too much” cash (a conveniently elastic concept) and you risk watching it disappear into the swamp known as civil forfeiture. Meanwhile, the country’s Croesus bills have long since vanished — $10,000, $5,000, $1,000, even the $500 that bore the face of poor murdered McKinley. Under the circumstances, they might have let him keep his mountain. 

The cull has further to go. Writing in the Washington Post earlier this year, former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers called for a “global agreement to stop issuing notes worth more than say $50 or $100.” He praised a Harvard paper by Peter Sands, the former CEO of the Standard Chartered bank, in which Sands claimed that the arguments for eliminating notes with a denomination above the equivalent of $50 “could well be compelling at an even lower threshold.” An even lower threshold: The ratchet turns in only one direction.

Naturally, there are good reasons for this latest government grab. There always are. The anonymity of cash makes it the criminal’s friend, and there are (just to start with) the wars on drugs and terror to think of and, of course, tax evasion. 

In Europe, authoritarian creep creeps more quickly. Italy introduced a maximum limit of €1,000 for cash transactions in 2010 (the current prime minister has proposed raising it to €3,000). By taking aim at widespread tax-dodging, this was intended to bolster Italy’s finances during one of the euro zone’s uglier spasms. It was also designed to discourage Italians from withdrawing euros from banks in a period when there were legitimate concerns about banks’ stability and the possibility that money deposited with them would be converted overnight from euros into rapidly depreciating “new lire.” “Forcing” Italians away from cash would make it more difficult for them to reduce their exposure to those dangers. This was about more than tax evasion: It was about keeping Italians locked within a crumbling system.

The ratchet keeps turning. Germany has proposed a €5,000 limit on cash transactions. Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, has called for the scrapping of the €500 bill.

Meanwhile, in Scandinavia, a part of the world where governments are trusted and technology is advanced, digital payments are squeezing out cash. In Sweden, cash is now used in only about 5 percent of retail sales. Progress is progress: If people prefer to make payments electronically, that’s up to them, and if that entails a loss of privacy, that’s their choice.

But choice may well be followed by compulsion. Forget about doing away with the Benjamins; the technology now exists to kill off cash altogether. The will has been there for a while. Now there’s a way. The Danish government would like to abandon paper money altogether by 2030. Norway’s largest bank, the partly state-owned DNB, has called for cash to be phased out, moaning that 60 percent of the kroner in circulation are “outside of any [official] control.” The horror!

Excuse me while I adjust the tinfoil, but this is not (and will not be) just a Scandinavian thing: We live in an era when central banks have driven interest rates down to levels that bear little connection to economic reality. Certain key rates are now below zero in the euro zone, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, and Japan. This is a terrible idea, and its time has come. The question is not only how far negative interest rates will spread, but how low they will go.

In a speech last September, Andrew Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief economist, grumbled about the “constraint physical currency imposes” on setting negative interest rates. After considering various ways of dealing with this nuisance, he concluded that an “interesting solution” would be to “maintain the principle of a government-backed currency, but have it issued in an electronic rather than paper form.” This “would allow negative interest rates to be levied on currency easily and speedily.” Translation: Make people hold their cash in electronic form (and thus in banks); they will then have no means of escaping the levy on savings that negative interest rates effectively represent. 

Before dismissing this as a form of madness that only Europeans could embrace, check out what Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff has been saying. Writing in the Financial Times in May 2014, he argued that replacing paper money with an electronic alternative “would kill two birds with one stone.” It would strike a blow against crime, and it would free central banks from a bind that has “handcuffed” them since the financial crisis. “At present, if central banks try setting rates too far below zero, people will start bailing out into cash.” Indeed, they will: To its credit, the central bank of Switzerland, one of the countries now burdened with negative interest rates, has made it clear that it has no plans to junk its thousand-franc bills. It accepts that these are used as a store of value, something that Rogoff, no friend of the saver, might regard as reprehensible but the sensible Swiss do not. There has been a 17 percent increase in the number of these bills in circulation in the last year. 

“Hoarding cash may be inconvenient and risky,” wrote Rogoff in a related paper, “but if rates become too negative, it becomes worth it.” He would clearly prefer to see that emergency exit locked and the key thrown away, leaving savers helpless in the face of whatever central bankers (and not only central bankers) might dream up.  

An open-minded sort, Rogoff did concede that there might be a problem or two with such a set-up, including the fact that “society may want to preserve the right for individuals to make anonymous payments in certain activities,” a telling choice of words. It’s not the rights of the individual that count, but what “society” (defined by whom?) “may want.”

