This piece from Mises.org talks about “sunk costs." This may have interesting implications for our struggle against the lifestyle frauds.
What is a sunk cost? This paragraph from the article explains it:
"One helpful reminder to appropriately apply the opportunity cost concept is that ‘sunk costs are sunk.’ Because what is in the past cannot be changed by a current decision (except on Wikipedia and in history textbooks), treating something that won’t be changed by a choice as a relevant opportunity cost of that choice is a mistake. Yet people violate this principle all the time. For example, people who overpaid for an asset often refuse to sell it because they "can’t afford to take the loss," even though they have already borne the cost of their mistake, and selling that asset afterward doesn’t cause the loss to change — it only forces one to admit that they made a mistake."
Since governments have been squandering vast sums in the elimination of smoking, they will be apprehensive about backing down even if we were able to bring the evidence of the epidemiological frauds to billions of people, and even in the presence of massive popular demonstration of a political nature.
The politicians and the press would address, indirectly, the problem of all the money wasted. The politicos would be captured in the “sunk cost problem." If they were to admit that such a vast programme was a blatant waste of money, then the public will quickly get the idea that perhaps all of the other government spending sprees are a waste.
There is today little accountability of politicians to the people but even less accountability for “public health” bureaucrats. A politician who comes to be seen as idiotic does not get elected again. Bureaucrats, however, not subject to elections, can hold their places while politicians come and go from office. Even as elected officialdom changes its cast and character, entrenched antitobacco bureaucracies will remain dogged in pursuing criminal policies and misrepresentations, until they too are forcibly removed from government.
It is a problem we face. We are up against the "sunk cost problem" and all its related entrenchments. This is one of the factors pointing towards a prohibition attempt. That’s why it becomes essential that the war against antitobacco becomes as vehement as possible. It is already difficult enough to get rid of a politician, but it is much harder to dethrone the cancerous bureaucracy impregnated with sick healthist ideology and pharmaceutical corruption. This ideology permeates both government and non-government (e.g. academia and medicine) institutions.
The force to destabilize the industry of fraud must, therefore, be much greater than that used to destabilize politics. We have to shake up and shake out vastly infected institutions within and without government. We have to make today’s eugenicists, like their predecessors, run for the hills. This can be done: they are fools and worse than fools and they can be effectively exposed as such. Indeed this must happen. The alternative is continuing erosion and, ultimately, total ethical bankruptcy. We are right about there right now. Total divestiture of antitobacco is long overdue.
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