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I'll Take Excessive Drinking for $1,000, Alex.
The latest place where liberties are being chipped away: Saint Paul, Minnesota, where a ban on smoking in bars and restaurants went into effect today.
The greater focus of the debate has been on bars, not restaurants. Many ban supporters (you can pick out a few of them in the comments section) say things along the lines of "Thank God! Now I can go out to a bar without getting all stinky!" And in response to the argument that a ban will cause economic damage, you sometimes hear the reply: but now all those non-smokers will show up.
Put aside the questions about freedom of association, property rights, the validity of the numbers surrounding "second-hand smoke," and the like.
I've got one question: nobody gets killed because he spends an evening sitting in the same bar as someone who is smoking. But plenty of people have gotten killed in car crashes because someone else had one too many at a bar.
Say you think that a ban on smoking in bars is good. It prevents death by second-hand smoke. OK, wouldn't it be odd to also make the argument that the smoking ban is good for business because it would bring in a new "round" of customers--thus contributing to the risk of deaths by impaired driving?
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"Justice Louis D. Brandeis'?s metaphor of the states as "laboratories" for policy experiments ... had almost nothing to do with federalism and everything to do with his commitment to scientific socialism. .... To this day, it continues to inhibit a truly experimental, federalist politics." -- Michael S. Greve
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