Reason Magazine - Bobby Suave - Listen Up, Liberals: Make Everything Illegal, Create More Eric Garners

In the article Listen up, Liberals: Make Everything Illegal, Create more Eric Garners in Reason Magazine, Robby Suave asserts an interesting contention, made by many conservatives and libertarians, that cigarette taxes were a “contributing factor in Garner's death”. In fact, Eric Garner was allegedly selling single cigarettes before his death. Why was he purportedly selling cigarettes?

Well, New York has the highest cigarette tax in the country at $4.35 per pack, plus another $1.50 levied in the city itself. As a result, there is higher demand for cheaper cigarettes that are smuggled through the black market and comprise 60.9% of the cigarette market in NYC. Then, the police have to recoup lost legal cigarette tax revenue by tracking down distributors of smuggled cigarettes…which ultimately led to the tragic police encounter with Eric Garner.

However, this conviction has been criticized by many on the left who believe that pointing towards cigarette taxes irrelevantly derails the important underlying causes behind Garner’s death and police brutality. Nevertheless, the left needs to understand that police brutality is an extremely complex issue that involves racism in the police system and the near impossibility of punishing cops who commit terrible behavior.

Along with the absurdity of cigarette taxes and our police system, supporters of our colossal regulatory state on both the left and the right, have increasingly placed burdensome regulations on millions of objects ranging from “cigarettes to sodas of a certain size, unlicensed lemonade stands, raw milk, alcohol (for teens), marijuana, food trucks, and taxicab alternatives” that have given an already powerful police system authority to harass individuals and severely punish them for violating these idiotic laws, as they did to Garner.

Evidently, liberals – and even conservatives – need to understand that through making any good illegal, the size of government directly increases through expanded regulatory and enforcement powers. Everyone suffers the consequences of these far-reaching authorities through more fines, judicial punishments, and even death. Unsurprisingly, the poor face the most humiliation from this institution since such restrictive regulations “disproportionately fall on the backs of the poorest of the poor”.  

Undoubtedly, if we want to prevent another Garner and end the innumerable governmental injustices within our nation, we need to focus, as Suave clearly affirmed in a libertarian leaning magazine, on including “strategies to combat racism, reforming the criminal justice system and police incentive structure... and taming the maniacal leviathan that is the modern regulatory state.”