Ban smoking in restaurants? Nyet!
Gov. Kaine has proposed amendments to the Assembly’s kind of pointless post-a-sign-if-you-allow-smoking bill that would ban smoking in any public place where food is served. Unlike most who push these smoking bills, Kaine at least acknowledges the obvious - these laws hurt business:
A conversation with the owner of a prominent Richmond restaurant persuaded Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to seek a legislative ban on smoking in all eateries.”‘I’d like to go no smoking for my employees, but I worry if I do, I’ll lose business’” Kaine quoted the owner, whom he did not name. The restaurateur urged Kaine to apply a ban to all eating establishments.
“I thought that was a fairly compelling insight,” the governor said.
So why did the governor propose the law? A variation of the protect-the-children rationale used to support all nanny state laws, of course.
He proposed the sweeping prohibition to the General Assembly primarily to protect restaurant workers, not customers.
Despite the documented dangers of second-hand smoke to customers, Kaine emphasized, they can choose a nonsmoking restaurant or stay at home and eat.
But it’s not as easy for workers to find other jobs, he explained.
This argument is a big, fat, stinking, moldy-under-the-gills red herring. Here’s a thought experiment - if a restaurant agreed to hire only smokers, would smoking then be OK? After all, surely first-hand smoke is more dangerous than second-hand smoke is. These workers don’t need protection, so smoking should be OK, right? Of course not, since these laws are all about the government telling you what is good for you and restricting what private property owners allow on their property.
This non-smoker hates cigarette smoke as much as anybody. I’d love it if I woke up tomorrow and all restaurants were smoke free. I’d also love it if people didn’t yak on their cell phones while driving, didn’t wear those stupid Bluetooth headsets at the grocery store, didn’t stink up elevators with bad cologne and didn’t wear stupid-looking topical print shirts. But I don’t ask the government to ban any of those things on my behalf. Non-smokers don’t have a right to a smoke-free restaurant any more than smokers have a right to smoke. Private property owners, however, do have a right to control what legal activity is allowed on their property, free from government interference.
So what’s the solution? As with all things, the market. Don’t want cigarette smoke with your smoked turkey? Patronize the many, many restaurants that are already smoke-free. Business owners will get the message. Don’t want to work somewhere where smoking is permitted? Get a different job (and despite what the governor says, there are other jobs). When workers for non-smoke-free restaurants become more scarce, business owners will have to pay more, increasing the economic pressure to go smoke-free. Customers don’t have the right to use the power of the state to remake businesses into what they want them to be. They do have the power to take their money elsewhere.
Hopefully the General Assembly will vote down the governor’s nanny state amendment.
