Curbing life's pleasures guarantees someone an earn

The Australian Customs Service was congratulating itself again yesterday on its wonderful work in catching yet another smuggler. "Customs continues to crackdown on attempts to smuggle large quantities of cigarettes and tobacco into Australia," its press release trumpeted. "In the latest case, 4.8 million undeclared cigarettes were detected in a shipping container that was landed in Sydney from China."
Now that is a lot of fags but it is only one of more than 45 separate catches of smuggled cigarettes and tobacco since January 2007. All up, some 95 million cigarettes and 280 tonnes of tobacco have been seized, amounting to attempts to evade revenue in excess of $108 million.
Illegal cigarette importing is clearly a massive business. and is yet another example of what happens when government's try to prohibit people from their pleasures. Organised crime is the beneficiary. Every time the do-gooders get their way and government increases the excise on tobacco products the incentive for the smugglers gets greater.

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