My feelings about smoking and smokers are no secret.  Smoking is smelly and disgusting and it displays an amazing amount of ignorance on the part of anyone who chooses to take up the habit.  The best thing that can be said about smoking is that it helps you identify stupid people   Oh … and you do know that more smokers vote Democrat than Republican, don’t you?   With that being said, let’s get to this story …

A public health proposal suggests that tobacco smokers should be required to apply and pay for a “smoker’s license” in order to continue buying cigarettes …

Simon Chapman, a professor at the University of Sydney, proposes that users would have to apply and pay for a mandatory license in the form of a smartcard that would be shown when buying cigarettes …

In a controversial move, the smartcard would allow the government to limit how many cigarettes a smoker could buy.

Talk about my two least favorite things: Smokers and government licensing.  As much as I loathe smoking, I have a similar distaste for government licensing.  For the most part, government licenses exist for the purposes of giving some pencil-pushing bureaucrat something to do in order to justify their existence.  It shouldn’t take a government certification to determine whether or not someone is qualified to hang drapes in your house, or arrange a bouquet of flowers or trim what little hair I have left on my head.  Heck, I don’t even think that doctors should have to be licensed by the government!  There are plenty of private-sector accreditation agencies that could take care of that.

But back to these smokers … the last thing that we need is more government bureaucrats imposing more government on more people, even if those people are certifiable idiots – they are smokers, after all. 

Look folks, let these people smoke.  It is a great indicator for employers to be able to weed out the idiots from the qualified candidates.  It is one of the few ways that Darwin is still at work … and to think it is self-inflicted!  That’s how dumb these people truly are.  But there is never an excuse for more government.