Of tobacco, socialism, Forrest Gump and Obi-Wan Kenobi.

In 2019, we ALL know smoking is bad. The Center for Disease Control says, “Smoking leads to disease and disability and harms nearly every organ of the body. It is the leading cause of preventable death.”* We know it causes cancer. We know smoking to be one of the causes of heart disease, stroke, and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).*

Question: When have you ever heard a licensed physician tell someone to take up smoking to improve their health?

Answer: Never.

That’s because smoking only harms your physical health, never improves it. And yet, despite decades worth of knowledge that it’s harmful, despite all the anti-smoking campaigns and laws against tobacco sales to younger people and against using it in public places, etc. for some strange reason, there seems to be an almost-romanticism surrounding smoking that continues to lure teenagers and adults alike into the habit.

And, so it is with socialism. Nowhere in world history is there a single success story where implementing a socialist government has ever improved things wide scale. Quite the opposite. Instead you can point to a dozen examples, in modern history alone – Venezuela, Cuba, the USSR, Nazi Germany, even the once-great empires of Britain and France - where implementing a socialist government or a socialist system has instead brought extremely high taxation, costs of living at best, or dictatorship, despotism, reduced economy sometimes to poverty levels, pain, suffering and misery instead at worst.

And yet, despite decades - centuries even, if one includes older than modern history – of knowledge that it’s harmful, for some strange reason, there seems to an almost-romanticism and poetic headiness surrounding socialism that continues to make people fall for it as a suggested cure for societal problems? People rationalize chasing this siren’s song with statements like “Well, they just didn’t implement it correctly,” or “They just didn’t get enough money into the system for it to work correctly” and so on.

There’s an old saying – I’m sure you’ve all heard it – that “Insantity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” We would think that someone who tries chain-smoking to improve their physical health to be crazy. So, why do liberal whackjobs like US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) or US Senators Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and former-Senator and former-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton before her advocate socialism and it seem so appealing and convincing to some that “This time we can get it to successfully work?”

Maybe the fictional movie character “Forrest Gump” was right, “Stupid is as stupid does.” Or, as “Star Wars” character Ben Obi-Wan Kenobi pointed out, “Who's the more foolish? The fool, or the fool who follows him?”

Sources:

*“Overviews of Diseases/Conditions | Overviews of Diseases/Conditions | Tips From Former Smokers | CDC.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, www.cdc.gov/tobacco/campaign/tips/diseases/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=EST 4059 - Tips 2016 Campaign Search - English - Prevention Terms;S;WL;BR;RES;HCP;CO&utm_content=Danger - Broad&utm_term=dangers of smoking&&gclid=CjwKCAiAy-_iBRAaEiwAYhSlA7AijSy95v2OPKj0SaLHwT2oPKQdcJbJH6DiKtEJHdT8oBDSDbmzbBoCtvsQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds.