Smoking and Socialism

The arguments for socialism are like arguments for smoking—they depend on anecdotes. There’s the person who just started smoking who is nonetheless healthy, leading many to proclaim the virtues of smoking until the moment the person falls deathly ill (like Venezuelan socialism). There’s the person who smoked heavily, got really sick, and so cut back to a pack a month and now is seen as the model of a healthy smoker (like Swedish socialism). And then, of course, there are all the people who just smoked and died (like Soviet socialism), to which we can always say, “They just weren’t smoking the right way.” As with socialism, the best way to know the effect of smoking is to run a regression analysis. When we do, we find that—controlling for other variables—the more smoking the less healthy the body, and the more socialism the less healthy the economy. Until we can find a correlation between socialism and positive economic outcomes, I’ll be considering smoking and socialism in the same light.