RoR: Forum

I marked "Other" because I wanted something that said private property is private property - the owner allows people to smoke or not - totally up to him. As of public property... the big problem is that its public and that needs to shift till we have as little of that as possible - like just court houses, police buildings, etc. Then they can take a vote :-)

I don't smoke, and don't like to be around those who are smoking in a closed space. But that just isn't the issue.

Post 1

Friday, October 14, 2011 - 10:29pm

The issue is entirely about the government telling private property owners what they can and can't do in their own establishments.

Post 2

Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - 4:44pm

This has already passed in canada and many many businesses were negatively impacted. Some bars,nightclubs and pubs actually went bankcrupt overnight.

Post 3

Sunday, October 30, 2011 - 12:40am

This has already passed in canada and many many businesses were negatively impacted. Some bars,nightclubs and pubs actually went bankcrupt overnight.

Bankrupt overnight? I wouldn't think they'd go out of business that quickly! But I guess that most people who drink in bars also smoke, so eventually at least some bars and nightclubs will go out of business, which is precisely the problem of legislating this stuff. You're interfering with people's private choices. What difference is there between that and telling people they can no longer drink alcohol in bars and nightclubs, because it encourages drunk driving, or outlawing smoking at private parties, because some of the partygoers wouldn't appreciate it? Pretty soon, you won't be able to buy cheeseburgers in fast food restaurants, because saturated fat and cholesterol pose a risk for people with heart disease. Where will it all end?

I will say that, as a nonsmoker, I really appreciate not having to breathe second-hand smoke in restaurants. I really noticed the difference when I traveled from California to Auburn, Alabama, where smoking in restaurants is allowed. Normally, I don't go to bars or nightclubs, so for me that's not an issue. There are undoubtedly some nonsmokers who are bothered by the smoky atmosphere in nightclubs, so allowing smoking in those places will lose some potential customers, but banning it will lose far more, so it's bewildering why such a law was enacted for places where smokers tend to congregate, unless it's simply a way to coerce people into doing what the government thinks is good for them.

Post 4

Sunday, January 8, 2012 - 8:49am

I can't stand smoking, the smell of it makes me nauseous. However, private property owners should be able to allow/ban smoking as they see fit, not the government.

Post 5

Sunday, January 8, 2012 - 3:07pm

Two arguments favoring laws banning smoking inside private property including private homes:

1. Clean air is a common property to which everyone has a legal and moral right to access regardless of location.

2. Imperfect economic conditions force workers into jobs (and children into homes and cars) they would prefer not to have and so entitles them to the clean air conditions articulated in the previous point.

Objectivists would argue that private property rights trump rights to clean air within that property. Clean air zealots would counter that not everyone gets to choose his location and so property owners have an obligation to assure baseline safety needs within their property boundaries. I see no common ground between these viewpoints.

Post 6

Sunday, January 8, 2012 - 5:50pm

Luke,

Your argument for clean air has some serious problems. First, there can be no such thing to a right to clean air, just as there is no right to health care, or chocolate ice cream. Those things have to be produced and to claim a right to the products of others efforts is an attempt to claim a right to their part of their lives.

Now if you already have clean air on your property and someone not on your property makes it dirty, you have the right to take them to court.

If you claim that the smoke from inside a bar or lounge that is down the street from you is getting onto your property all you have to do is prove harm, however small, and you have a valid claim. If you can't substantiate the harm, you don't.

Children already have protection in form of child abuse statutes. If the state can demonstrate that a child is being significantly harmed through the actions or inactions of his parents, the state can act.

"Clean air" isn't a common property. We only own certain reasonable expectations to the air, as it exists, over our property and those expectations are that it isn't used as a vehicle to carry damaging toxins/smells/particulates onto our property.

If a bar were right next to our property, and it was a bar for cigar smokers, and the amount of smoke was considerable then we probably have a case right now - no special pseudo-rights or new laws needed - and we could probably force them to install some sort of filter on an exhaust fan.

You said, "Imperfect economic conditions force workers into jobs..." I understand what you are saying, but we need to understand that they aren't forced in the sense of being threatened with initiated force. It would be just as logical to say that under imperfect economic conditions some workers are lucky enough to have jobs and happy to chose having a job even if it isn't in an environment they would have chosen.

