By Constitution Staff

Oklahoma Constitution columnist Ted King has penned an entertaining and informative book on the subject of the government's "war," as he calls it, on smokers. I noted that King calls this the war on smokers, not the war on smoking.

It is easy to defend the liberty of a person to do something that you agree with. Defending the liberty of someone to do something with which you disagree is a sterner test of someone's dedication to the concept of liberty. While I personally detest cigarette smoke, when anti-smoker zealots like Oklahoma's ruthless attorney general, Drew Edmondson, began their anti-smoker crusade, I feared that the premise was set for more attacks upon the liberties of even more individuals.

King begins his book with a letter he sent to Oklahoma State University President, Burns Hargis, who banned smoking from the OSU campus. King quotes Senator Barry Goldwater, who delivered his acceptance of the Republican Party nomination in July of 1964: "Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. They -- and let me remind you, they are the ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies."

With the insidious argument that society has to pay for the poor health of individuals in society, we can see that socialized medicine will lead to just such a hellish tyranny. Governing authorities will impose their agenda in the form of protecting the public health and saving the taxpayer money.

One of the more entertaining chapters in the book is the one that examines the anti-smoking zealotry of German dictator Adolf Hitler. Hitler imposed ever-increasingly sterner restrictions on the right of Germans to smoke, in the manner expected from someone who cares nothing for the concept of individual liberty.

I found King's discussion of the views of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee to be of particular interest. I was not a Huckabee supporter when he ran for president because of his softness on the immigration and global warming issues, among other things. King has handed me another reason to not make Huckabee my first choice for the Republican presidential nomination.

Huckabee said after a presidential debate that one step was to put up no smoking signs as a way to "help condition people's behavior," and "the final thing you do, then you bring about actions, which means you codify in law what has become a new behavioral norm." This sounds a lot like those described by Goldwater in 1964.

Huckabee even advocated a federal ban, which led fellow Republican Fred Thompson to comment that Huckabee had thrown the concept of federalism out the window. Huckabee reversed his position on the federal ban before the South Carolina primary, but he lost anyway.

Renowned economist Walter Williams has endorsed King's book saying, " Theodore King has done a yeoman's job assembling evidence that the success of tobacco zealots has become a useful template for those who want to use health issues to control our lives. The War on Smokers and the Rise of the Nanny State is not only a story about the attack on tobacco users but a story about how decent Americans can be frightened, perhaps duped into accepting phony science, attacks on private property rights and rule of law. One need not be a smoker to be alarmed by the underlying hideousness of the anti-tobacco movement."

Jack Cashill, Executive editor of Ingram's Magazine and author of Hoodwinked, How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture said "Ted King's enlightening and engaging book, The War on Smokers and the Rise of the Nanny State, has a compound title but a consistent theme. The war on smokers has to be seen not as an isolated bit of do-goodism, but as one front out of many in the war on personal liberty. King manages to strike just the right tone in sounding the wake up call to his fellow citizens. He delights in stripping away the Nanny drag and showing the anti-smoking movement as the embryonic monster it is."

And commentator Tucker Carlson said, "Government efforts to fight smoking over the past 40 years amount to more than a victory for public health. They are also, as Ted King's new book makes clear, a cautionary tale of how the state can bully, and ultimately crush, members of a momentarily-unfashionable minority group. Just because you don't smoke doesn't mean you shouldn't be afraid."

See your bookseller about purchasing this book.