Another Alpine nation, Austria, is aware of the menace to privacy that a cashless society could be. Its deputy economy minister, Harald Mahrer, has vowed to fight rules curtailing the use of cash: “We don’t want someone to be able to track digitally what we buy, eat, and drink, what books we read and what movies we watch.”

And this is more than a matter of books, movies, and meals. It’s worth noting that the German proposals to restrict cash transactions ran into opposition across the political spectrum, from the leftist Greens to the populist-right party Alternative for Germany on through to the classical liberals of the Free Democratic party. After Hitler and Honecker, Germans understand how totalitarianism works, and they know too that the slippery slope is all too real.

The abolition of cash is a notion that we should reject out of hand. It puts too much faith in technology, and it puts too much trust in the state. It eliminates privacy to a degree that ought to be unacceptable to any free society, and it leaves people dangerously exposed to having their savings confiscated by negative interest rates or, more traditionally, confiscated by government, by way of a savage wealth tax perhaps. It  leaves them with nowhere to hide.

To those making the case against cash or high-denomination bills, that, of course, is the whole point, but it is a point they are pushing too far. Their tightly controlled, fully tax-compliant society could easily, given a sufficiently malign government, be as dysfunctional as one where the “shadow economy” (not to be confused with the “criminal economy”) is flourishing. The ability to dodge the system acts as a brake on overreach by the system. For example, there’s no sense in pushing taxes so high that people decide it’s worth the risk of not paying them. Tax evasion should not be endorsed (I write, nervously aware of the IRS), but the potential, if somewhat paradoxical, benefit to society from the threat of tax evasion can be. Make tax impossible (or close to impossible) to dodge and there’s far less to hold back the demands of a greedy state.

And yes, there is cash’s role as crime’s discreet accomplice. Well, as I alluded to before, government already has a wide range of powers to combat that. To ask for much more seems excessive. To borrow a famous comment a wise man once made: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

That wise man? He is on the $100 bill.

A Case Of The Vapers

National Review Online, December 26, 2013

What was it again that Mencken once wrote? Google, enter, click. Ah yes, it was this: “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

On Thursday, the New York City Council made room in its legislative agenda — it was also busy commissioning a study on polystyrene foam — to pass by a vote of 43–8 (that lopsided majority an indicator of idiocy afoot) a measure that will, once Mayor Bloomberg signs it (oh, he will) shortly prohibit the vaping (that’s the word) of e-cigarettes anyplace where smoking is now banned in Gotham, bars, restaurants, offices, parks, the beach, you name it. Technically speaking, the ban will take effect as an amendment to the city’s Smoke-Free Air Act. That e-cigarettes do not emit any smoke was an irrelevance.

To vape is to inhale a vapor from a plastic facsimile of a cigarette, battery-powered, bought for $10 at a local store, and good, it is claimed, for 400 puffs. The business end is fashioned to look like a filter. In another nod to nostalgia, the tip typically glows as the user inhales. It’s not the real thing, nothing like. Plastic is neither leaf nor paper. It holds no memories of that old bar down on the Lower East Side, that conversation once upon when. There’s no tobacco, no combustion, none of the warmth, none of the evocative transience, none of the mouth-feel of cigarette or cigar, and it looks just a bit dumb. Walk into Rick’s with an e-cigarette and Rick would laugh. Then again, Bogie died at 57.

Whatever the aesthetics of e-cigarettes, as nicotine-delivery systems go, they are a lot safer than the cancer sticks of old. There’s no carbon monoxide, no tar, very little, in fact, of tobacco smoking’s carcinogenic stew. To be sure, the Food and Drug Administration has detected tobacco-specific nitrosamines (a carcinogen) in the e-cigarette cartridges that contain the treats to come. A 2009 study revealed about the same quantity of TSNAs in cartridges as might be found in a nicotine patch, a total about one-nine-hundredth of the level found inside Joe Camel. The vaper (I know, I know) will inhale an even smaller portion, a tiny fraction of a minuscule amount. Furthermore, TSNAs were the only carcinogens detected in this study. Boston University’s Dr. Michael Siegel, a 25-year veteran of tobacco-control work (and a Centers for Disease Control alumnus), has noted that smokers of conventional cigarettes may inhale maybe 40 other carcinogens, not to speak of “thousands of [other] chemicals.”

It is true that at the end of November a study by Holland’s National Institute for National Health (RIVM) triggered a few headlines like “Dutch sound alarm about possible risks of e-cigarettes” (Reuters), but within the body of that Reuters story there was this: “The institute said it was concerned about a lack of evidence on the possible health effects of e-cigarettes…”

As a reminder: Don’t know is not the same as know.