If second-hand smoke is proven bad enough that children in a smoking parent's car is undergoing significant risk, most parents will stop smoking in their car. I'm sure that most parents would not willingly cause their child to have cancer, or a strongly increased risk of cancer. But some will. They will either be emotionally deficient, or in deep denial about smoking, or just asses. But if the evidence is there about the smoking, then the child abuse laws can be used. As for another adult riding in that car, they have a choice. Unlike the kid, they can just say, "Quit smoking in the car, or pull over and let me out."

It isn't that property rights trumps this or that... it is that property rights trump everything. It is our right to our own life - which is our primary property without which nothing else would be possible - that is the base of all rights. In that sense, all rights are property rights.

Post 7

Sunday, January 8, 2012 - 6:28pm

I was listening to a Hitchen's podcast from the CATO institute. Apparently Hitchens discovered that in the bar he was going to in California, you couldn't have a private cigarette (this on the day of the complete smoking ban) there and so he called up the judge that had written the legislation and inquired as to how he can justify that. The judge said that it was written to protect the staff. He didn't want people that didn't want to smoke or didn't like it to work in a smoking bar. Hitchens replied that if some bars allowed it and some bars didn't, then sooner or later people would just apply to the jobs in the non-smoking bars. The judge said that he couldn't entertain such an assumption. It could be that there was a man or woman who have applied for a job as a barman and it was the only job available to them and that job was in a smoking bar only. That could not happen

Post 8

Sunday, January 8, 2012 - 7:10pm

It could be that there was a man or woman who have applied for a job as a barman and it was the only job available to them and that job was in a smoking bar only. That could not happen

First, it is a false assumption that a person would be out of work unless they take this one single job in this one single industry in the one single city. That could not happen.

But second, by what right does this one employee, according to the hypothetical situation, turn around and tell the only employer that would have him, that he has to change the way he uses his property. But this example goes beyond that. It implies that this unemployed fellow's need justifies initiating violence against others to violate their property rights. That's wrong and that could happen... actually, that has happened in many regulations here in the country. It is an application of "to those according to their needs, and from those according to their abilities."

Freedom of choice - freedom of association - property rights... do we really want to throw away all of those so a person can work in a bar that doesn't have smoking instead of somewhere else?

Post 9

Monday, January 9, 2012 - 5:08am

The arguments I mounted in Post 5 came from an encounter with a college student activist for the Democratic Party back in 2002. In fairness to his position contrary to that of Steve Wolfer, clean air is not "produced" but is a given. Outside natural disasters like wildfires, only humans can pollute the air to a degree to make it unfit for human consumption. One can say the same in large part about fresh water in rivers and streams, less so about water that has to be pumped from underground sources.

I basically support the idea of private property owners ultimately determining what pollutants they allow on their property. I just wanted to make a fair representation of the other side. I do not agree with it but want to make sure we all understand it.

Post 10

Monday, January 9, 2012 - 1:08pm

Luke,

I stand corrected. You are right, to a degree, about "clean air" not being produced.

It is the pollutants that are 'produced' (whether by man or by nature) and the air is the transport mechanism.

On the topic of clean water, it actually takes human intervention to ensure that water is potable. Microbes are a natural inhabitant of fresh water and drinking from even the clearest mountain stream can make you sick as a dog. But Luke is correct that most forms of ugly pollution are man made.

It isn't that we have a right to clean air, or to clean water, as such. What we have is a right to not have others put pollutants into the air or water such that they harm us. When we say we have a right to clean air, that has to be what the statement actually means - if we are to be effective and to honor individual rights.

Property rights must rule in cases of pollution or else we are throwing out individual rights.

Post 11

Monday, January 9, 2012 - 1:27pm

SW wrote:

"What we have is a right to not have others put pollutants into the air ... such that they harm us."

The smoking ban advocates will say that everyone has this right regardless of location. I would counter that if that is the case, those who feel "forced" to work in a smoking location could demand, at most, protective breathing gear per OSHA. (I hate to appease OSHA but it seems like a good counter for the immediate moment.) After all, work environments can have all sorts of known hazards of which workers know before the fact. The whole argument can become ridiculous when examining the larger picture of workplace selection.

Post 12

Monday, January 9, 2012 - 2:44pm

The smoking ban advocates would be right about the fellow working in the bar if, and only if, working there weren't a choice. But it is a choice. And no one needs to appeal to OSHA and try to force the bar owner to provide the face mask, because the employee can buy his own - the are cheap... or he or she can just work somewhere else.

If they stop legislating on this issue and let the free market settle it, you'd have lots of smoke free bars, some free to smoke bars, and lots of bars with both smoking and non-smoking areas, where air-flow and filtration technology protect the smoke free areas.

