tim's experiment

As I write this I have no idea what is in the budget. At least, not officially. A lot of stuff has been leaked, as now seems to be the habit. Still, I do not know, as of now, whether the FS has decided to raise the tax on cigarettes or not. Nor is that relevant to my complaint, which is that the question has become rather hysterical.

After all this is a prettystraightforward policy issue. Arguments for: raises money, discourages young smokers. Arguments against: government doesn’t need money, tax applies to all smokers regardless of age, if difference between prices in HK and prices in Shenzhen gets too big, lots of cigs will be smuggled. Both sets of arguments can be supported with statistics. In theory, a job for the technocrats. In practice this is a topic which attracts fanatics.

So we were treated to screeches of horror because the Financial Secretary had done something terrible. He had not kicked his dog, beaten his wife or, heaven forbid, actually been seen smoking one of the poisonous things himself. He had, in the course of the usual charade of public consultation which precedes the budget, met representatives of the tobacco business. Nobody suggested that he had made any decision as a result. The mere holding of the meeting was enough to arouse a horde of  health harridans of both sexes. It was, apparently, not enough that the government already taxes the business. It should also ostracise it. True believers know that the dreadful industry is populated by people of matchless cunning and supernatural persuasive powers. Merely being in a room with a tobacco baron is enough to reduce a government official to a state of helpless puppetry, putty in the nicotine-stained hands of the fag pushers. Or so they affect to believe. Personally I think this is nonsense. The FS meets all sorts of people. Some of them I rather disapprove of. No doubt he considers all the points put to him, and does not overlook the possiblity that interests are mixed up with the logic. So the Jockey Club sees merit in more gambling, the construction industry sees merit in more building, the booze people urge the advantages of cheaper booze and real estate salesmen want lower stamp duty. So it goes. Arguments should be considered on their merits, not on their origins.

But this is not the way fanatics work. Also up for the firing squad was the Lion Rock Institute, which had criticised the idea that taxation should be used to manipulate people’s behaviour as incompatible with complete personal freedom, which it is. The Institute, we were told, had accepted money from organisations which, in turn, had accepted money from the tobacco industry. Its opinions were therefore tainted with nicotine and should be disregarded. This is not fair. I usually disagree with the Lion Rock Institute. They are in my view a bunch of free market nutcases. However they seem to be a sincere and consistent set of free market nutcases. Opposition to tobacco taxes is entirely consistent with their views on a wide variety of other subjects. People are entitled to have their arguments considered as arguments, not dismissed by association. Actually having tried in vain for many years to get any of the tobacco puritans to address the question of freedom I do not expect the institute to have any luck either. But still. Argument ad hominem is fallacious and misleading. If the tax is an infringement of freedom it remains an infringement whether the person pointing this out is a pawn of the tobacco industry, a member of the Falun Gong or the last survivor of the Armenian Massacres. Some health experts need to meet a logic expert.

Actually this is a knife that cuts both ways. The public health business has become a substantial academic industry, populated by people who have made a career out of attending each other’s conferences and citing each other’s papers. Nobody actually reads most of that stuff. The industry has its own consensus. The researcher who fails to substantiate the expectation that in all and any circumstances tobacco is a threat to your health will be drummed out of the magic circle. There was a good illustration of the results of this approach the other week. A Canadian researcher had established that you can detect small particles in the air even if you are a few yards from an outdoor smoker. I presume this requires a gentle breeze or no breeze at all, but it is very unsurprising. We have all caught an outdoor whiff occasionally. Was this dangerous? The researcher announced that the concentration of particulates exceeded someone’s safety limit. He then added that the safety limit was for 24-hour exposure. Honesty might have suggested admitting, at this point, that the odd whiff of particulates that you might pick up as a passer-by was no hazard at all. But this is not the way these things are done. The smoke, we were warned, might be a hazard to people with lung conditions or breathing problems. No evidence was provided for this. But then “might” is a very flexible word. Science also has its dogmas.

Meanwhile the persecution of local smokers (of whom I am not one) continues. The latest wheeze is the ban on smoking in “public transport interchanges”, even if they are in the open air. This means effectively that you may not smoke at bus stops, because the railway stations banned smoking years ago. This has been interpreted in a sweeping way to include places which have very little to do with public transport. In Shatin, for example, it applies to the pedestrian ramp which goes from the ground floor up to the podium on which the station, and other things, sit. It is true that some people use this ramp to get from minibus stops downstairs to the station upstairs. But it is not part of the bus station, nor of the station. And many people use it who are not users of buses or trains, because it is the only way of crossing the railway for a few hundred yards in each direction. So it allows pedestrian connections between, on the mountain side of the tracks, important landmarks like the LCSD headquarters, the Shatin Government offices and Ikea, with on the river side of the tracks, New Town Plaza, the Tiown Hall, Law Courts, Town Park etc. Even more contentiously, according to the new signs, the Public Transport Interchange includes a stretch of pavement in what I think is Pai Tau Street which has no connection with buses or trains at all.  No doubt officials will say that the new signs conform to the plans of Public Transport Interchanges which were provided for public information. Well there were 130 of them, and curious would-be inspectors had to go to the Lands Registry, wherever that is. Clearly officials have used this as a pretext for surreptitiously extending no smoking rules over large numbers of open spaces which have no connection with public transport and where the odd whiff is a minor inconvenience if you notice it at all. What a bunch of weasels.