This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 5th, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

The forces lining up to ban or at least tightly regulate so-called e-cigarettes are more parochial than you might think.

Sure, the FDA wants to make sure that the product, a nicotine delivery device,

is firmly under the agency's thumb, but the federal government also wants revenue to fund

S-CHIP expansion, tobacco companies want to crush competition, and state governments want a stable

source of tobacco-fueled revenues. It seems only smokers might

want to defend what may be a much safer means of getting that nicotine fix. It's Baptist's bootlegers and tax collectors in this coalition,

according to Cato Institute Senior Fellow Peter Van Dore.

What is most striking about the fact that we have this innovation in nicotine delivery that does not

neatly fall into the category of cigarette and does not neatly fall into the category of nicotine

replacement therapy.

All innovations threaten the status quo.

So in markets, when we have innovations,

existing firms don't like it.

So in politics, when a new product arises,

the existing organization of things is threatened.

So the FDA is threatened by this, or the component of the FDA,

the people who, the Baptist part of the FDA who are whose mission in their view is to make

sure other people don't harm themselves through their own behavior even though to you and

I and any other libertarian that seems like an odd

concern. But to many other people, the point of the FDA and the point of something called

public health is to be a busy body, is in fact to worry about other people's

...