The best way to look at Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s move against mail-order cigarettes is as a tax increase. The attorney general last week got the DHL courier company into a deal under which it will stop shipping cigarettes directly to individual consumers who order the products over the Internet. The attorney general is ostensibly protecting minors, who would otherwise be able to purchase cigarettes from vendors who don’t enforce age restrictions. But his real reason, no doubt, is that he wants more excise.

It explains why the federal government and many other states have stepped up their efforts to police these sales in recent years. The Internet threatens more than $936 million that New York state raked in from taxes on legal cigarettes in the 2005 fiscal year, although the Department of Taxation and Finance hasn’t estimated precisely how much revenue the state loses to illegal sales. The city has estimated such losses on its own cigarette tax and concluded it misses out on $75 million a year.

The question the Spitzer tax grab raises is why New Yorkers shouldn’t be able to buy cigarettes online, since they can buy books, clothes, plane tickets, electronics, and – thanks to a recent Supreme Court ruling – wine (God save this honorable court and the commerce clause of the Constitution of the United States). The argument that online shopping would make cigarettes too easily available to underage consumers resembles one of the arguments from the wine case, but the court’s logic in rejecting it seems equally applicable: Minors already have easier ways of obtaining the forbidden product anyway.

Which leaves taxes. New Yorkers wouldn’t be so keen to evade the taxes this way if cigarette taxes were reasonable to begin with. New Yorkers pony up $1.50 in excise tax to the state for each pack of 20 cigarettes and on top of it another $1.50 in city excise if they make their purchase in the five boroughs, plus state and local sales and use taxes, and then a federal excise tax of 39 cents for good measure. A carton in New York City costs about $70, compared to as little as $15 online.

We don’t believe for 10 seconds that any of these politicians care about the health issue, which, even if they did, ought to be a matter of choice. After all, Messrs. Pataki, Bloomberg, and Spitzer are now in the cigarette business. Their operations get millions of dollars in revenues from selling tobacco; if they didn’t want this money, they’d go for an outright ban. But Mr. Spitzer is a vender, plain and simple.

Maybe the politicians realize that such a ban would be a tough sell politically, considering that evidence on the societal hazards of smoking – such as the effects of secondhand smoke or the higher Medicare and Medicaid costs of treating smokers – looks thin at best. So instead, they impose exorbitant excises to profit from the addiction they bemoan, and then crack down on what amounts to Internet-based tax competition.