I don't buy into most of these arguments about pollution or smoking because I don't believe that most of the strong advocates are really about the condition of a person's lungs. Progressives are liars by design, by education. It is a learned, practiced technique. It rests upon their moral foundation of the end justifies the means and their claim that the good of the collective takes precedence of all individuals.

They are about instituting centralize control of all aspects of human life. If you don't believe that, just look at the way the same people take the "control from Washington" approach on all issues. They don't just do it for lungs, or just for health, or just for the economy... they are always on the side of control and that is usually their defining common denominator. They constantly seek the most sympathetic subject to couch their pro-control arguments. Imaginary innocent employees that have to work in smoke clouds getting cancer or be unemployed, babies, etc. But the examples are a bunch of camels noses looking for a way into the tent so that the whole camel can push in later.

Someone might want to take me to task for making an extreme example and point out that there are people, even normal libertarian or average tea party, middle America folk that would like to see bars be non-smoking. Yep, that's true, but the political class and the intellectuals who take that position need to be measured by the sum of their positions. And that's who sets the agenda the rest of the country just reacts to. And they react to examples that were created by the Progressives to be sympathetic. In essence they are saying, "Help this poor soul, help this baby," and they aren't saying, "because we will have installed our control principle and can start expanding it."

Post 13

Monday, January 9, 2012 - 2:49pm

"The smoking ban advocates will say that everyone has this right regardless of location." To answer that more directly, I'd just say, if they can violate property rights to tell a bar owner what his air must be like, then they can tell anyone, anywhere, including in your own home, anything. No coffee tables with sharp corners... even if you have no children, after all you one day trip yourself, or a visitor could. Health and safety are the key focuses of the Progressives because they offer the best cover for the attempt to install centralized control over individuals.

Post 14

Monday, January 9, 2012 - 3:43pm

The central control advocates will say that it "makes more sense" to have "uniform" standards nationally or even globally to achieve "efficiencies" and "common standards" like those found in industry. I am not saying this is right or good. But as you noted, they will use whatever arguments needed to usurp power. Peruse the general public comments to any Internet news article and you will see these and other arguments advanced.

Post 15

Monday, January 9, 2012 - 4:05pm

Control freaks don't have to use uniform standards as an excuse... anyone who is a control freak deeply wants to force all things be the same, to be uniform.

And common, uniform standards in things like screw thread sizes and types, or frequencies used for blue-tooth, or WiFi, etc., are good things. Having standards in engineering and other areas are beneficial. But Progressives want to include human behavior (and thought, if they could figure how to do it).

Oh, wait! Progressive do have a way to partially implement thought control - it is legislation where "Hate" is a feature, or where a thought is declared to be politically incorrect.

Post 16

Monday, January 9, 2012 - 4:44pm

Uniformity can be achieved to a certain degree with government-run, taxpayer-financed schools per Dr. Benjamin Rush, circa 1786:

"Our schools of learning, by producing one general and uniform system of education, will render the mass of the people more homogeneous and thereby fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government. ... Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property."

This "uniformity" obsession unfortunately had its roots planted within the cracked foundation of our own country. While the Founders got much right, they got enough wrong (such as slavery) to create problems that have grown wild over time.

Post 17

Monday, January 9, 2012 - 5:22pm

Luke, I'd lay the blame on those that came after the Founding Fathers. The Founders gave the country an awesome start. When you read the Federalist Papers and private correspondence, you can see how they tried to begin the end of slavery, but just didn't have the political capital to do that and to start a new nation even at the cost of war with England, and then to overcome the resulting demand of each of the states to hold on to their sovereignty.

The fault is that our nation stopped watching carefully enough, stopped picking out the corruption that crept into government in a very short time, and didn't improve on the excellent work the Founders started.

The worst loss of freedom came in the late 1800's through the early 1900's - the birth of big government. That is where we need to determine why there was not the needed opposition to the those Fabian Socialist gains.

The conservative movement arose later in opposition to Progressives, but it was much, much later and very flawed.

Why was there no Locke/Jefferson ideologically based opposition that was effective back in the days of Woodrow Wilson? I think that's a good question and worth answering. But it requires that we drop the idea that the Founders caused faults we suffer from now - to do otherwise would be to expect perfection, and to expect that anyone can create a structure that will last and work forever without maintenance and even the minor modification.

Post 18

Monday, January 9, 2012 - 10:13pm