The RIVM did note that the dread nicotine was involved and referred to reports of nausea and throat irritation by some users. Indeed, it recommended (Reuters writes) that “as a precaution [e-cigarettes] should not be used by pregnant women or in the vicinity of children.” For a health warning nowadays, this is on the mild side. The scientific concerns it reflects are not enough to justify a heavy-handed ban of the type now headed New York City’s way.

But what about the antifreeze? This substance, more happily associated with autos than lungs, has seeped into the e-cigarette debate, setting up a scare or 50. The truth is that the FDA found some diethylene glycol — an important ingredient in antifreeze — in just one of the cartridges surveyed in the 2009 study, a dismaying result but almost certainly a rogue finding. E-cigarettes generally do contain, however, a base of propylene glycol to “hold” the nicotine and any added flavoring. Propylene glycol is used in antifreeze, but as a kinder, gentler alternative to its rough diethylene cousin, particularly when there is any danger of contact with food. As is explained in the compound’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry toxicological profile (September 1997), “the [FDA] has classified propylene glycol as ‘generally recognized as safe,’ which means that it is acceptable for use in flavorings, drugs, and cosmetics, and as a direct food additive.” Move along, there’s nothing to see here.

As an alternative to propylene glycol, some e-cigarettes use vegetable glycerin as their base. This common food additive will affect their taste, but not your health.

And so far as the ingredients lurking in an e-cigarette are concerned, that ought to be about it. This is not, of course, a reason for arguing that research on these products should cease, or that stricter quality control should be opposed. Nor is it a claim that e-cigarettes are risk-free. They may, for example, inhibit lung capacity, at least temporarily. Beyond that and those pesky TSNAs, there is also the matter that most e-cigarettes will (as the astute folk at the RIVM had noticed) be used to deliver nicotine, a potentially addictive substance — albeit one that has been given up by tens of millions. Then again, much of nicotine’s famously powerful addictiveness can be attributed to the fact that it is being delivered via tobacco, a medium with naturally occurring monoamine oxidase inhibitors that seem to have a great deal to do (it’s a long story) with the difficulty of quitting smoking. Divorced from its leafy accomplice, nicotine is not that addictive, nor under those circumstances is it, to quote John Britton, who leads the tobacco advisory group for Britain’s Royal College of Physicians, even a “particularly hazardous” drug.

What about secondhand smoke, butcher of innocents, enricher of laundries? E-cigarettes give off little or no odor, and, although the research is still at an early stage, the health risks of secondhand vaping likely rest somewhere between zero and infinitesimal.

Considering all this (Dr. Britton has been quoted as saying that if everyone switched over to e-cigarettes it could save “millions” of lives), the medical world ought to be cheering the swift rise of a hugely safer alternative to demon tobacco. E-cigarettes are, so to speak, catching fire. In the U.S., sales are expected to hit $1 billion in 2013, twice the total of a year ago. That’s still only about 1 percent of the total spent on tobacco products, but it says something that Altria Group Inc. (parent company of Philip Morris USA), Reynolds American Inc., and Lorillard Inc. (which paid $135 million for blu eCigs in 2012) have all entered this market. Non-U.S. e-cigarette sales have been expanding rapidly too, reaching an estimated $2 billion in 2012.

But e-cigarettes have given tobacco’s fiercer foes, well, the vapors. Brazil, Norway, and Singapore have banned them. Others have imposed strict controls, including the prohibition of vaping in public places. Some British railway companies have exiled vapers from their carriages on the carefully considered grounds that they make other passengers “uneasy.” Such stupidities are not, as New Yorkers now know, confined to abroad. Their city is by no means alone. A growing number of America’s politicians, bureaucrats, and other nuisances are on the offensive against e-cigarettes. Thus bans similar to that now looming over New York City have already been introduced in New Jersey and Utah, states that would not normally agree on very much.

There are some legitimate concerns. There is a wide range of e-flavors, some of which, cherry crush, say, or chocolate (I’m not sure — on many grounds — about maple bacon), might appeal to a younger set. Meanwhile the anxious RIVM frets (according to Reuters) that e-cigarettes “might be attractive to young people because of bright colors, flashing lights and jewelry-like appearance.” Dutch e-cigarette design must have taken an exotic turn.

Such worries could be addressed by prohibiting the sale of e-cigarettes to minors, but that would not have been enough for New York councilman James Gennaro, a key promoter of the ban (and also a sponsor of legislation that recently increased the minimum age for buying tobacco in New York City to 21), who wants us all — of course he does — to think of the children. He worried (the New York Times reported) “that children who could not differentiate between regular and electronic smoking were getting the message that smoking is socially acceptable.” Combine the RIVM with Gennaro and the message is clear. E-cigarettes are a menace when they look like cigarettes. And they are a menace when they do not.

