Selling tobacco was and is an enormously profitable venture, but only because the full costs of tobacco use manifest many years after the products are purchased and consumed, and these costs do not fall on the tobacco producers but on the consumers, and on the healthcare system and society at large, which must absorb the staggering direct cost of dealing with the diseases caused by tobacco addiction and the indirect costs of lost productivity and early death.
For every $1 of profit the tobacco companies earned, $100 of future external costs were imposed on the consumers of tobacco and society at large.
If the full external costs were levied at the point of sale, tobacco would be extremely expensive, and if the true risks had been advertised as heavily as the products themselves, the tobacco companies' liability exposure would have made the packaging and selling of tobacco an unprofitable business.
To maintain profitability, the tobacco companies engaged in a decades-long campaign to mask the real-world health consequences of using their products.
The goal was three-fold: hide the well-known consequences of tobacco addiction, maintain that tobacco wasn't addictive, and maintain that it wasn't unhealthy, decoupling the sale of tobacco from the eventual costs.
Medicare-for-All is simply a way to fund the racket as painlessly as possible, which is to borrow from future generations to fund profiteering rackets in Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Packaged Food/Fast Food, and so on-the equivalents of Big Tobacco.
Just as smokers were encouraged to kill themselves without being aware of the eventual consequences of tobacco addiction, consumers of highly processed foods are killing themselves without being aware of the eventual consequences.
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2019/11/medicare-for-all-socialism-is-just.html
For every $1 of profit the tobacco companies earned, $100 of future external costs were imposed on the consumers of tobacco and society at large.
If the full external costs were levied at the point of sale, tobacco would be extremely expensive, and if the true risks had been advertised as heavily as the products themselves, the tobacco companies' liability exposure would have made the packaging and selling of tobacco an unprofitable business.
To maintain profitability, the tobacco companies engaged in a decades-long campaign to mask the real-world health consequences of using their products.
The goal was three-fold: hide the well-known consequences of tobacco addiction, maintain that tobacco wasn't addictive, and maintain that it wasn't unhealthy, decoupling the sale of tobacco from the eventual costs.
Medicare-for-All is simply a way to fund the racket as painlessly as possible, which is to borrow from future generations to fund profiteering rackets in Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Packaged Food/Fast Food, and so on-the equivalents of Big Tobacco.
Just as smokers were encouraged to kill themselves without being aware of the eventual consequences of tobacco addiction, consumers of highly processed foods are killing themselves without being aware of the eventual consequences.
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2019/11/medicare-for-all-socialism-is-just.html
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