Lindsay Perigo: Smoking Out Big Brother

Originally broadcast by Lindsay Perigo on Radio Pacific's Politically Incorrect Show.

Smoking Out Big Brother

The foot-soldiers of Big Brother have been out in force this week, demanding a new national baby register, a ban on the feel-good dietary supplement One4B, a taxpayer-funded youth radio network, legislation to make us exercise more, & the raising of the legal drinking age. It's tempting to conclude that the only answer to Big Brother is a bullet. The Founding Fathers thought that about Big Mother England two hundred-odd years ago, & liberated themselves from her suffocating clutches. Yet even in America, the freedom for which the patriots fought has been progressively snuffed out. James Bovard's 1994 book, Lost Rights, furnishes a horrifying catalogue of just that, & examples have continued to abound since. Often, taken in isolation, they seem merely petty - funny even; as a totality, they spell totalitarianism. Here are just two from the Land of the Free this week. First, from the Cigar Aficionado magazine's web site:

"Antismoking activists are trying to crack down on San Francisco cigar smokers and cigar retailers. Proposed legislation aims to ban smoking in the city's cigar shops and would prohibit retailers from making their living by only selling cigars and tobacco products.

"There are already cigar shops in America where you cannot smoke -- those in some shopping malls, for example -- but if the law passes, San Francisco would become the first city in the United States to entirely prohibit smoking in cigar shops...

"The smoking ban is but one part of the legislation that would radically alter the way customers buy and enjoy cigars in the city and county of San Francisco. The ordinances would also limit cigar shop owners to devoting only 25 percent of their floor space to tobacco products. They would also be limited to getting no more than 75 percent of their gross sales from tobacco products."

The second example is from the Dallas Morning News:

"A bill that would let Fairfax County prohibit its residents from sleeping in rooms other than a bedroom has won approval in the state Senate... The bill would give county code enforcers new authority to go after people whose homes have been turned into virtual hotels."

Well, we might laugh & say, "Only in America ..." - but as we witness daily, it is NOT only in America. As the movie producer Lloyd Phillips observed after filming in New Zealand for Vertical Limit, "If you want to build a pimple on your ass you've got to get a Resource Management consent."

Ladies & gentlemen, Big Brother is not going to back off. He is a Godzilla, a self-reproducing, gargantuan drooling beast, sniffing the air for free-thinking, free-acting humans & crushing them underfoot. We made this monster & let him run amok. We have seen the havoc he wreaks - is it not time we redeemed ourselves & exterminated him?

For Lindsay Perigo's daily "Politically Incorrect Show" editorials, visit: www.freeradical.co.nz or listen to Radio Pacific from noon to 2pm weekdays.

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