March 2013 - MyChoice Australia

When The Nanny State Kills

28 Mar, 2013 admin_ata

An excellent piece from the Center for Competitive Enterprise on how government nanny state policies can, well, kill: The government told people to switch from saturated animal fats to unsaturated vegetable fats. But that advice may have killed a lot of people. As David Oliver notes, a recent study “in the British Medical Journal” shows that ”those who heeded the advice” from public-health officials “to switch from saturated fats to polyunsaturated vegetable oils dramatically reduced their odds of living to see 2013,” incurring up to a ”60% increase in risk of death by switching from animal fats to vegetable oils.” This possibly deadly medical…

Electronic Saving Lives, Yet Banned By The Government

25 Mar, 2013 admin_ata

There have been two great articles in the last week on the rise of electronic cigarettes, a revolutionary way to significantly reduce the harm associated with smoking, and continued efforts by governments to ban them. First, the Economist notes that: SOME inventions are so simple, you have to wonder why no one has come up with them before. One such is the electronic cigarette. Smoking tobacco is the most dangerous voluntary activity in the world. More than 5m people die every year of the consequences. That is one death in…

Tobacco Display Bans: The Evidence

25 Mar, 2013 admin_ata

Patrick Basham, director of the Democracy Institute has a great summary of the evidence supporting tobacco display bans (which have been in place in Australian States for a number of years). The results… shouldn’t surprise anyone: Between 2005 and 2010, each of Canada’s provinces instituted display bans. Those bans have had a devastating effect on Canadian convenience stores, which have lost 1 million daily visits and billions of dollars in tobacco and non-tobacco revenue as a result of the bans, as smokers have taken their business elsewhere. Not surprisingly, bankruptcies in the…

Plain Packaging For … Cars???

25 Mar, 2013 admin_ata

We’ve written before about proposals for plain packaging for alcohol even for food, but this proposal, published in The Age, shocked even me: Thanks to Nicola Roxon and the federal government, we now have plain packaging for cigarettes. Cigarette sales are declining. Can we please move on to plain packaging for cars? Over the past 30 years, I’ve watched the design of cars becoming ever more aggressive and sinister. Scowling headlights and hulking lines. Tinted windows so other road users can’t see the driver. Multiple exhausts for the grand prix…