Posted on 05/27/2003 12:14:17 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
The bandwagon of local smoking bans now steamrolling across the nation - from New York City to San Antonio - has nothing to do with protecting people from the supposed threat of "second-hand" smoke.
Indeed, the bans themselves are symptoms of a far more grievous threat; a cancer that has been spreading for decades and has now metastasized throughout the body politic, spreading even to the tiniest organs of local government. This cancer is the only real hazard involved - the cancer of unlimited government power.
The issue is not whether second-hand smoke is a real danger or a phantom menace, as a study published recently in the British Medical Journal indicates. The issue is: if it were harmful, what would be the proper reaction? Should anti-tobacco activists satisfy themselves with educating people about the potential danger and allowing them to make their own decisions, or should they seize the power of government and force people to make the "right" decision?
Supporters of local tobacco bans have made their choice. Rather than attempting to protect people from an unwanted intrusion on their health, the tobacco bans are the unwanted intrusion.
Loudly billed as measures that only affect "public places," they have actually targeted private places: restaurants, bars, nightclubs, shops, and offices - places whose owners are free to set anti-smoking rules or whose customers are free to go elsewhere if they don't like the smoke. Some local bans even harass smokers in places where their effect on others is obviously negligible, such as outdoor public parks.
The decision to smoke, or to avoid "second-hand" smoke, is a question to be answered by each individual based on his own values and his own assessment of the risks. This is the same kind of decision free people make regarding every aspect of their lives: how much to spend or invest, whom to befriend or sleep with, whether to go to college or get a job, whether to get married or divorced, and so on.
All of these decisions involve risks; some have demonstrably harmful consequences; most are controversial and invite disapproval from the neighbors. But the individual must be free to make these decisions. He must be free, because his life belongs to him, not to his neighbors, and only his own judgment can guide him through it.
Yet when it comes to smoking, this freedom is under attack. Cigarette smokers are a numerical minority, practicing a habit considered annoying and unpleasant to the majority. So the majority has simply commandeered the power of government and used it to dictate their behavior.
That is why these bans are far more threatening than the prospect of inhaling a few stray whiffs of tobacco while waiting for a table at your favorite restaurant. The anti-tobacco crusaders point in exaggerated alarm at those wisps of smoke while they unleash the systematic and unlimited intrusion of government into our lives.
The tobacco bans are just part of one prong of this assault. Traditionally, the political Right has attempted to override the individual's judgment on spiritual matters: outlawing certain sexual practices, trying to ban sex and violence in entertainment, discouraging divorce.
While the political Left is nominally opposed to this trend - denouncing attempts to "legislate morality" and crusading for the toleration of "alternative lifestyles," - they seek to override the individual's judgment on material matters: imposing controls on business and profit-making, regulating advertising and campaign finance, and now legislating healthy behavior.
But the difference is only one of emphasis; the underlying premise is still anti-freedom and anti-individual-judgment. The tobacco bans bulldoze all the barriers to intrusive regulation, establishing the precedent that the rights of the individual can be violated whenever the local city council decides that the "public good" demands it.
Ayn Rand described the effect of this two-pronged assault on liberty: "The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories--with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington.
The liberals see man as a soul free-wheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread," or, today, when he crosses the street to buy a cigarette.
It doesn't take a new statistical study to show that such an attack on freedom is inimical to human life. No crusade to purge our air of any whiff of tobacco smoke can take precedence over a much more important human requirement: the need for the unbreached protection of individual rights.
The Socialists who support these measures consider these places "public," because they consider everyone's property to be "public."
This is how they created laws which forced businesses to hire certain preferred classes in the first place. This agenda has been anti-capitalist from the beginning. This is about destroying small businesses and shaking down big businesses.
You are so right.
