Over at Catallarchy, Sean Lynch says libertarians can be cool with smoking bans.

As you might guess, I think he’s off his rocker. His case seems to be that because government has made it so difficult to switch jobs with minimum wage, health care regulations, etc., it’s up to government to remedy the situation, and use coercion to get things back to where they’d be if the free market reigned. Lynch seems to think that would mean most private businesses going smoke-free voluntarily.

I really have no idea what he’s talking about. Seems to me the bar and restaurant scene is where most of this debate is taking place right now. I used to bartend part-time. It’s not that difficult at all for a bartender or a waiter to hop jobs. Turnover is rampant.

Second, what makes Lynch think that without minimum wage and various other regulations, the bar and restaurant industry would voluntarily go entirely smoke free? I suppose Lynch has a point that these regs prevent new bars from popping up, bars that woulc potentially be smoke-free. But if Lynch is right, you’d think most existing bars would by now have made the jump. And the regulations Lynch talks about have nothing to do with whether or not the owner of an existing allows his customers to smoke. That’s driven by what his customers want. And the fact that most bars continue to allow smoking is a pretty good indication of what the market is calling for right now. Why in the world would Lynch, a self-described “anarcho-capitalist,” be okay with using the force of law to compel bar owners to make decisions their customers aren’t asking for? Because of minimum wage?

Third, Lynch glosses over the property rights and free association considerations. If I want to open up a place where people can come have a beer and a cigarette on my own property, in the name of public health the government of D.C. will soon tell me I’m not allowed. Seems to me, that as far as libertarian priorities go, this is far from small potatoes. These are pretty fundamental principles at stake. New York and Chicago, for example, are already considering bans on trans fats, and under the same reasoning they passed smoking bans.

Finally, Lynch’s logic could apply to all sorts of other policies. Federal loans and grants have driven up the cost of a college education. Guess we should use the force of government to put price caps on tuition to get the higher ed back to where it would have been before the government interfered, right? Government spends billions every year on Medicare and Medicaid. Since there’s no hope of getting rid of those programs, we might as well invite heavy government interference in what we eat and drink, how often we exercise, our sex lives, whether or not we wear or seatbelts, and all sorts of other “risk management” policies. We need to minimize these programs’ costs to taxpayers, right?

Sorry. I don’t buy it. Seems to me that smoking bans are a pretty fundamental, litmus-test libertarian issue.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 1st, 2006 at 7:57 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.