Senator John McCain's tobacco control bill went down in flames in June; will it rise from the ashes in the next legislative session?
Patrick Reilly of the Capital Research Center predicts that "comprehensive anti-tobacco legislation will return, because the backers of this year's campaign are just beginning. Tobacco control supporters have the backing of deep-pocketed benefactors," Reilly explains. "Of course, many donors contribute to the tobacco control budget," he concedes, "but most of these contributions come from just two sources that work closely together: the Clinton Administration and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation."
Clinton and company are contributing our money to the anti-tobacco effort, not their own. "Federal programs begun by the Clinton Administration are funding the state and local networks that tobacco control advocates used in this year's push for even more new laws," Reilly reports. "That effort failed, but ongoing federal programs continue to help state and local coalitions increase cigarette taxes that in turn will fund more tobacco control efforts. Government-supported activists," he contends, "are the core of the next federal-level anti-tobacco campaign.
"The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation works hand in glove with the Administration," Reilly continues. "It has contributed millions to anti-tobacco efforts for the past several years. Although the private grantmaker is the largest health care philanthropy in the United States," he observes, "it operates in relative obscurity. But its support for tobacco control has propelled the recent national debate: the foundation is the largest funder of the Center for Tobacco-Free Kids, the leading non-profit advocate for the McCain bill."
Reilly notes the irony of the foundation's evident scorn for "individual choice and the free-market system. The foundation was endowed by General Robert Wood Johnson, an entrepreneur and industrialist," he recalls. But the foundation's current board "funds liberal nonprofits that support taxes and government controls." That includes "the $20 million it committed over five years to establish the Center for Tobacco-Free Kids in 1996." The Center has secured another 12 million in "initial funding commitments."
Nevertheless, the big contributions to the anti-tobacco effort come from Big Government. "Private foundation grants are a trickle compared to the flood of taxpayer dollars streaming into anti-tobacco coffers," Reilly asserts. "Clearly, the tobacco control movement is not grassroots-initiated," he concludes. "It is funded by veteran liberal activists in the foundation, government, and nonprofit worlds."
We've been suckered again. It's the old "public interest" scam we've fallen for so many times before. "But we don't want you to raise our taxes and restrict our freedoms," we protest at first. "What's that you say? It's for our own good? Well, that's okay, then. If it's for our own good, by all means go right ahead." You'd think we'd learn, eventually, that just because some "reformer" says he wants to help us doesn't mean he really does. In fact, it generally means the opposite. After all, the con artist who's trying to get the best of us isn't likely to admit it, is he? That would make him even stupider than us.