Other objections — that e-cigarettes might act as a gateway to the real thing (in reality, they are more likely to represent an exit from it) or that they might reglamorize smoking — are feeble stuff. This suggests that the real agenda is driven by the precautionary principle run amok, or, ominously, by something darker still.

And that something is not the prospect of the loss of valuable tobacco tax revenues (although that will not have gone unnoticed by some of those looking to bring vaping to heel). What is at work here is, at least in part, altogether more profound, and more disturbing, than that. The campaign against tobacco began with the best of intentions, but it has long since degenerated into an instrument for its activists both to order others around and to display their own virtue. And with that comes an insistence on a rejection of tobacco so absolute, so pure, that it has become detached from any logic other than the logic of control, the classic hallmark of a cult. So mighty is the supposed power of this anathematized leaf that anything — even when tobacco-free — that looks like a cigarette or provides any approximation of its pleasures is suspect.

It’s too much, of course, to expect any respect these days for the principle that adults should be left to decide such things for themselves, but the chance that the e-cigarette could save an impressive number of lives should count for something. Europe’s sad snus saga suggests that that might not necessarily be so. For generations Swedes have taken a form of oral tobacco, a snuff known as “snus,” cured in a way that sharply reduces its TSNA content. Snus is available in the U.S., land of dip and chaw, but, within the EU, where no such tradition exists, it can be sold only in Sweden. Taking snus is not without risk, but it’s far less harmful than smoking. Its popularity in Sweden, especially with the guys, goes a long way to explaining why that country has Europe’s lowest incidence of lung cancer among men. It has been estimated that introducing snus elsewhere in the EU could save some 90,000 lives a year, but the EU’s capnophobic leadership has rejected the idea. Anti-tobacco jihadists are quite content, you see, to accept that the perfect can be the enemy of the good.

As America’s vapers are now finding out.

Note: This article updates “Vaper Strain,” an article that appeared in the September 2, 2013 issue of National Review.

Vaper Strain

National Review, September 2, 2013

As I write, I am vaping — yes, that’s the word — inhaling an odorless vapor from a plastic facsimile of a cigarette, battery-powered, bought for $10 at a local store, and good, it is claimed, for 400 puffs. The business end is fashioned to look like a filter. In another nod to nostalgia, the tip glows as I inhale. It’s not the real thing, nothing like. Plastic is neither leaf nor paper. It holds no memories of that old bar down on the Lower East Side, that conversation once upon when. There’s no tobacco, no combustion, none of the warmth, none of the evocative transience, none of the mouth-feel of cigarette or cigar, and it looks just a bit dumb. Walk into Rick’s with an e-cigarette and Rick would laugh. Then again, Bogie died at 57.

Whatever the aesthetics of e-cigarettes, as nicotine-delivery systems go they are a lot safer than the cancer sticks of old. There’s no carbon monoxide, no tar, very little, in fact, of tobacco smoking’s carcinogenic stew. To be sure, the Food and Drug Administration has detected tobacco-specific nitrosamines (a carcinogen) in the e-cigarette cartridges that contain the treats to come. A 2009 study revealed about the same quantity of TSNAs in cartridges as might be found in a nicotine patch, a total about one-nine-hundredth of the level found inside Joe Camel. The vaper (I know, I know) will inhale an even smaller portion, a tiny fraction of a minuscule amount. Furthermore, TSNAs were the only carcinogens detected in this study. Boston University’s Dr. Michael Siegel, a 25-year veteran of tobacco-control work (and a Centers for Disease Control alumnus), has noted that smokers of conventional cigarettes may inhale maybe 40 other carcinogens, not to speak of “thousands of [other] chemicals.”

But what about the antifreeze? This substance, more happily associated with autos than lungs, has seeped into the e-cigarette debate, setting up a scare or 50. The truth is that the FDA found some diethylene glycol — an important ingredient in antifreeze — in just one of the cartridges surveyed in the 2009 study, a dismaying result but almost certainly a rogue finding. E-cigarettes generally do contain, however, a base of propylene glycol to “hold” the nicotine and any added flavoring. Propylene glycol is used in antifreeze, but as a kinder, gentler alternative to its rough diethylene cousin, particularly when there is any danger of contact with food. As is explained in the compound’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry toxicological profile (September 1997), “the [FDA] has classified propylene glycol as ‘generally recognized as safe,’ which means that it is acceptable for use in flavorings, drugs, and cosmetics, and as a direct food additive.” Move along, there’s nothing to see here.

