Clearing The Air

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Smoking ban lessons learned & typical government ineptitude......Circle jerk themselves and taxpayers into bankruptcy

Anatomy of a progressive government movement: Enact government over-regulation on businesses (in this case smoking bans), then as the onerous and unnecessary government regulation destroys those businesses & jobs; throw more taxpayer money at the problem they previously created.

For regular pubgoers, it could be the investment of a lifetime. The public are to be given cash and advice on how to invest and buy pubs as part of a package of measures designed to stem the wave of closures.....The initiative has been prompted by the closure of around 40 pubs each week, resulting in losses of jobs and millions of pounds from the economy....In a 2008 report on community pubs, the group found pub takings had been hit by...... heavy regulation, such as the smoking ban.

As a reminder to readers, over 3,300 UK pubs have gone out of business since lawmakers enacted smoking bans across the pond.

Rest of the story is online here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/mar/18/investors-offered-cash-buy-pubs

What makes this entire circle jerk even more troubling is that smoking ban lobbyists ALA, CTFK, AMA, etc were funded by the pharmaceutical nicotine industry via (RWJF) whose real motive was to increase Nicoderm, Nicotrol, Nicorette, etc. product sales by making it illegal to smoke tobacco products in the pubs. If anyone should pay for the losses incurred as a result of the rent seeking legislation it ought to be the lobbyist (non-profit) groups as well as their benefactor Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and Johnson & Johnson Co. as parent entity of RWJF and manufacturer / owner of the now artificially demanded pharmaceutical nicotine products.

Lawmakers who are stupid enough to write laws that financially benefit one industry or company over another should also be personally responsible for providing (financial) recompense to those that lose business or jobs as a result of the rent seeking laws passed.......but the industry or company (RWJF / J & J) which funded and benefited from the immoral legislation should provide the majority financial contribution.

Around the globe smoking bans have decimated an entire industry eliminating tens of thousands of businesses, hundreds of thousands of jobs; which eventually impacts other industries and jobs until the negative worldwide effect snowballs into what we are currently experiencing.

http://cleanairquality.blogspot.com/2009/03/worldwide-economic-meltdown-and.html

....Who wouldn't want these same bumbling idiot bureaucrats running our healthcare system?