Curmudgeonly musing

Everywhere I have gone this holiday season I have seen young people smoking. This ought to strike us as odd for the last four or five decades have been characterized by successive crusades to eliminate smoking, especially in the young.

Could I be so base as to suggest that the anti-smoking campaigns have been set up so as to favour the elite. For if there is one thing that you notice about the many people who still smoke it is that they are not among the educated elite. And this is not surprising if we consider that the primary weapon to discourage smoking has been education. Given that what divides the elite from the underclass in our society is the ability to get the most from the education system, it would seem to follow that any and all efforts to educate the public will favour the elite.
And not just in the sense that the elite are more successful at being educated but also because they know what parts of education to ignore. Much of what the school system teaches kids is nonsense as are many public health crusades. It takes a particular class of person to know enough to actually not start smoking whole ignoring campaigns against salt.