[alliteration]

The real problem I have with the argument "don't go to smoke filled places if you don't like smoke" is the fact that I enjoy going to the bar, but I don't smoke. I really haven't ever encountered a no smoking bar in this state, so where does that leave me? Thats when I have a problem with it, is when it impedes my enjoyment of places. If I want to go bowling, I can't unless I want to set fire to my clothing afterwards. If I want to go out and have a few drinks, I am unable to without reeking of smoke. To me, thats wrong.

I agree with the whole personal property standpoint, sure, its your business, I get it. But many places in many other states have increased business from banning smoking on their property so you can't really say that business owners will lose business from it. Sure, I agree with less governmental control in most aspects, but not here. Do I think there should be health standards? Sure. They normally make sure our food and our environment is pretty safe, so it only makes sense that smoking in public should be minimized.

[20yrsinBranson]

Originally Posted by Peter B

More evidence for those with their heads in the sand and unaware of their surroundings.

Smoking ban leads to major drop in heart attacks - Yahoo! News

Has anyone considered that a greater awareness of the importance of diet and exercise might be the cause? Correlation does not equal causation. There could be a hundred BAJILLION reasons why "hospitalized cases" have dropped 41 percent. It could be that there has been an increase in INSTANTANEOUSLY FATAL heart attacks that do not require hospitalization! Perhaps the population of these areas has become progressively younger which would account for fewer heart attacks than if the general population was older.

No one can prove - DEFINITIVELY that the smoking ban had ANYTHING to do with it. It's just numbers.

20yrsinBranson

[Peter B]

Originally Posted by alliteration

The real problem I have with the argument "don't go to smoke filled places if you don't like smoke" is the fact that I enjoy going to the bar, but I don't smoke. I really haven't ever encountered a no smoking bar in this state, so where does that leave me? Thats when I have a problem with it, is when it impedes my enjoyment of places. If I want to go bowling, I can't unless I want to set fire to my clothing afterwards. If I want to go out and have a few drinks, I am unable to without reeking of smoke. To me, thats wrong.

I agree with the whole personal property standpoint, sure, its your business, I get it. But many places in many other states have increased business from banning smoking on their property so you can't really say that business owners will lose business from it. Sure, I agree with less governmental control in most aspects, but not here. Do I think there should be health standards? Sure. They normally make sure our food and our environment is pretty safe, so it only makes sense that smoking in public should be minimized.

That fact is lost on the smokers. Especially the business owners living in the past with the, "my business will suffer if smoking is banned" ideology which has been proven wrong time and time again. It'll take awhile but it'll be worth the wait. Imagine going bowling or to a bar and not smelling like YOU'VE smoked a pack of cigs!!

[Peter B]

Originally Posted by 20yrsinBranson

Has anyone considered that a greater awareness of the importance of diet and exercise might be the cause? Correlation does not equal causation. There could be a hundred BAJILLION reasons why "hospitalized cases" have dropped 41 percent. It could be that there has been an increase in INSTANTANEOUSLY FATAL heart attacks that do not require hospitalization! Perhaps the population of these areas has become progressively younger which would account for fewer heart attacks than if the general population was older.

No one can prove - DEFINITIVELY that the smoking ban had ANYTHING to do with it. It's just numbers.

20yrsinBranson

Yeah, within 3 years, everyone realized diet & exercise were important

[walls]

PeterB said quote...."Especially the business owners living in the past" thats brilliant,......just brilliant. Somebody please tell museums et al to get with the program. Lets hope the Gov shuts down Greenfield Village......STOP all ferry rides to Mackinaw Island....

Get this thru your heads people...it is a private business conducting perfectly legal business. It's NOBODYS fault if you smell like smoke but your own. You are NOT required to go into the place, and if its good for biz to stop smokers...buy your own freakin bar and put your money where your buttinski mouth is. Consider this,....I get a slick agent who helps me convince the legislature that taking a pee is an important health consideration,to serious to be left to public rest rooms. So we get laws passed that says anybody can walk into your house and use your bathroom if nature demands it..... "Get your heads out of the sand" people, I gotta take a crap and it can't wait,leave the lite on and have a good magazine waitin for me.

[deslok]

There is no smoking in Chicago and the bars still do well. Bars will do well regardless. You also leave and can go home not feeling like a Marlboro. The only thing that suffers are the smokers by having to sit outside in the cold to smoke. If they don't like it they can stop smoking, how about that. =)

[walls]

...for the illuminati among us...