As an alternative to propylene glycol, some e-cigarettes use vegetable glycerin as their base. This common food additive will affect their taste, but not your health.

And so far as the ingredients lurking in an e-cigarette are concerned, that ought to be about it. This is not, of course, a reason for arguing that research on these products should cease, or that stricter quality control should be opposed. Nor is it a claim that e-cigarettes are risk-free. They may, for example, inhibit lung capacity, at least temporarily. Beyond that and those pesky TSNAs, there is also the matter that most e-cigarettes will be used to deliver nicotine, a potentially addictive substance — albeit one that has been given up by tens of millions. Then again, much of nicotine’s famously powerful addictiveness can be attributed to the fact that it is being delivered via tobacco, a medium with naturally occurring monoamine oxidase inhibitors that seem to have a great deal to do (it’s a long story) with the difficulty of quitting smoking. Divorced from its leafy accomplice, nicotine is not that addictive, nor under those circumstances, to quote John Britton, who leads the tobacco advisory group for Britain’s Royal College of Physicians, is it even a “particularly hazardous” drug.

What about secondhand smoke, butcher of innocents, enricher of laundries? E-cigarettes give off little or no odor, and, although the research is still at an early stage, the health risks of secondhand vaping likely rest somewhere between zero and infinitesimal.

Considering all this (Dr. Britton has been quoted as saying that if everyone switched over to e-cigarettes it could save “millions” of lives), the medical world ought to be cheering the swift rise of a hugely safer alternative to demon tobacco. E-cigarettes are, so to speak, catching fire. In the U.S., sales are expected to hit $1 billion in 2013, twice the total of a year ago. That’s still only about 1 percent of the total spent on tobacco products, but it says something that Altria Group Inc. (parent company of Philip Morris USA), Reynolds American Inc., and Lorillard Inc. (which paid $135 million for blu eCigs in 2012) have all entered this market. Non-U.S. e-cigarette sales have been expanding rapidly too, reaching an estimated $2 billion in 2012.

But e-cigarettes have given tobacco’s fiercer foes, well, the vapors. Brazil, Norway, and Singapore have banned them. Others have imposed strict controls, including the prohibition of vaping in public places. Some British railway companies have exiled vapers from their carriages on the carefully considered grounds that they make other passengers “uneasy.” Such stupidities are not confined to abroad. A growing number of America’s politicians, bureaucrats, and other nuisances are on the offensive against e-cigarettes, including — if recent reports are true — New York’s nanny-in-chief, Michael Bloomberg. And he won’t be the last.

There are some legitimate concerns. There is a wide range of e-flavors, some of which, cherry crush, say, or chocolate (I’m not sure — on many grounds — about maple bacon), might appeal to a younger set, but such worries are best addressed by prohibiting sales to minors. Other objections — that e-cigarettes might act as a gateway to the real thing (in reality, they are more likely to represent an exit from it) or that they might re-glamorize smoking — are feeble stuff. This suggests that the real agenda is driven by the precautionary principle run amok, or, ominously, by something darker still.

Cynics might point to the loss of valuable tax revenues as the motive, but there’s much more to it than that. The campaign against tobacco began with the best of intentions, but it has long since degenerated into an instrument for its activists both to order others around and to display their own virtue. And with that comes an insistence on a rejection of tobacco so absolute, so pure, that it has become detached from any logic other than the logic of control, the classic hallmark of a cult. So mighty is the supposed power of this anathematized leaf that anything — even when tobacco-free — that looks like a cigarette or provides any approximation of its pleasures is suspect.

It’s too much, of course, to expect any respect these days for the principle that adults should be left to decide such things for themselves, but the chance that the e-cigarette could save an impressive number of lives should count for something. Europe’s sad snus saga suggests that that might not necessarily be so. For generations Swedes have taken a form of oral tobacco, a snuff known as “snus,” cured in a way that sharply reduces its TSNA content. Snus is available in the U.S., land of dip and chaw, but, within the EU, where no such tradition exists, it can be sold only in Sweden. Taking snus is not without risk, but it’s far less harmful than smoking. Its popularity in Sweden, especially with the guys, goes a long way to explaining why that country has Europe’s lowest incidence of lung cancer among men. It has been estimated that introducing snus elsewhere in the EU could save some 90,000 lives a year, but the EU’s capnophobic leadership has rejected the idea. Anti-tobacco jihadists are quite content, you see, to accept that the perfect can be the enemy of the good.

As America’s vapers might be about to find out.

