I've been re-reading Erasmus' The Praise of Folly. Published in 1511, it's one of the most famous satires ever written, and still gets read a lot, usually in university survey courses dedicated to the culture of the Renaissance. But it's funny, real bite-ass funny, and one of the reasons it's still read today is because it's still relevant. Boy, is it relevant. Old Erasmus was 400 years ahead of his time.
Folly herself speaks, in the guise of one of the gods of antiquity, or perhaps as the muse of the truly stoopid. Erasmus spares no one: kings, princes, popes, philosophers, the mighty, the low; Folly speaks of them all, and praises them for how unfailingly they follow her counsel. To hear Folly speak, the entire human race is hellbent on doing whatever and precisely does not make sense.
If Voltaire and the other architects of the 18th century Enlightenment knew this book, and it's probably safe to assume they did, one wonders where they got the idea that man is a reasoning, rational animal. Erasmus was telling it like it is 200 years before any of them came along, and it ain't pretty.
How seemly to be reading this classic screed on the subject of the relentless lack of good sense shown by the entire human race since time immemorial, when we're about to have a change of administration here in Washington.
Now, don't hit the panic button, anybody. I'm not going to discuss politics. Well, maybe sort of, in the sense that it's hard to bring up the subject of taxation without mentioning politics, since politicians are, after all, the source of all our taxations, right?
Sometimes I think that Washington is the only city in the world in which the word "DUH" has no meaning whatsoever.
A couple of days ago I posted a list of things I would like to see disappear forever in the coming year. Included on the list was "do-gooders." I cannot stand do-gooders. Charity is one thing, but the relentless refusal to mind your own business is something else entirely.
Unfortunately, the relentless refusal to mind your own business is the chief prerequisite, or so it seems to me, for a career in politics.
I smoke cigars. And I regularly receive cigar catalogues in the mail, since I buy most of my cigars online. And just last week I received such a catalogue from a cigar dealer who was advertising an "S-CHIP sale."
What, I hear you cry, is an "S-CHIP?" I didn't know myself, so I read the introductory blurb about the inevitable arrival of this S-CHIP, whether it's a man or a horse.
Well, surprise! It's a proposed government program. Grab your wallets.
S-CHIP appears to be the latest attempt by those relentlessly determined moralizers in our government to Punish Sin by forcing it to Subsidize Virtue.
S-CHIP stands for "state children's health insurance program." The idea is to create a health insurance plan for children. Now, nobody could be against a health insurance plan for children. The part of that acronym that gives me the willies is that "S." "State." Any time the State gets mixed up in anything, something is going to be done Stoopid.
The rub here is that S-CHIP is going to be funded entirely by tobacco taxes. Now, all of you anti-smoking bores out there are jumping up and down yelling "hallelujah" at the reading of these words I'm sure, because there is nothing a zealot loves more than hearing that the thing he hates is going to be punished in the kingdom.
Yes, they're at it again. The do-gooders are out to stamp out smoking by making it pay for health care, in this case for children. S-CHIP would amount to yet another tax on tobacco products, this one 53 percent. As it is, nearly all of that $5.00 a pack you pay for Marlboros is taxes, but no, they want more. That health badness just has to be punished, punished, punished!
This tax was actually passed twice last year, but was vetoed twice by that ogre Bush, who is obviously in the pocket of Big Tobacco, right?
Well, in giving this bill the veto, Bush reasoned that it doesn't make sense to fund a program that's going to grow over the years by slapping a tax on a product whose sales are declining.
But the Democrats take over Washington this month, and arguments like that one are lost on them. Sin taxes have an irresistible allure on the left side of the aisle, like the odor of Chanel No. 5.
Here's where "DUH" comes in. Regardless of what you thought of Bush, he, like my father, couldn't always be wrong about everything. My father was wrong about practically everything, but every now and then, once every leap year or so, he got something right. By the way, my father was a smoker, and every time the price of cigarettes went up he would merely shrug. "If I'm dumb enough to smoke these things, let them raise the price to $20 a pack if they want," he said.
