This whiny op-ed at the Ithaca Journal faults the post office for not sifting through people's mail looking for butt-legged cigarettes.

The U.S. Postal Service should follow FedEx and the credit card industry and wash its hands of the dirty online tobacco business. If postal officials won't, federal lawmakers should heed [New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's] call and step in and do it for them.

New York decided to jack their cigarette taxes up to obscene levels, and now they think everyone else in the world should help them enforce their nutty laws.

Of course all of this is rooted in the problem of socialism. The pleasure police nannies know what's best for you, and they're going to enforce their temperance on you even if it kills you.

The high taxes on tobacco products do two things -- they attempt to offset the enormous health care related costs we all bear thanks to the lethal effects of this popular American drug; and they attempt to reduce the financial and human costs of smoking by reducing the number of people, particularly teens, who chose nicotine as their narcotic.

Bottom line: If you buy tax-free cigarettes, you're shifting the medical care burden to the rest of us taxpayers at the same time you're increasing the odds we'll all have to pay for your oxygen tank or your autopsy. And, of course, you're breaking the law.

Who said that it's the government's responsibility to pay for people's health care? If you don't want to pay cash for your health care, you buy health insurance. If you can't pay for a good or service than you go without. Worst case you rely on the charity of others to willingly provide you with assistance. What you don't do is use the threat of lethal force to make your neighbors pay for it. (Unless of course you are a socialist.)

These socialist do-gooders have not only assumed financial responsibility over your well being, but now they're using that as a reason to run your life. If we allow them to do this to smokers, over-eaters will be next. Then they'll be making you give up skydiving, telling you what kind of car to buy, and forcing you to eat broccoli.

It's time to tell these socialist medicine types to keep their laws off our bodies.