It has been a goal of progressives for years to ban smoking. Not quite able to convince enough people to go all the way, they have settled for piecemeal measures, such as banning smoking in public places or raising excise taxes on tobacco products.

One of those piecemeal measures was supposed to be banning menthol cigarettes. This measure was exigent because it was also anti-racist, progressives said. Menthols are popular among black smokers, so banning them would help improve disparate racial health outcomes, the argument goes.

Like many “anti-racist” arguments, this one sounds more racist the more you think about it. Not being able to ban a product in general but settling for only banning the version of it popular with black people doesn’t put very much faith in the decision-making abilities of black people, who are fully capable of evaluating their decisions just like anyone else.

States with punitive tobacco taxes have learned that people can and will evade government, with estimates that over half of all cigarettes consumed in New York State are smuggled. A national ban on the type of cigarette preferred by black smokers increases the chances for black people to confront law enforcement and face penalties for evading a ban that most white smokers wouldn’t face.

But progressives persisted in their desire to ban menthols — at least until election season rolled around. The Biden administration announced it would be indefinitely delaying its plan to ban menthols because, in the words of Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra, “there are still more conversations to have, and that will take significantly more time.”

Considering that the ban was formally proposed in May 2022 and that it’s been the subject of more than 175,000 comments, we’re skeptical that insufficient time and conversation are the real issue here. With polls showing softening support for Biden among black men, the election-year calculation isn’t hard to understand. It turns out that banning a product used by black people because it’s used by black people might not be very endearing to black people.

Lest we be accused of shilling for the tobacco industry, let the reader understand: Smoking is bad for you and can cause various forms of cancer and heart disease. If you don’t already know that, in the year of our Lord 2024, it’s hard to say when you ever would. The smoking rate for U.S. adults is currently at a record low of 11 percent, down from 42 percent in the 1960s.

People who still smoke don’t do it because they don’t know it’s bad for them. They do it because, knowing it’s bad for them, they wish to risk their health nonetheless. That’s a decision grown adults can make for themselves in a free society.

It’s not the government’s job to ban everything that is bad for you. If it was, the government would need to ban fried chicken, binge-watching television, and Paul Krugman’s column in the New York Times. Most Americans understand that this isn’t the role for government to play in their everyday lives.

Past nanny-state efforts such as banning sugary drinks attracted sufficient national derision that politicians have largely abandoned them. The U.S. is somewhat unusual in this. In the U.K., the Conservative Party is currently priding itself on phasing out smoking by government diktat, with support from 64 percent of Conservative voters, one poll found.

“Of all the policies the Conservatives have adopted from the Labour Party in the past few years, nothing shows our dominance in the battle of ideas more than this latest capitulation,” the Labour Party shadow health secretary told Parliament. A bipartisan agreement that adults can’t take care of themselves and need government to do it for them is a further sign of the erosion of freedom in the U.K. — something already evident in the way both major parties there talk about socialized medicine.

That’s a path the United States need not follow, and thanks to Americans’ healthy mistrust of government in many situations, one that it’s unlikely to follow. That even the Biden administration — which believes government capable of just about anything and seems always willing to act in the name of social justice — has shelved its menthol ban is a sign that overbearing government remains unpopular with Americans.