New York City’s finance commissioner, Martha E. Stark, has sent a wire warning readers of The New York Sun of the legal consequences they face if they head to a state with a less burdensome tax to purchase cigarettes, and bring them back into the Empire State to resell. This has become an increasingly popular activity, since between the city taxes and the state taxes that have lately been piled onto a pack of cigarettes, a carton of brand name smokes is going to soar to something like $70 — more than $40 above the cost of a carton in, say, North Carolina, where they don’t have these kinds of absurd taxes. We print Ms. Stark’s letter in the adjacent columns and wish the city’s revenuers luck. They’re not to blame for making the laws. They just enforce them.

This is the second time in two months that a story has fetched up about efforts to block the rights of New Yorkers under the commerce clause of the Constitution. In April, the story was a legal battle over whether New Yorkers could purchase wine over the Internet from out of state. A few years back, there was a story about New York putting secret agents in the parking lot of an Ikea store in New Jersey – where the sales tax is 3%, as opposed to 8.25% in New York City — to snoop on New Yorkers intent on slipping back home with a new crib. At one point, New York tried to block even individual purchases of out of state cigarettes by phone, internet, or mail order, but the effort got snuffed out by a federal judge.

We have no affection for cigarette smugglers (the AP reports that a trial in North Carolina has heard testimony that cigarette smugglers have sent profits to Middle East militants). We favor obeying the law. But New York City and State have created the situation they profess to abhor. They have reached the point where they have to station stool pigeons up and down the east coast, in gas stations, convenience stores, and the like. It begins to sound like Eastern Europe in the old days, when western cigarettes were so valuable they were used as currency. When things get to a point where thousands of ordinary New Yorkers are turning to smugglers, the Empire State is courting the kind of tax revolt that used to start in places like California and Boston.