Cato has always been there to help them, whether it was Tobacco or Asbestos.

I don't know enough about Cato's position on asbestos litigation to comment, but I agree with them on tobacco suits. The idea that the population has not know for many, many decades that smoking causes cancer, heart disease etc. is preposterous -- my smoker parents knew it in the 60s and told me not to do it. Should every alcoholic who dies of cirrhosis be able to sue Seagram's? All women who consume a fifth of gin a day and then who deliver a child with fetal alcohol syndrome should recover from the liquor companies?

You conflate Cato's position there with favoring "big business," when it all part and parcel of the very libertarian interest in preserving choice -- and taking responsibility for it. Cato is ardently in favor of legalizing drugs. It is hard to see whose pocket that could put them in, since the illegal drug cartels have no more interest in ending drug prohibition than does the DEA.

I really enjoy thinking about what you write. It opens an uninformed portions of my life that I've never known. Or, it activates a brain cell that seems way-too long damn dormant.

I did not know that The CATO Institute is ardently in favor of legalizing drug

Thank you! I enjoy your prose as well. However, I am now going to ignore the obsessive compulsive disorder afflicting LWM, including his citations to sci-fi writer David Brin and whatnot, on the supposed odiousness of the Cato Institute (none of whihc have anything to do with my observations about their position on tobacco suits, or the subject of Glenn's post). It just is past time for the thread hijackings on the subject of libertarianism to stop -- or at least take a time out -- and that means not letting that person bait me.

Not the entire population it seems. Didn't the CEOs of big tobacco swear to congress, under oath, that tobacco smoking was just fine? Perhaps I'm not remembering correctly.

They surely made absurd arguments that the proof wasn't in, and it was laughable. Sort of like Ted Haggard insisting he's now had his Xian "therapy" and is 100% heterosexual. I imagine their lawyers told them they had to publicly maintain that position, but I don't see how anyone could subject themselves to such a humiliating display.

I believe the word is profit. Not a dirty or ugly word by any stretch. I'm sure they made Ayn Rand proud.

I'm not, to understate, a Rand fan. But she ardently opposed lying, and was an utter Puritan on health issues. Altho she believed that recreational drug use ought to be legal, she felt it was immoral for assaulting a person's reasoning faculties.

They lied because their lawyers told them to; it all comes down to protection from liability. I think they ought to have that protection even if they tell the whole truth, but in this legal climate they just do not.

Actually, the Cato article on smoking is excellent -- it isn't denying that smoking causes cancer, and addresses rather scientifically unsound claims that "smoking-related" deaths from second hand smoke and such -- arguments used to bolster attacks on private pty owners to allow smoking in their establishments -- are junk. It also argues that some portion of the claimed 400,000 annual deaths are inferred via statistically improper methods. But it does not deny what everyone knows, namely, that smoking can cause cancer (and other awful maladies).

Do read the whole thing (pdf), instead of what someone says about the piece:

http://ltdlimages.library.ucsf.edu/imagesv/v/g/c/vgc21c00/Svgc21c00.pdf

This sounds like the closing argument for the Bush/Cheney/Gonzales/Rumsfeld/Rice defense at the Hague.

Oh, come now. I was being descriptive, not prescriptive. No way in hell could I ever have sat there and lied like that. BUT, if they were my clients, I'd be telling them to do all the fudging and smoke and mirrors bullshit that they did.

But we are talking about tort actions, smoking suits, in which most plaintiffs should not prevail if we are going to agree that adults have personal agency. Not a freakin' war crimes trial.

Consider pornography: libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesn’t like it, he can choose not to view it. But what he can’t do is choose not to live in a culture that has been vulgarized by it....Libertarians argue that radical permissiveness, like legalizing drugs, would not shred a libertarian society because drug users who caused trouble would be disciplined by the threat of losing their jobs or homes if current laws that make it difficult to fire or evict people were abolished...And is society really wrong to protect people against the negative consequences of some of their free choices? [Ed Mona: No, we should lock them in prison first to "protect" them.] While it is obviously fair to let people enjoy the benefits of their wise choices and suffer the costs of their stupid ones, decent societies set limits on both these outcomes.

...They assume that if people are given freedom, they will gravitate towards essentially bourgeois lives, but this takes for granted things like the deferral of gratification that were pounded into them as children without their being free to refuse. They forget that for much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of wedlock. Society is dependent upon inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint. Ironically, this often results in internal restraints being replaced by the external restraints of police and prison, resulting in less freedom, not more.

Nanny-state conservatism at its best. How cute to see a "socialist" here recommend this article.