It is truly amazing how many people actually go totally ballistic if I walk around with an UNLIT cigarette in my mouth. And I only do it with an unlit one - because you can't smoke anywhere indoors in Delaware except your own home. (Thank goodness I don't live in Delaware anymore)
It is perfectly legal in Delaware and at least 22 other states to refuse to hire someone because they are tobacco smokers.
Health insurance companies already charge higher rates for smokers (by giving discounts to those that don't) just as do life insurance companies.
I won't complain once they start charging higher rates for those that are obese.
Smokers have been facing workplace discrimination for years. Including workplace discrimination by government entities themselves.
You cannot see a difference? I think that you are needed on the "Girls Gone Wild Thread" to support the child porn angle. Or are you saving your energy for the other straw argument concerning "pools".
Now you and I have a disagreement.
What gives you the right to not be inconvenienced on someone else's private property?
I mean, waiting 30 minutes for a table at a restaurant is an inconvenience. Are you saying I have the right to have the government intervene so that it doesn't happen again?
That's a rather ludicrous idea, isn't it? the same goes for smoking bans.
I bet Rush has a response to this article on his Wednesday 5/28/3 radio program. This guy really nails it and the problems with our loss of freedoms.
Good Hunting... from Varmint Al
You compare decency laws that have been in effect for thousands of years to BS laws that are based on faulty research? The decency laws have been modified with time. Perhaps this law will be modified such that you not only have to pay for my cigarettes, but must smoke them for me too.
Most laws are enacted, then modified not repealed.
Like someone stated earlier. We ARE going to see that your bull is gored if you continue to gore ours. You are going to be really pitching a fit!
Too late though, because it will be our hobby by then.
I did something similar in a smoking section of a restaurant once. We had waited over an hour for seating in the smoking section and someone who claimed "no preference" when asked about smoking or non was seated at the next table. And were seated before us, even though we had been there first.
When the waitress brought our drinks she also asked us to put out our cigarettes because they were bothering the people at the next table. I politely refused, because we were seated in the SMOKING section. The waitress then took our order.
A few minutes later she made the same request regarding the cigaettes - and I again politely refused, as we were in the smoking section.
Prior to any food being served a manager came over and said we needed to put out our cigarettes as other customers were complaining. I looked him in the eye and said "no problem" we were leaving. I was told the police would be called if I didn't pay my bill, etc - my attitude was 'fine call them' - I even waited in the parking lot for quite a while in order to speak with them if they showed up.
Anti-smokers do this on a regular basis in an effort to make smokers look bad.
What you did is a different type of situation. You were in non-smoking and expected non-smoking. The person that did this to me was in the smoking section.
But the biggest bugaboo about the entire situation - these people had been sitting next to us in the bar for more than 30 minutes and had never once made a comment about our smoking.
The cops never showed and we never went back there, nor did any of our friends, smokers and non-smokers.
No we are NOT.
Smokers are arguing that the private business owner should be permitted to make his/her own decision when it comes to permitting us to smoke on his/her private property.
The anti-smoker establishment has declared that any establishment that invites in the public or employess anyone is now public property.
I'm sorry - but that is wrong.
And you and I will continue to disagree about the issue of outside. Smokers are taxpayers just like non-smokers sidewalks and parks, etc are just as much ours as yours.
smokers have been forced outside by these laws, banning us from areas we pay for as taxpayers is wrong. Plain and simple.
Then you don't know any smokers.
The proposals for banning smoking within 20 or 25 feet of the entrance to any building wipes out smoking anywhere in any city. 20 feet from the entrance to a building on any street is somewhere in the vicinity of the center line of a 2way steet.
The goal of the anti-smokers is to banish smoking to no where but your home - and they are pushing to outlaw that if there are children or even pets in the house.
I've been dealing with this for a long time, I know what I'm talking about.
It started with the airplanes, then non-smoking in restaurants and now even people like you, who oppose the government on private property smoking bans are in favor of sidewalk bans.
For years I have driven people nuts with my attitude it would come down to an all out ban - no one believed me.
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