Same can be said for any dangerous activity. Like bicycling? As long as I pay for health care, I'm not going to allow you to do it. Driving? Hell no! You need to walk, and you can't use roads or sidewalks near roads. Only the rich can use roads, we're putting on a driving tax.

Exactly like bicycling. However, bicycling has positive benefits - it gets people places (as does driving), it provides excercise etc. So a reasonable compromise might be requiring a helmet while cycling, which lots of countries does. That reduces the costs of injuries to a point where it's likely to be outweighed by the positives.

> Only the rich can use roads, we're putting on a driving tax.

Cars do have very expensive side effects (injuries in car accidents, pollution, lack of excercise, ...). I pay a 25% VAT on a car. Then I pay a yearly car tax of $100 year and around $2/mile in fuel taxes. That still is probably not enough for cars to "pay for themselves".

It's starts to sound much more unreasonable when you compare the taxes.

Ok, so you still haven't solved the problem, you aren't collecting any revenue, and now you have a pretty serious black market and all the crime, policing costs, jail costs and bribes that go with it. At what point do you realize it's bad policy to tax sin and really only succeeds in getting revenue from predominantly poor people?

1. You will never get all people to stop smoking. 2. Any effort to squeeze down the last 15% or so is the same folly that got us into the drug war. 3. The only thing you can reasonably do as a nation is to keep pushing out the commercials and hope for the best.

Quit taxing the crap out of poor people. Quit acting like smoke is mustard gas.

This. Once you socialise the costs of something it becomes increasing easy to justify laws banning it. Welcome to creeping authoritarianism.

The solution: stop socialism. Or if you must, tax at a level sufficient to cover the costs, but no more.

I agree: socializing healthcare means your health is my concern. That's what socialism is: your well being is my problem. That is both positive (If you are in need I'll provide) but as you point out also in the negative sense.

But the same can be said without socialized healthcare; as long as you pay any taxes or receive any benefits, your life expectancy is the concern of others. Smokers living N years shorter than non-smokers is a problem to the next person in the US just as it is in Australia, but the difference is that without socialized healthcare, the tax needed for a pack of cigarettes in the US might be $2 to offset the cost, but in Australia it might be $50.

I already pay more in taxes than the average person earns in gross income, I don't owe you or society jack shit.

Too few people die from skydiving for it to be an economic problem to society. For motorcycling the law is usually to require a helmet (it's still an activity that's expensive as hell to society so perhaps motorcycle taxes should be higher as to not have other people subsidize the activity).

Edit: I realize I was being deliberately harsh in the previous comment. By "I'm not going to allow them to", I mean "I'm going to support taxes on activity or product X that are so high they fully pay for the damages of product or activity X to society".

In many countries with VAT there is a reduced VAT for "food" (typically ~half the general VAT) and it wouldn't be unreasonable to categorize candy and soda as "not food", effectively doubling the tax.