Monday, February 18, 2008

Death by Cigarettes...or Government?

According to a recent study by the World Health Organization, tobacco use killed 100 million people in the 20th Century. What should be done about this “tobacco epidemic”? Health Officials Say Governments Must Do More to Curb Deaths. That’s interesting, in Death By Government, R.J. Rummel records that not including 160 million deaths from the use of government. Judging by the numbers, it seems the world might be a better place if tobacco companies curbed government power.

The study made another interesting finding: according to the study, 2/3 of the world’s smokers live in 10 specific countries. From the numbers I found, it appears that 2/3 of the world’s total population lives in these same 10 countries.

Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that which the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant. ~Fredrich Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty