Posted on 07/19/2011 5:55:23 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Boston’s Mayor Menino continues to pop his moron pills every morning, and local businesses continue to feel the consequences. The latest story involves the city’s soon-to-be-shut-down cigar bars. Menino’s Department of Public Health has ordered the handful of cigar bars that haven’t already been driven out of business by ridiculously high taxes to shut down by 2018, anyway.
Why is Boston closing popular, profitable private businesses? To “protect the workers,” a.k.a. “the people who choose to work there.”
“Anybody working in a bar of any kind shouldn’t have to breathe in secondhand smoke in order to make a living,’’ said Michael Siegel, a tobacco control specialist at Boston University School of Public Health.
Well, congratulations, Michael—thanks to you, they won’t be—making a living, that is. They’ll be healthily unemployed because the government took away the job they wanted and enjoyed.
How stupid is the Mayor’s position? Here’s Leonard H. Glantz, Professor of Health Law, Bioethics, and Human Rights at Boston University School of Public Health:
If smoking is banned in restaurants and bars, those establishments remain open and the workers continue to work in a smoke-free environment. If cigar bars are banned, their workers become unemployed. This is a strange form of worker protection.
If proponents of closing cigar bars wish to argue that those workers can find jobs elsewhere, then their argument that cigar bar workers are somehow “forced’’ to breathe second hand smoke vanishes. If other jobs are available, then the choice to work in a cigar bar is just that - a choice.
Given that unemployment is also a risk factor for poor health, firing workers to save them makes no sense at all.
Exactly.
Oh, and is anyone else noticing how often the phrases “Mayor Menino” and “no sense at all” keep popping up in the same conversations?
UPDATE! It’s not just Boston. My friends at Watch City Cigar in Framingham are under siege, too. The town says customers aren’t allowed to open the cigar cases and feel/smell the cigars. If you’re on Route 9, please stop in and show them some support—Padron-style!
Nanny State PING!
To the left, smoking cigarettes or cigars is a crime against humanity, but smoking weed is a sacrament, a sacred rite.
Killing babies is also a sacrament to the Democrats!
I’m surprised cigar bars still exist in Massachusetts. They’ve been done away with in so many other places. Heck, the smoking ban in Delaware even includes tobacco shops.......
‘Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.’
— CS Lewis
And remember. Just because you don’t have a job. You still are required by law to purchase health care.
Here is the problem in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen. What is the pay scale for your average nanny-state tobacco control specialist I wonder?
“Anybody working in a bar of any kind shouldn’t have to breathe in secondhand smoke in order to make a living.”
####
Nobody has to work in a bar, Siegel.
And, although you make your useless Commie living perpretating health scares, the dangers of second-hand smoke are an utter mythology.
See a problem, make a law. It’s the American way.
same reason we’re shutting down coal mines in West Virginia
““Anybody working in a bar of any kind shouldn’t have to breathe in secondhand smoke in order to make a living,’’ said Michael Siegel, a tobacco control specialist at Boston University School of Public Health.”
Good thing there aren’t any other dangerous jobs in Mass. It would be a shame for someone to have to choose between being a fireman or cop or their safety. I wonder how this guy would justify coal mining or crab fishing. Or maybe he wouldn’t.
Or the NFL, given the poor health of players after their retirement.
Massachusetts: the California of the East Coast.
If there is any such thing, Doc Siegel is one of the more reasonable of this class of cretin. He has actually been shunned by the vast majority of the anti-smoker nanny state control freak cartel. He has called them out for bogus science and for the fact they have gotten to be worse than MADD in zealotry.
So we start making maryjane cigars...If it worked for Cheech n Chong... LOL
So we start making maryjane cigars...If it worked for Cheech n Chong... LOL
If there is one thing a fascistic socialist cannot tolerate it is a choice.
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