I will no longer be providing links to the Detroit Free Press, because they don’t have a permalink structure and source articles go stale after about a week, which is terribly annoying as a blogger. In any event, a recent article about the pending smoking ban in Michigan cited that:
“The action could squelch a decade-old effort by anti-smoking advocates to rid public places of smokers. ”
As always, an improper application of the term “public” exacerbates the debate. What anti-smoking advocates want is to rid private places of smokers. When we begin to recognize that your restaurant is your property, we will be able to table the issue permanently. But as long as people continue to delude themselves into thinking that your restaurant is “public” property, smoking, trans fats, nude dancing, beer sales on Sunday mornings, etc., will continue to be banned.
Perhaps another way to look at the issue is like this: If we grant legislators the power to ban smoking, then we also grant them the potential power to make every establishment tolerate smoking, however unlikely a scenario that might be. Politics cuts both ways.
Of course, there is always the question of whether politicians have solved all of life’s far more pressing problems. And they haven’t. So unless smoking is a higher priority than, I don’t know, robbery or murder or theft or poverty, they shouldn’t worry about it in the least.
When they cure all other social ills, we can still remind them that property is property, and rights are rights.
