The smoking ban here in Kanawha County is now about six weeks old, and some bar owners are thumbing their noses at the law. Good for them. Their complaints center around the facts that they’ve lost business due to the new regulations, and that the regulations are being inconsistently enforced, which gives some competitors an unfair advantage.

Those are both valid arguments, but I have a different one. Besides the violations of property rights (which I discussed here), the ban is completely inconsistent with its stated purpose.

Allegedly, the ban was put in place to protect non-smokers in these establishments from the dangers of second-hand smoke. This is an extremely ineffectual way to do that. Bar patrons are a self-selecting group of people^[a]. They choose to enter these bars, and could just as easily choose not to do so (or to go to a bar that didn’t allow smoking, for that matter). Therefore, it is a fact that anyone exposed to smoke inside a bar chose to put themselves in a situation where they would likely be exposed to second hand smoke.

Where do smokers who are now banned from smoking in bars go? To the streets, where they are no longer in the presence of their self-selected group of alcohol-imbibing compatriots, but instead they now expose individuals who didn’t choose to enter a bar, but simply to walk down the street. We’ve protected the bar patrons at the expense of everyone else.

This is like protecting workers in a nuclear power plant from radiation by removing all the radioactive material from the plant and placing it in the middle of Central Park. Sure, the workers are safer, but everyone else is screwed.

Obviously, the Health Department’s policy is not consistent with their philosophy. Assuming I agree with their philosophy^[b]. I would like to propose a philosophically consistent smoking policy. Instead of banning smoking in private businesses that are open to the public, we ban smoking in the following places:

• Public^[c] buildings
• Private buildings whose owners choose not to allow smoking
• Outdoors on public^[c] property.

Under my proposal, any business that serves the public and chooses to allow smokers must make that fact known, preventing any non-smokers from being inadvertently exposed by entering unaware that the business is non-smoking. Private home and land owners are perfectly welcome to smoke to their hearts content on their own land.

My policy would actually do what the health department claims it’s trying to do. But, of course, the Health Department isn’t interested in actually helping protect non-smokers. It is a branch of the government, and is therefore devoted solely to controlling the nation’s citizens and turning them into its Subjects.

1. I would guess that they’re a self-selecting group of people with a higher percentage of smokers than the group that doesn’t patronize bars, but I have no statistics to back that up. [↩]
2. Actually, I do sort of agree with the basic philosophy. Non-smokers should be able to avoid being exposed to second-hand smoke by taking reasonable precautions, such as avoiding bars where smoking is permitted [↩]
3. “Public”, in this case, is intended to mean “owned or maintained by the people” (that is, the government). [↩] [↩]