SMOKING BAN

Liberty is a precious and fragile commodity that is hard won and easily destroyed. It is not destroyed, however, in one blow by the sledge hammer, but is chipped away by the chisel over time by a government who neither respects nor recognizes it.

To protect individual liberty and maintain a robust free market, the founders of our state and nation designed a government to be restrained, provided the people who populate the government respects those restraints.

The founders wanted government to be restrained to doing those things that the free market can’t do or can’t do well. A smoking ban is one of those issues that really separate those who believe in smaller-government-enforcing-their-own-biases from those who truly believe in smaller government and private property rights.

A ban on smoking in businesses and by government fiat is a rejection of the concept of limited government. It embraces the concept that public policy can be based on whatever naked power the government wants to exercise for the ephemeral notion of “the public good.” On that path lie the gallows and the gulag. We don’t always like the results of freedom, but the alternative of oppression– even well-meaning oppression– is equally unacceptable.

The marketplace can and does achieve the goal of banning smoking and it does it every hour of every day. The marketplace has demonstrated in this area its ability to address the desires of non-smoking public as each day another business or restaurant adds to the burgeoning list of non-smoking venues. In just two minutes on the internet, I compiled a list of nearly 500 restaurants across Tennessee that are smoke-free.

It was not that long ago that totally non-smoking restaurants and work places were a rarity; now they the exception that has become the rule. More importantly, it was done without government intervention.
·Where once smokers and non-smokers co-mingled in the same space, they are now segregated;
· Where once the size of smoking and non-smoking areas were on equal footing, now smoking sections are significantly smaller and relegated to the least desirable portions of the restaurant and even those areas are on borrowed time.

The number of completely non-smoking restaurants and work places grows each minute without the heavy hand of government. Indeed a state law is a solution in search of a problem—and headlines. A statutory ban on smoking tramples the right of a private business owner to decide how he or she wishes to cater to potential customers. It is now a point of competitive advantage for a restaurant to say it is smoke-free! If an individual is offended by tobacco smoke he has a multitude of alternative locales available to him.

If a business owner sees his clientele dropping off because he allows smoking, he can make his business smoke-free and get those clients back.

Going smoke-free pays off for restaurants; which raises again the question of why we need a one-size-fits-all government ban, when customers are fully capable of sending signals to entrepreneurs.

If you wish to create some new social norm that discourages people from smoking, it is already there.

But in a state and country that champions the individual, freedom of choice and personal responsibility, a statutory smoking ban is ample evidence that politicians don’t trust citizens and business owners enough to make the right choices.

If government wants to ban smoking, it can. It can ban smoking on those areas over which it has direct control or ownership. Government is well within its authority to ban smoking in government buildings and government property. But to ban smoking on private property is an assault on private property rights. If government wants to ban smoking on private property, it should be intellectually honest and buy the property at fair market value.

Some of the arguments offered in support of the ban strain logic.

· I have heard legislators say a ban is a compromise. That is indeed a new definition of compromise. You win, I lose. You win more power, I lose more liberty. Lord spare us from many more such compromises. A real compromise would require businesses to post signs giving notice of its smoking policy. A real compromise would repeal the law that requires smoking areas in all buildings—oh wait, there is no such law. A real compromise would make allowances for the owner, the employees and the customers all to agree that smoking should be permitted.

· I have heard it said that the ban is no different from health regulation such as sneeze guards and inspection. Health standards and inspection are about protecting the public from food-borne illnesses and illness from poor sanitation practices—both of which have incubation periods of hours or days—not years. Those regulations are to address illnesses that can affect large numbers of people in a very short time.

While some of you may think this to be a small positive step in stamping out smoking, as a smoker I have to ask what is the next step? More and more public officials are warming up to the idea that the full force of the state should be brought down on people making unhealthy choices.

· California, so often the first state to reach new frontiers in silly public policy, was an early adopter of smoking bans, and it shows the direction the pro-ban forces may take us.

·After driving smokers out of bars, anti-smoking activists there have sought, with considerable success, to drive them off the beaches, the sidewalks, and other outdoor public spaces.

· San Francisco city officials, having recently banned smoking in all public parks, moved to ban chewing tobacco at all city athletic fields (is the concern there "secondhand spit"?). Antismoking activists have recently turned their attention to restricting smoking on private property.

· Anti-smoking activist urge legal action to ban smoking in condominiums and apartment buildings

· At a town hall meeting held Washington, DC, somebody raised the question of what to do when noise complaints skyrocket because every smoker up and down the downtown streets is forced out on the sidewalk. And the answer? Crack down with anti-loitering laws.

That is the slope onto which you are taking your first small step.
“As a Knoxville News-Sentinel Editorial put it: The smoke-free adherents share at least one thing in common: Smokers annoy them. Trying to pass legislation based upon mere annoyance, however, is not politically expedient. So the tactic is set forth to protect the vulnerable nonsmoker from secondhand smoke.

The very same arguments used against smoking in the workplace could be applied to smoking outside in public or in your home. Smoking on a public sidewalk endangers other citizens within 25 feet of secondhand smoke. Smoking in your car or in your home could endanger other adults or children in those environments.

This is a freedom issue. Restaurants and bars are free to choose whether they want a smoking or nonsmoking establishment. The public is free to choose where to eat. Smoke-Free would like to outlaw that freedom to choose. They say it's for our own good.

The group has targeted secondhand smoke as a threat to public health, but it is concerned only with removing smoking from workplaces, specifically restaurants and bars.

That qualifier exposes Smoke-Free Tennessee as an organization willing to deceive as a means to an end, so it will settle for a ban on restaurant smoking - for now. If you think the buck stops there, you're kidding yourself. And that is definitely annoying.”

While getting people to stop smoking is a desirable goal, government has no right to promote it by restricting the freedom of business owners to set the rules for the premises they own. And they have no right to push adults out into the cold and outside the protection of the law for the sin of indulging in a perfectly legal product. You may think smoking is a nasty habit and secondhand smoke is unpleasant. But what's truly obnoxious is the drive to make us all healthier people through the coercive arm of the law. That's the impulse behind the smoking ban, and it has no place in a free, tolerant and diverse state. Please, let’s just say no to the nanny state.

I have just one more thing to say in closing. It is a poem from by a German pastor about another effort to deal with undesirable elements of society:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out,Because I was not a communist.

Then they came for the Jews,and I did not speak out,
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the sick, the so-called incurables,
and I didn't speak up,
Because I wasn't mentally ill.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists,and I did not speak out,
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Next they came for the Catholics,and I did not speak out,
Because I was not a Catholic.
Then they came for me,and there was no one left,
To speak out for me.

There will surely come a day when something legal you enjoy becomes the target of the Nanny State. Who will be left to speak for you then?