Not linked on Ron Paul’s Congressional Website.
I now yield 3 minutes to the gentleman
from Texas (Mr. PAUL).
(Mr. PAUL asked and was given permission
to revise and extend his remarks.)
2009 Ron Paul 66:2
Madam Speaker, I don’t think anybody
can argue at all with the intentions
of the proposal of this bill. There
is no question that cigarettes are very
harmful. The question for me here is
the process, and I find the process here
atrocious because it assumes that
authoritarianism is right, proper and
that it works and that volunteerism,
education, self-reliance and depending
on oneself to take care of oneself is a
proper approach. We totally reject our
free society and assume that if we just
have tobacco police roaming the country,
that all of a sudden bad habits are
going to be cleared up. We’re dealing
with bad habits, and these are bad for
health. But let me tell you, I can bring
you a list here of dozens and dozens of
bad habits that lead to death. As a
matter of fact, one of the things that
we ought to consider is, how many people
die from our drug war? We have a
drug war, and about 3,000 people die
from the use of illegal drugs. So we
have a drug war going on, and tens of
thousands of people die.
2009 Ron Paul 66:3
It’s so exasperating at times because
we always have two proposals here, or
we have two ways of solving problems
or dealing with tobacco. For decades,
what did we do? We subsidized tobacco,
and now we want to prohibit tobacco.
Why don’t we just let the people decide.
This whole idea of either having
to subsidize something or prohibit
something shows a shallowness that I
think we ought to challenge.
2009 Ron Paul 66:4
One part of this bill that I find particularly
bad, but it is pervasive in so
much of what we do, about 100 years
ago we took the First Amendment and
freedom of speech and chopped it into
two pieces. We have political speech. Of
course we like that. We’re in the business
of politics. But we take commercial
speech, and we put it over here,
and we regulate the living daylights
out of commercial speech. That’s not a
First Amendment. That’s chopping
freedom in half, and that just leads to
more problems. But this will lead to
prohibition, and it won’t work. This
will just give us a lot more trouble.
2009 Ron Paul 66:5
You say, Well, how will these problems
be handled if we just permit people
to advertise? Well, you are not allowed
to commit fraud; you are not allowed
to commit slander; you are not
allowed to commit any libel or slander
or fraud. So there are prohibitions. But
this approach can’t work. It is assumed
that people are total idiots, that they
won’t respond to education, that we
have to be the nanny state. We want to
expand the war on drugs, which is a
total failure.
2009 Ron Paul 66:6
And look at what happened to the
prohibition of alcohol. You say, Well,
no, this is not going to be a prohibition.
It is going to be prohibition. This
is a form of prohibition. When you have
prohibition or even approach prohibition,
what do you create? You create
the black market. We will see the
black market come. Already the taxes
are opening up the doors of the black
market.
2009 Ron Paul 66:7
All I ask for is people to reconsider,
believe that freedom, self-reliance and
individualism can solve these problems
a lot better than a bunch of politicians,
bureaucrats and tobacco police here
from Washington, D.C.
