Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : LSI Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sea_biscuit who wrote (9578)	2/8/1998 10:44:00 PM
From: Franklin M. Humphreys	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25814

To all: nothing here to do with LSI <mostly political folderol or MPF> Dipy; you wrote: >>>....MO passionately believes in guarding the individual's right to smoke.<<<<ed.> This phrase reminds me of a passage in H. Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" "... a man can learn to love horse-shit if his lively-hood depends upon it; take, for instance, the lowly street-cleaner." <ed.> Well, lower than the "lowly street-cleaner" is the purveyor of death and disease operating under the lofty sounding guise of "protector of individual rights". The real travesty here does in fact revert back to the Federal Government and its multi-layered bureaucracies who profit handsomely (vis-a-vis their "jobs") from the use of tobacco products. For instance: Government subsidies for growing and NOT growing tobacco; Massive tax relief to tobacco companies for the cost of promoting and distributing their drug delivery systems. (yes, the Joe Camel billboards were tax-deductible expenses---the cost of which represents only a small portion of the fees paid to Madison Ave. advertising giants and which ultimately passes on to some other taxpayer, most likely a non-smoker. Interestingly, the owner of Joe Camel, in support of their "we are not targeting children" defense strategy, declared that "this ad campaign was not intended to sell tobacco, merely to entertain."<ed.> The media missed this self-incriminating statement but surely Tobacco tax lawyers grasped the implications, even if the IRS did not, since no further reference to it was ever noted in the press.) The not-so-obvious reality is that the ever-present, ever-spending Federal juggernaut must replace the "revenue" it loses to "deductions" at the corporate level with revenue in the form of "tobacco" taxes at the retail level AND with additional taxes on smoker and non-smoker alike. The most notable and egregious of the latter instance being those taxes supporting the burgeoning Healthcare Industry, AKA: Medicare, Midicaid, insurance giants, etc., in short; the whole third party payor system. That includes the bureacracies who purport to administer and regulate them and to police the graft and fraud inherent in all such massive government "programs". Costs have skyrocketed AS THE DIRECT RESULT OF GOVERNMENT'S INVOLVEMENT and will continue to do so. What I am saying is that we and generations to come will be paying exorbitantly not only for the deleterious effects of tobacco on the health of the minority, (whose exercise of poor judgement in their youth is encouraged by industry AND government) but, adding to insult, we will suffer further injury as the tax codes FORCE us to shoulder the cost of promoting these nicotine/drug delivery systems in spite of our own recognition of their inherently malignant nature. Now the reason for this posting lies in the insulting inferences one must draw from your assertion that holding MO shares is at best an affirmation of MO's high sounding "passionate belief in the guarding of individual rights"<scoff> and worse, the individual investors' version of the pushers' and panderers' rational of "well, if I don't do it somebody else will". (Ashamedly I must admit that as a recipient of the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend check I am grudgingly benefitting from the share price appreciation in several Tobacco Companies. The Fund's administrators, when asked on broadcast TV if they did not judge the immorality of investing in Tobacco to be sufficient reason to divest the Fund of those holdings, to a person responded that their responsibilty was to MAKE MONEY! My shame is only slightly mitigated by bewilderment at the ever-present efforts of the "liberals" in State legislature to instigate additional taxes [income, user fees, etc] in order to remain responsive to the "needs" of those requiring ever more costly health care---much of it necessitated by the ravages of drugs purchased legally in the State-licensed [and taxed] drug distribution system.) Finally, I will add that anybody who does not take violent exception to the proposal in Congress which would grant the tobacco industry immunity from certain litigation is just not in touch with the level to which our Federal government aspires---and indeed, to which it has attained---in usurping the powers granted not to it, but to the people, by the Constitution. There is absolutely no part of the Constitution which provides for "Entitlements". The Federal machine promotes and protects their "cradle-to-the-grave" socialist programs of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.; doing so in full knowledge that these programs are doomed; yet all the while acting in concert and from abject fear that the various so-called Senior Citizen Groups ostensibly will vote against anybody who threatens to "take away" "their" money. The point being that if Congress can immunize Tobacco against litigation they are yet one more giant step towards further burdening later generations with the tax-supported administration of the healthcare AND insurance industries. (not to mention the fraud industry) If this sounds like a "Sock it to the Corporation with taxes" advocacy, it is not. The gist is that the true cost of tobacco use should be borne by the user, not the non using taxpayer. If Tobacco had to support itself in our quasi-democratic, highly-touted, mostly misrepresented, free market system under the taxing power delegated to the Federal Government by our Constitution, then ALL the costs and ALL the profits would be reflected in the price of the product. Refering back to: >>>MO passionately believes in guarding the individual's right to smoke.<<< I ask you "Who is guarding the non-smoking individual's right NOT to be burdened with the expense of the smoker's folly?" "Who is passionately guarding the individual's right to litigate against Tobacco and the Federal Government for the myriad of losses to their health and property occasioned by this insidious partnership between them?" If you suggest that all---or any---protection is afforded by the ubiquitous "programs" that smother our society, then you are part of the problem by virtue of being a willing victim to the modern "liberal" scheme to reduce us to one level of mediocrity through the redistribution of our wealth. Remember it well; "program" is a code word for the distribution of YOUR wealth! You are well-advised to grab your wallet whenever the word "program" rolls easily and innocuously from the mouth of a bureaucrat, or a member of the press in pursuit of some high-minded socio-political agenda to which they subscribe and to which they commit their considerable weight, often with dubious credentials in truth or fact but still, from under the powerful protective cloak of First amendment rights. Be doubly alert if the word "program" is couched in terms of "needs/needs testing" or "Judeo-Christian principles." These are clear signals that the "need" will be judged by somebody with minimal qualification to judge. The guiding "principle" will be the perpetuation of the job of meting out the reward for being "needy". Success of the program is therefore measured by the longevity of the "job" and the length of the recipient list. It should be measured instead by the growing list of "needy" or "homeless" that it creates. As in most social problems the solution is found in the law that created the problem, not in the passage of another law. Go LSI <G> Ho-hum..Z-z-z-z-z-z-z Frank