Goodbye to All That

National Review Online, April 27, 2004

They banned Ulysses, the authorities did, they banned it as "obscene" in Britain, and they banned it as obscene in America, and they banned it as obscene just about anywhere else where English speakers could be shocked, offended, or otherwise appalled by James Joyce's strange, lovely mix of prose poetry, incomprehensibility, genius, and naughty talk. That was then. Nowadays, Leopold Bloom's Dublin odyssey is revered, a masterpiece, a monument, a part of our high culture, but its author would still be in trouble. Not for his book, but for his lunch. Times and taboos change, but killjoys and scolds do not.

Joyce used to eat in Davy Byrne's pub, a meal he later bequeathed to Bloom, a Gorgonzola sandwich, a glass of burgundy and a cigarette. The sandwich? No problem, so long as the cheese had been labeled as required by EU regulations. The Burgundy? Well, "glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the winepress grapes of Burgundy. Sun's heat it is." Who's going to argue with that? Not you, not me, not even Brussels. But that cigarette, oh dear, that cigarette.

Since late March, those addictive little sticks of dangerous delight been banned from Davy Byrne's, and every other pub in Ireland. They've been banned in restaurants, they've been banned in offices, they've been banned in factories and they've been banned just about anywhere else the Irish government considers a workplace, even banned, let Willy Loman howl, in company cars. There are exceptions, but most of them are not a lot of fun—prisons, nunneries, the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum and, with grim, but kindly logic, hospices.

And Micheal Martin, the instigator of the ban? He's the typographically challenging busybody-in-chief, a bore, and a smug, self-righteous zealot. His one experience of a cigarette, as a foolish "teenager" naturally, was "disgusting." While he may have a drink now and then, he never, never gets "tipsy." Of course he doesn't. He's too busy planning his next crusade, pondering ways to restrict the advertising of alcohol. And when he's done thinking about that, this nanny, this ninny, this drone, this nosey, hectoring clown is "very tentatively" mulling a fat tax. Ireland's tragedy is that this monstrous figure has the job of his dreams—and everybody else's nightmares. By being appointed Ireland's Minister for Health and, wait for it, "Children," Martin was given a blank check for bossiness. On January 30, 2003, he cashed it.

On that dark day, Martin made a speech. Citing the findings of an "independent scientific working group," he announced that, "on the best of international scientific evidence...there is harm in Environmental Tobacco Smoke. Proven harm about which there is not only a consensus in the worldwide scientific community, but a significant substantial consensus." What's the difference between a "significant substantial" consensus and an ordinary consensus? Who knows? All we do know is that the Martin consensus evidently does not include all that awkward, inconvenient research showing that the health effect of passive smoking on adults is minimal, nonexistent, or statistically irrelevant. That data does not count.

And while we're talking data, let's chat about dosage. A substance can be perfectly safe, even good for you, in low quantities, but lethal in large amounts. Martin has no time for such quibbling. So far as this Einstein, this Galileo, this prince of precision, was concerned, all that we simpletons needed to be told was that in a smoky room, we'd be breathing in "a load of" dangerous chemicals that "do us enormous damage." This horrifying state of affairs had, Martin explained, led him to take "radical new measures.... I'm banning smoking in the workplace...I am publishing draft regulations.... I'm doing this because—as this report makes inescapably clear—I have no choice. There is no other option open to me...as you know, I've already taken a number of initiatives to reduce tobacco consumption...I've raised the age limit for buying tobacco.... I've stopped tobacco advertising in newspapers and magazines.... I believe that in every decade, we are presented with one major choice where...we change the future for the better.... I'm making the call the way it must be made."

"I", "I", "I", "I", "me", "I", "I", "I", "I", "I". Did I mention that our Mr. Martin is a tad self-important?

To be fair, there wasn't a lot of "we" about it. Martin may have had "no choice," but nor did members of the Irish parliament, let alone their electors. There was no vote approving the ban. The minister simply exercised the discretion given to him by an earlier piece of legislation. It's a well-known trick to anyone familiar with the way that the EU imposes its rules and in a way, that's only fitting. For while, behind the (forgive the phrase) smokescreen of healthcare concern, the real motives behind this move include Martin's ego and the uncontrollable urge of politicians to control their fellow citizens, one critical additional element has been the Irish establishment's determination to prove to the outside world how their country is modern, "European," Communautaire, international.

Turn again to that January 30 speech, with its reference to consensus in "the worldwide scientific community", the "best of international scientific evidence and to "the use of internationally recognized experts on tobacco control." A year later, Martin was boasting (not inaccurately) that his initiative had triggered "significant momentum across Europe." Foreigners impressed! That's what counted. The ban he had earlier described as "a massive cultural change" was (the Belfast News Letter reported) marking Ireland out as a "forward-thinking, modern society." "Ireland had," Martin said, "transformed itself in many ways over the last decade...Irish people have demonstrated their capacity to change and to adapt." Indeed they have, but as anyone familiar with the destruction of Georgian Dublin will know, unthinking modernization, or what passes for modernization, can come at a high price.

