New Zealand’s government has announced plans to reverse the legislation introduced by Jacinda Ardern’s government that bans the selling of cigarettes to anyone born after 2008. The Smokefree legislation would cost the government about a billion dollars in tax revenue, a sum which it apparently cannot justify finding from other sources. It’s a controversial move for several reasons, not least the values it exposes. The taxes that furnish the government's coffers are obviously a complicated business. Decisions are influenced by balancing expediency and ideology and should ultimately serve some vision of the common good. While a more liberal attitude to smoking may be justified from a libertarian standpoint, i.e. it’s about maximising personal choice - it’s hard to avoid the sense that this is in no small part a decision to help the economy at the expense of healthcare. Viewed in this light, these plans seem like an implicit reminder that, in this case, at least, economic priorities trump...