In
comparison to the Michael Brown shooting, the death of Eric
Garner—and the similar decision not to indict the cop who killed
him—has drawn outrage from across the political spectrum. Many
conservatives, including Breitbart‘s
John Nolte,
The Federalist‘s
Sean Davis, and
The Daily Caller‘s Matt Lewis, agreed with
anti-police-brutality libertarians and liberals that Garner’s
killer should have faced charges. The consensus is that the video
evidence definitively established wrongdoing on the part of the
officer (unlike the Brown case, which relied on conflicting
eyewitness testimony).
But because that’s no fun, right and left had to find some way
to tear each other apart over this. And so the contention—made by
some libertarians and conservatives—that punitive cigarette taxes
are a contributing factor in Garner’s death has driven many on the
left into a fit of rage.
Some background on that contention,
courtesy Reason‘s J.D. Tuccille:
Here we have Garner, a guy allegedly selling loosies—single
cigarettes—which are a perfectly legal product. Why is he
supposedly selling loosies? Because New York officials inflict on
their long-suffering subjects the highest cigarette tax in the
country at at $4.35
per pack, plus another $1.50 levied in the city itself. It’s
not a popular tax, with smuggled smokes making up 60.9 percent of
the market. So the powers that be unleash the cops to enhance
revenue by tracking down shipments of smuggled cigarettes and, on
occasion, putting the occasional small-time street vendor in an
illegal chokehold.
On his show last night, Jon Stewart
mocked Sen. Rand Paul for making that point. When asked about
Garner’s death, Paul said: “Some politician put a tax of $5.85 on
cigarettes, so they have driven cigarettes underground by making
them so expensive, but then some politician also had to direct the
police to say, hey, we want you arresting people for selling a
loose cigarette.”
Stewart’s response: “What the fuck are you talking about?”
BuzzFeed‘s Adam Serwer also criticized the point
(though more kindly), in a Twitter
argument with Reason‘s Scott Shackford. “I think ‘it’s
the cigarette tax’ is comforting because then we don’t have to deal
with the racism, which we know isn’t getting fixed easily,” wrote
Serwer.
Media Matters was as nasty as could have been expected,
publishing an email update on the matter under the vindictive
headline: “Right-Wing Media Parrot Rand Paul’s Absurd Assertion
That Cigarette Taxes Are To Blame For Eric Garner’s Death.”
And the most eloquent critic of the cigarette argument, The
New Republic‘s Danny Vinik,
wrote:
In other words, Eric Garner is not dead because New York City
imposes high cigarette taxes. He’s dead because a cop put him in a
chokehold, in violation of NYPD rules, and held his head against
ground. To their credit, conservatives have widely denounced the
grand jury’s decision. If they want to argue against cigarette
taxes, though, they should make that full argument—including that
the law can cause violent confrontations between police and
civilians. But pointing to Garner’s death as evidence that those
taxes are bad policy isn’t meaningful.
Look, police brutality has many underlying causes. One of them
is undoubtedly racism; black people are disproportionately arrested
and imprisoned. An encounter between a cop and a civilian is more
likely to be unpleasant if the civilian is black. In fact, it’s
more likely to occur in the first place if the civilian is black,
because many cops racially profile suspects.
Another cause is the police incentive structure. Police have far
more legal protections than non-police. They can get away with so
much more. Indeed, while the cop who killed Garner evaded
indictment, a civilian who recorded the incident on his phone was
indicted on a separate weapons charge. It’s difficult—often
impossible—to punish police for bad behavior, which gives the bad
apples free rein to abuse people.
You know what’s also a cause? Overcriminalization. And that one
is on you, supporters of the regulatory super state. When a million
things are highly regulated or outright illegal—from cigarettes to
sodas of a certain size, unlicensed lemonade stands, raw milk,
alcohol (for teens), marijuana, food trucks, taxicab alternatives,
and even fishing supplies (in schools)—the unrestrained, often
racist police force has a million reasons to pick on people.
Punitive cigarette taxes, which disproportionately fall on the
backs of the poorest of the poor, contribute to police brutality in
the exact same way that the war on drugs does. Liberals readily
admit the latter; why is the former any different?
If you want all these things to be illegal, you must want—by the
very definition of the word illegal—the police to force
people not to have them. Government is a gang of thugs who are paid
to push us around. It’s their job.
A well-meaning liberal who doesn’t want people to smoke but also
doesn’t want the government to kill them for doing so has plenty of
other options, by the way. There are countless organizations and
products dedicated to helping people quit cigarettes
voluntarily.
But anybody who wants it to be a matter of law must accept that
resistance will be met with fines, prison, and death. As
Bloomberg View columnist and law professor Stephen L.
Carter put it:
It’s not just cigarette tax laws that can lead to the death of
those the police seek to arrest. It’s every law. Libertarians argue
that we have far too many laws, and the Garner case offers evidence
that they’re right.There are many painful lessons to be drawn from the Garner
tragedy, but one of them, sadly, is the same as the advice I give
my students on the first day of classes: Don’t ever fight to make
something illegal unless you’re willing to risk the lives of your
fellow citizens to get your way.
Any subsequent conversation about ending police brutality should
include strategies to combat racism, reforming the criminal justice
system and police incentive structure… and taming the
maniacal leviathan that is the modern regulatory state.
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