Growing Up Means Resisting the Statist Impulse

(Note: On Oct. 16, at the third and final debate of the 2006 Michigan gubernatorial campaign, candidates Jennifer Granholm and Dick DeVos were asked for their views on the notion of banning smoking in all places patronized by the public. Below is a commentary on this very issue by Mackinac Center President Lawrence W. Reed. It appears this month as the latest installment of his "Ideas and Consequences" column in The Freeman, the journal of the Foundation for Economic Education.)
A few months ago, I walked into a restaurant in Naples, Fla., and said "A nonsmoking table for two, please." The greeter replied, "No problem. All restaurants in Florida are nonsmoking by law. Follow me."
For a brief moment as we walked to our table, I thought to myself: "Good. No chance of even a whiff of a cigarette. I like that!"
And then I felt shame. I had fallen victim to the statist impulse. For 40 years, I thought I was a passionate, uncompromising believer in the free society. Yet for a few seconds, I took pleasure in government trampling on the liberties of consenting adults in a private setting.
This incident troubled me enough to think about it a long while. I wanted to know why my first instinct was to abandon principles for a little convenience. And if a committed freedom-lover like me can be so easily tugged in the wrong direction, what does that say for ever getting nonbelievers to eschew similar or more egregious temptations?
At first, I thought about the harm that many doctors believe secondhand smoke can do. Perhaps it wasn’t wrong for government to protect nonsmokers if what we have here is a case of one person imposing a harmful externality on an unwilling other. Then I quickly realized two things: no one compelled me to enter the place, and the restaurant belonged to neither the government nor me. The plain fact is that in a genuinely free society, a private owner who wants to allow some people in his establishment to smoke has as much right to permit it as you or I have to go elsewhere. It’s not as though people aren’t aware of the risks involved. Moreover, no one has a right to compel another citizen to provide him with a smoke-free restaurant.
Besides, I can think of a lot of risky behaviors in which many adults freely engage but which I would never call upon government to ban: sky diving and bungee jumping being just two of them. Statistics show that merely attending or teaching in certain inner city government schools is pretty risky too — and maybe more so than occasionally inhaling somebody’s smoke.
The statist impulse is a preference for deploying the force of the state to achieve some benefit — real or imagined, for one’s self or others — over voluntary alternatives such as persuasion, education or free choice. If people saw the options in such stark terms, or if they realized the slippery slope they’re on when they endorse government intervention, support for resolving matters through force would likely diminish. The problem is, they frequently fail to equate intervention with force. But that is precisely what’s involved, is it not? The state government in Florida did not request that restaurants forbid smoking; it ordered them to under threat of fines and imprisonment.
I tried this reasoning on some of my friends. Except for the diehard libertarians, here were some typical attitudes and how they were expressed:
Delusion: "It’s not really ‘force’ if a majority of citizens support it."
Paternalism: "In this instance, force was a positive thing because it was for your own good."
Dependency: "If government won’t do it, who will?"
Myopia: "You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. How can banning smoking in restaurants possibly be a threat to liberty? If it is, it’s so minor that it doesn’t matter."
Impatience: "I don’t want to wait until my favorite restaurant gets around to banning it on its own."
Power lust: "Restaurants that won’t keep smoke out have to be told to do it."
Self-absorption: "I just don’t care. I hate smoke and I don’t want to chance smelling it even if a restaurant owner puts the smokers in their own section."
On a larger scale, every one of these arguments can be employed — indeed, they are invariably employed — to justify shackling a people with intolerable limitations on their liberties. If there’s one thing we must learn from the history of regimes, it is that you give them an inch and sooner or later, by appealing to popular weaknesses, they will take a mile. The trick is getting people to understand that liberty is more often eaten away one small bite at a time than in one big gulp, and that it’s wiser to resist liberty’s erosion in small things than it is to concede and hope that bigger battles won’t have to be fought later.
Delusion, paternalism, dependency, myopia, impatience, power lust and self-absorption: All are reasons people succumb to the statist impulse. As I pondered this, it occurred to me that they are also vestiges of infantile thinking. As children or adolescents, our understanding of how the world works is half-baked at best. We expect others to provide for us and don’t much care how they get what they give us. And we want it now.
We consider ourselves "adults" when we learn there are boundaries beyond which our behavior should not tread; when we think of the long run and all people instead of just ourselves and the here and now; when we make every effort to be as independent as our physical and mental abilities allow; when we leave others alone unless they threaten us; and when we patiently satisfy our desires through peaceful means rather than with a club. We consider ourselves "adults" when we embrace personal responsibility; we revert to infantile behavior when we shun it.
Yet survey the landscape of American political debate these days and you find no end to the demands to utilize the force of the state to "do something." Tax the other guy because he has more than me. Give me a tariff so I can be relieved of my foreign competition. Subsidize my college education. Swipe that property so I can put a hotel on it. Fix this or that problem for me, and fix it pronto. Make my life easier by making somebody else pay. Tell that guy who owns a restaurant that he can’t serve people who want to smoke.
I wonder if America has become a giant nursery, full of screaming babies who see the state as their loving nanny. It makes me want to say, "Grow up!"
Societies rise or fall depending on how civil its citizens are. The more they respect each other and associate freely, the safer and more prosperous they are. The more they rely on force — legal or not — the more pliant they are in the hands of demagogues and tyrants. So resisting the statist impulse is no trivial issue.
In my mind, resisting that impulse is nothing less than the adult thing to do.