Writing in the London Independent late last year, a journalist recalled walking one rainy day into a pub in County Clare:

"A warm miasma...reached over and enfolded us in its arms. It was a heady mélange of smells—of burning turf and spilt beer, of mushroom soup and cigarette smoke and wet tweed slowly drying...The atmosphere was extraordinary—thick and savory and textured, like anchovy toast, like the barmbrack spread with butter that my aunt gave us every teatime. The embracing fog of fragrances was practically visible in the fumes that rose to the murky ceiling from every corner of the room. Fumes of sweet turf-smoke, fumes from our drying clothes, fumes of burning tobacco and exhaled smoke, all of it drifting lazily upward like a sacrifice to the household gods. We stuck around. What else could you do?"

History be hanged. In Micheal Martin's antiseptic, go-ahead Celtic tiger there can be no place for messy, awkward anachronisms such as the fug, the fellowship and the fumes of a country pub on a rainy day. The much-heralded choice, 'diversity' and openness of the New Ireland do not, it turns out, mean very much. If, as is always claimed, most drinkers prefer no-smoking pubs, then the market should be left to provide them with that choice. To argue that some supposed fundamental freedom to hang out in a smoke-free bar means that all pubs have to renounce tobacco is to make a mockery of liberty in a country where generations fought, and died, for the real thing.

You'd think that, in the land of craic, cussedness, conflict, and Cuchulain that there would have been more opposition, but while there was some grumbling, some debate, some jeering, only the splendid Deirdre Healy of John Player & Sons (the manufacturers of Eire's most popular cigarette) struck a note that, in its defiance and its poetry was, somehow, very, very Irish. The impact of the ban on her company's business would, said this warrior queen, be no more than "a slap in the face from a butterfly's wings."

Some butterfly, some wings. Prohibition has been introduced, on schedule and on the lines that Martin wanted. Worse still, like so much nanny state nagging, the new law seems to have been accepted, something that was even acknowledged by two visiting statesmen, two giants of our time, Gerrit Zalm, Holland's finance minister, and Jean-Claude Juncker, the premier of mighty Luxembourg. The two men were in Ireland for an EU summit and, in what was possibly the most supine diplomatic gesture seen in Europe since Neville Chamberlain boarded that plane to Munich, they smoked their cigarettes out in the cold.

But, in Ireland's worst moments a hero usually emerges to inspire, enchant, and Irish history being what it is, come to an unfortunate end. On March 30, John Deasy, a member of the Irish parliament, did just that. He committed an unthinkable act in one of the Dail's bars. He smoked not one cigarette, but three (some say two). The whole story remains, so to speak, cloudy, but it appears that Deasy first asked for a fire door to be opened so he could step outside into an alleyway. Request denied! It had not yet been designated a smoking area (it has now—too late for Deasy). Thwarted, the MP remained at the bar, enjoyed his three (or was it two?) cigarettes regardless, washed down, quite possibly, with three pints of beer (whether the barman served this outlaw, this smoker, is still under investigation). Retribution was inevitable. In Micheal Martin's Ireland, such open defiance could not be left unpunished.

And it wasn't. These days there's no smoking without a firing. Deasy was promptly removed as Fine Gael's justice spokesman. More was to come. On April 13 this wretch, this reprobate, this renegade, this rebel, was questioned for half an hour by officers from Dublin's feared South West Area Health Board. He runs the risk of prosecution and a fine of over $3,000. Yes, yes, yes, I know. As an MP, let alone a justice spokesman, Deasy should, of course, have complied with the law (which, disgracefully, he had done nothing before to oppose). But, when you read how this freedom fighter has refused to apologize and, better still, has told the media ("a bunch of hypocrites") to take "a running jump," it's impossible not to cheer.

James Joyce, I suspect, would have felt the same way.

Spirits in the Sky

National Review Online, July 24, 2001

Is it possible, do you think, that Democratic senators are, in reality, demons sent by the Devil to pester, humiliate, and torment the rest of us? It may be a somewhat far-fetched theory, but take a look at the latest proposed policy initiative from Dianne Feinstein and see if you can come up with any other explanation.

 Ms. Feinstein, the senior senator from California, has decided that the experience of air travel in this country needs to be made worse. The senator, a lawmaker with, clearly, too little to occupy her time, has recently written to the CEOs of seven major air carriers suggesting that they should not serve any passenger more than two alcoholic drinks in the course of a domestic flight.

