Who really costs us money?

We've heard it before, over and over again from the Nanny Staters.

Smokers and drinkers and (insert vice here) are a burden on society, particularly because of the strain they place on the health care system. Therefore, heavy-handed regulation of such behavior -- through punitive taxes or other means -- is justified.

There are two major problems with this mind-set.

First, the above premise is a prescription for tyranny. A government operating under such a premise is a government that will soon run roughshod over individual freedom in the name of safety or caution.

Second, it's all a crock.

"It looks unpleasant or ghoulish to look at the cost savings as well as the cost increases," said Vanderbilt economist Kip Viscusi this week. "But if you're going to follow this health-cost train all the way, you have to take into account all the effects."

What Mr. Viscusi means is that, as a group, smokers and others who engage in risky behavior die much younger than their more risk-averse neighbors, potentially saving the government billions in Medicare and Social Security expenses.

But such logic was nowhere in sight last week when the House approved a bill allowing the FDA to regulate tobacco products -- nor when a measure increasing the federal cigarette tax by almost 200 percent became law on April 1. Instead, congressional do-gooders touted the idea that smokers are responsible for more than $100 billion each year in health care costs.

Maybe, but that's not the whole story.

"We were actually quite surprised by the finding because we were pretty sure that smokers were getting cross-subsidized by everybody else," said Willard Manning, a University of Chicago professor who two decades ago published a paper concluding smokers were not an overall burden to society. "But it was only when we put all the pieces together that we found it was pretty much a wash."

Mr. Manning's findings were replicated by both Mr. Viscusi, who found that for every pack of cigarettes smoked, the country saves 32 cents, and by Dutch researchers who last year concluded that smokers cost society about 30 percent less in lifetime health care costs than nonsmokers.

Of course, none of this is what the Nanny Staters want to hear. The 2004 surgeon general's report on smoking argued that "any negative economic impacts from gains in longevity with smoking reduction should not be emphasized in public health decisions."

But shouldn't the opposite also be true then? Especially when the primary argument driving the creation of more and more laws regulating individual behavior is, in fact, a fallacy?