[xlabel]

Actually Florida did it right, it's my home state, I am a smoker and happy with they way they handled it. You cannot smoke in a restaurant, you can smoke at outdoor seating at a restaurant. You can smoke in a bar as long as the bar does not derive more than 10% of receipts from selling food. I think it's a practical solution if you want non-smoking, you can go to a Chili's or Applebee's, drink and not be bothered by smoke. As for myself, I prefer the corner pub, dive bar, nosebleed bar, biker bar whatever you want to call it and can puff away and tie one on all I want and any goody two shoes health nut probably don't want to come in there anyhow so everyone's happy, for now.

[Dwatted Wabbit]

Originally Posted by walls

...heads in the sand????? I am fully aware of my surroundings, but how ironic of you,as it is YOU with your head in the sand, that is, when you are not being a small time tyrant. Smoking is a legal product, if I own a business and I want to smoke in it,what right do you have stealing my property. Read the constitution and the bill of rights.The takings clause. This is NOT a health issue, it is a property rights issue. People so uninformed as you, but still able to vote,may have caused untold heart attacks and strokes to people who still revere the liberty our fore fathers were prepared to die for.

Blowing Smoke Over Private Property Rights [Mackinac Center for Public Policy]

Exactly right.

The holier-than-thous who will do whatever to us, FOR OUR OWN GOOD, are the most dangerous people in the world.

It is a pitiful commentary on today's America that so many have such a warped, inaccurate, and condescending view of personal rights, liberty, and the proper, constitutional role of government.

Most of the smoking-ban types think, like most of the congress and presidents 43, 42, 41, 38, 37 (for starters), that the Constitution is an old fuddy duddy document that has "lost its relevence."

Human behavior does not change. Tyrants' desire to run others' lives does not change, whether it's the first century or the twenty-first.

[Alex Libman]

Originally Posted by alliteration

I really haven't ever encountered a no smoking bar in this state, so where does that leave me?

Have you really looked, like asked around or posted on the Internet? The problem is that most people run to Mommy Government for help instead of using the free market, which hurts the free market's ability to deal with the problem as loudly and with as much publicity as the government can. Also, government regulations (zoning, licenses, etc) limit how many bars there can be, raising barrier to entry and reducing the variety of available establishments.

Originally Posted by alliteration

Sure, I agree with less governmental control in most aspects, but not here. Do I think there should be health standards? Sure.

Individuals, independent organizations, certification authorities, etc should have health standards, true, but a force-driven monopoly (aka government) is not something you want to trust with your health. Remember, it got people hooked on smoking in the first place during the wars, and not because it didn't know the health effects. It's an institution that cares about strengthening its grip on power and making you helplessly dependent on it, not your individual best interest. It gets you coming and going. Little things like smoking regulations can lead to much bigger things, and before long your body is the property of the state.

Remember, governments have killed hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century alone, sometimes simply starving people to death because they became dependent on the government for food distribution. There's no reason to do it if there's more profit for the government in playing nice, sure, it might even allow for free speech if that's more effective for keeping the illusion of freedom, but ultimately all governments are the same. On a long-enough time-line, the government will slit your throat if/when it wants to.

Originally Posted by alliteration

They normally make sure our food and our environment is pretty safe [...]

Safe compared to what? It's like someone (hypothetically) breaking your legs, giving you crutches, and proclaiming that they've made it possible for you to walk! Benefits of government force are an illusion! The problem is that most people are so brainwashed by the government they can't even imagine the benefits of not having their legs broken in the first place!