 Now, a "suggestion" from Dianne Feinstein is, like a "request" from Don Corleone, something to take seriously. Just in case any of the CEOs did not understand this, the sober-sided senator spelled out the threat implicit in her proposal. If the airlines would not comply "voluntarily" they would be required to do so by law. "I am," she warned sternly, "in the process of writing legislation." And that legislation would be tough. The ban, she explained, would apply "regardless of the type of alcoholic beverage served."

 Let us imagine what that could mean. You are in Coach, in a middle seat narrower than George W. Bush's Florida majority. One neighbor, grotesquely obese, is spreading out from the confines of his chair into your own space. The other, who does not appear to have washed for some days, is sobbing quietly after a nasty spot of turbulence over Des Moines. Two rows behind, a baby screams, but undeterred his mother carries on with the grim task of changing a diaper then and there (she has little choice — the line for the restroom stretches halfway down the plane). The flight itself, theoretically a six-hour hike from New York to Seattle, took off very late owing to unspecified "trouble" at O'Hare. You will, you already know, miss the meeting that was the purpose of your journey in the first place. The flight attendant has just informed you that the last chicken entrée has already been taken, leaving a choice of a bean-based mush or a packet of honey-coated pretzels. It has been two or three hours since your last drink. To numb the pain, you ask for a third Bud Light. Under the terms of the Feinstein fatwa your request will be denied.

 If there is anything guaranteed to spark an outburst of anger, this is it, which is ironic really, as the alleged purpose of the two drinks limit is to reduce "air rage." Of course, why Sen. Feinstein should be so worried by this subject is not clear. The senator was, after all, famously relaxed ("we've got to step back…let cooler minds prevail") when, in this year's most spectacular instance of aerial misbehavior, a hot-dogging Chinese jet collided into an American surveillance plane. We can only speculate as to what it is that has now led Ms. Feinstein to take a new harder line against trouble in the sky. It would, of course, be absolutely inappropriate to suggest that a double standard is at work and quite, quite wrong to hint that the senior senator from California is a self-important busybody, who finds it easier to boss around American citizens than stand up to Communist China.

 No, the answer must lie elsewhere. Was there, perhaps, an incident, senator, a squabble, maybe, on one fraught flight over just whose suitcase was going to have priority in a jam-packed overhead locker? We can only speculate. There is no evidence of such a drama, but then, why worry too much about that? There is no evidence of any epidemic of air rage either, but that does not seem to have stopped Ms. Feinstein.

 The real data are, in fact, rather reassuring. In response to the senator's proposal, a spokesman for an airline industry group, the Air Transport Association, has claimed that most of the four thousand or so (usually fairly minor) incidents of "air rage" that take place each year do so on the ground. Minor or not, that is four thousand too many, but it is worth remembering that U.S. airports catered for over six hundred million passengers last year. Based on those statistics, therefore, unruly travelers account for .0007 percent of the total, and most of those are enraged not by drink, but by delays. One of the principal causes of those delays, Sen. Feinstein, has been Washington's failure to bring the private sector into the management of the air-traffic-control system.

 What is more, when a drunken passenger is, or may become, a problem, the airlines already have all the powers they need. As Ms. Feinstein's own press release admits, under FAA regulations airlines are prohibited from serving alcoholic beverages to any person aboard who appears to be intoxicated. Disorderly passengers can be handcuffed or otherwise restrained. Quite rightly, as a number of loutish holidaymakers have recently discovered, they can also be prosecuted.

 As for those who argue that two drinks should be enough for anyone, well, that may be true for them (and for me. I'm a very frequent flier, but, in the air at least, a very infrequent drinker) but it is not for others, and those folks should be left to make their own choices. A drink or three can help wile away the time, or soothe, perhaps, the truculent traveler who might otherwise cause just the sort of problems which, supposedly, so alarm the senator. In addition, most of us know those terrified fliers (hi, Mom!) who need more than a little something to help them through their ordeal. Why should they suffer?

 In the end though, the utilitarian case misses the point. This particular example, the right to that third beer, may be not be the most important cause, but what matters here is the underlying principle, the principle that government should not take away any of our freedoms without a good reason. In this instance, Sen. Feinstein has not shown us that reason. The facts do not support her argument, and if we reject Satan as an explanation for Dianne's draft diktat (and, probably we must, although the Devil does, notoriously, find work for idle hands), then the only motive that can be found is in her own mindset, one all too typical of her party's leadership: priggish, arrogant, condescending, and unbelievably interfering.

 And you don't need to get in an airplane to be angry over that.