You can't be more candid than that.
Now regardless of what you think about anything else the Bush administration did, it's hard to deny the validity of Bush's logic in this particular veto.
Ah-HAH! I hear you zealots yelling. "DUPUIS IS IN THE POCKET OF BIG TOBACCO!!"
Would that it were true. I could use the money.
But would you please please please please (to paraphrase a character in Hemingway) THINK about this for a moment?
Funding a health insurance program for children by slapping a tax on a product whose use we are trying to stamp out.
I'll go get a cup of coffee while you all think about that for a minute.
Okay, I'm back.
Now, if the truly lunatic logic of that proposal hasn't sunk in yet, let me offer a couple of hypothetical parallels. Let's set aside for a moment the fact that the states have already figured out ways to funnel tobacco-tax money intended for anti-smoking programs into such things as road-building projects, creating what Dave Barry himself called the perfectly idiotic situation wherein if we want more and better roads, we have to smoke more cigarettes.
Let's just set that aside for a minute.
Imagine we're back in the beginning of the last century. It's 1900. Horseless carriages are beginning to huff and chuff along the nation's roadways, pushing aside the horses and buggies that have had those roadways to themselves since the beginning of the republic and before.
Now, I'm a progressive congressman of 1900, and I see this as progress. So I decide I want to help this process along, encourage more people to put Old Bessie out to pasture and buy a Winton Flyer or a Stanley Steamer or whatever.
And I come up with this great idea: to encourage more paved road-building and encourage more people to swap their horses-and-buggies for automobiles, what we should do is slap a tax on the blacksmith industry! Blacksmiths are holding up progress by providing a service dedicated to All Things Horse, right? So we get the blacksmiths to pay for the new roads! Brilliant!
To Wile E. Coyote, maybe. Do you see the problem here? As the horses disappeared, so did the blacksmiths. Blacksmithing as a trade is obsolete now except on your occasional horse ranch here and there. So...where would my pool of money to pay for roads go when the blacksmiths vanished?
DUH.
Now don't get me wrong. I do understand why people get emotional about this issue, causing logic to fly out the window. I had real difficulty, for example, explaining my position on this to my friend Holly Inder. Her 14 year-old son Mason suffers from asthma, and she recently caught him with a pack of cigarettes, causing her to bristle and fume, as any parent would. Because her emotions were involved, she had trouble wrapping her head around my idea that funding children's health insurance programs by punishing people for using tobacco just doesn't make any reasonable sense. You persuade the goose to lay the golden egg, then you start chasing it around the barnyard with an axe, trying to kill it? Holly?
Or if that cliche doesn't do it for you, you know the old cartoon gag where the guy climbs up into a tree and then starts sawing away at the branch he's sitting on...BEHIND him?
I am all for providing health care for children, but funding it by taxing a product you're trying to get people to quit using is...well, I'd like to hear what Erasmus would say about it. Why not a tax on something whose use is increasing, like say, Sony Playstation? (Or are we already taxing that for programs to fight childhood obesity?)
Isn't this sort of thing that the state lotteries were supposed to be for? Folly would be a happy camper if she showed up today and saw how many billions of dollars are being ponied up by idiots to play a game in which their chances of winning riches are one in 150 million. How about funding these children's health insurance programs with another lottery? I promise you, you'd have no shortage of players. Or maybe a tax on gambling in general? A special casino tax?
Ah, but there the moral message is being lost, right? The idea here is not so much to provide a needed service, but to punish the sin that made that service more urgently needed, right? Why punish the gambling industry? Gambling doesn't give kids asthma. The most important thing here is to make sure we're punishing the right people.
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, it must be equally true that the road to Washington is paved with the queasiest theology since a bunch of anabaptists somewhere back around the time of Erasmus decided to take Christ's exhortation that they "become as little children" literally, and began sitting around in a circle, babbling baby-talk at each other.
Don't believe me. Go look it up.
Some of those people could have found great jobs in Washington.
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