Freedom’s Great Big Pain in the Butt

“Liberty: One of Imagination’s most precious possessions.”

— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

BECAUSE I KNOW EVERYONE WILL BE WONDERING ABOUT IT as they read this, I have to disclose something right up front: I’m one of the few people you’ve ever met (if one can say that writers and their readers have “met”) who has never used tobacco in any form. Never smoked any, chewed any, snorted any, whatever. Not once. That means I don’t know what it’s like to crave a cigarette, nor what an addiction to nicotine feels like…

But I know all too well what such things look and smell like. That’s because for my entire adult life, I’ve been in the presence of a good number of smokers. Most times I’ve chosen (an important word, as I’ll explain in a minute) to go out to local pubs, concert halls, clubs, fairs, festivals or sporting events with friends or dates in my home state of Maryland…

No longer, though. As of February 1, 2008, smoking of any type is now banned in the Old Line State’s bars, restaurants and many other venues — including American Legion halls and other such private clubs.

Like with a lot of other states where indoor smoking has been banned in public places, poll results show that most people consider this a victory for Marylanders. And in truth, I personally will not miss the passive-smoking headaches and congestion I get from nights out in smoky bars or concert halls. Nor will I miss my clothes reeking of smoke in the laundry hamper — or my truck’s upholstery smelling like an ashtray simply because I’m not in the habit of stripping naked to drive home (not typically, anyway)…

However, what I will miss is yet another way in which we Americans can exercise our liberty to do what we want to do, even when it’s arguably not what’s best for us. This is the bittersweet essence of freedom, and I believe it’s something worth preserving — even when personally distasteful to me. I also lament the demise of yet another opportunity for the free market to accommodate both personal liberty and the varying preferences of individuals. This was what the Constitution’s framers had in mind, after all…

Not the arbitrary domination of The State to serve politicians’ majority-pandering — or even bona-fide cost-benefit calculations.

Freedom of/and Choice Extinguished

In my opinion, the smoking debate transcends fact, science, statistics and economics. To me, it isn’t about health or public safety or tax revenues or insurance costs so much as it is about the fundamental nature of government (and the greedy, devious hacks that run it) to hobble and ransom liberty for its own ends. The smoking issue is more emblematic than anything else that comes to mind of both the corruption rampant in our system and that system’s perversion of its freedom-first, free-market roots.

Don’t misunderstand me, here. I’m all for the government looking out for us. I think it’s entirely appropriate that they should regulate whatever they must in order to make sure we have reasonably pure food and drugs, high-quality housing construction, relatively safe roads, toys without toxic lead paint on them and so on (whether they do this properly or not isn’t today’s can o’ worms)…

And I don’t think it’s the least bit in conflict with the principals of freedom to restrict smoking in places we have no choice in going — places like airports, offices and on public transportation and its hubs. After all, the ultimate litmus test of personal liberty is “Does my exercise of freedom infringe on anyone else’s freedom?” If the answer to this question is “yes,” then regulation is appropriate.

However, I’m very wary (and weary) of a government that confounds the free market as it regulates away our liberties. That’s exactly what banning smoking in bars does. Here’s what I mean, from personal experience:

As I mentioned above, for years I’ve been going out to pubs, clubs, concert halls and taverns, either solo or with a wide variety of friends and dates. But whenever I go out with one particular friend of mine (I’ll call him R.A. Hill), the degree of cigarette smoke we’d likely encounter would factor heavily into our calculus in deciding where to go. R.A. Hill, being more smoke-sensitive than me, knew which bars attracted the greatest ratio of smokers, which had the best “smoke-eater” filtration systems, which had the highest ceilings to dissipate smoke — even which had their ceiling fans rotating in the proper direction to waft smoke up and away, instead of forcing it back down into the hair and clothing of bar patrons…

You see, that’s the free market at work. When we’d go out, we’d make a priority of choosing bars based on the “exposure to smoke” criteria — and we always found a way to have a blast without smelling like an ashtray or giving ourselves passive-smoking headaches.

It has always been my feeling that the marketplace responds better to people’s needs and desires than the government does. I also think that if the market can sustain non-smoking bars, clubs and restaurants, they spring up. They have in many places — without regulatory mandate. Consider as proof how many restaurants currently either prohibit smoking entirely in dining areas, or have dedicated “smoking” sections. I remember when this started to be a widespread policy (the 1980s). It was in response to the demands of the market, not the mandates of state or federal lawmakers…

Now, I know what a lot of you are thinking: What about the non-smoking employees of bars and restaurants in which smoking is allowed? (It’s under the auspices of concern for these folks that a lot of states pass smoking bans, by the way.)

Again, I look to the free market. People have a choice of where to work, but not the unalienable right to work there. If you can’t tolerate smoke or are afraid of the health risks, don’t apply for jobs in which you’re likely to be exposed to smoke. Those jobs will be filled with people who smoke themselves, are not worried or offended by the smoke — or who may be, but choose to forego their concerns in exchange for the money…

This idea of “choice” is the beautiful, self-regulating linchpin of the whole free-market concept upon which America is founded, yet that seems all of a sudden so foreign to our politicos and pundits.

Principle vs. Principal

Make no mistake, politicians regulate smoking for one reason only: Votes.

By ever-further restricting smoking (but not banning it outright), they get to have their cake and eat it, too. They get to curry favor and leverage votes from the non-smoking majority as crusaders for better public health and lower health-care costs. But at the end of the day, as long as smoking remains legal, people will still smoke, get sick and require medical treatment — yet politicians will still get every penny of the enormous corporate taxes tobacco companies pay, all the federal excise tax money from cigarette sales, plus all the sales tax and other revenues at the state and local level…

Oh, and all the money they can extort out of the tobacco industry — like the $206 billion 1998 Master Settlement Agreement and other high-dollar lawsuits.

This multi-streamed delta of tax-and-blackmail cash dwarfs any increased costs that smoking levies on society (or at least on the government) — and is the reason why they’d never ban cigarettes outright. Their “dirty little secret” is that they know there’s little, if any, correlation between restrictions on smoking (like taxes and public-area bans) and reduction in cigarette consumption. Smoking, after all, is an addiction, and politicians know that smokers will continue to smoke, even if they can’t do it in their favorite bars.

Consider this, to In 1976, the Feds banned Red Dye #2 based on 1969 Soviet research linking the food coloring to cancer in laboratory animals (the FDA’s own attempts to duplicate this research was inconclusive, by the way). Did they jack taxes up on food-makers and sue them for a few billion dollars, issue public alerts, mandate warning labels on products with Red Dye #2 in them, then let the public decide what level of risk they were comfortable with? No, they didn’t hesitate to simply ban the substance…

Why do you suppose this is? Don’t you think it’s because there was no real money for them to wring from the situation? After all, tens of millions of people weren’t addicted to Red Dye #2, and it wasn’t the cornerstone of a mega-billion-dollar industry from which billions in corporate, sales, excise and other taxes flow — and from which hundreds of billions more in “damages” could be ransomed.

In other words, it cost them very little to ban Red Dye #2, so they did — on nothing more than the suggestion that it might cause cancer in lab rats.

Now, in the case of cigarettes, an overwhelming amount of decades worth of scientific, clinical and anecdotal evidence from every corner of the world — not to mention leaked internal memoranda of tobacco companies — proves that smoking is strongly correlated to lung and other deadly cancers in millions of humans, yet the U.S. government won’t ban it…

This couldn’t have anything to do with the money, could it? Nah.

Look, I know that this is obvious stuff here. I just want to re-emphasize it to hammer home a larger point: That nowadays, personal liberties in America stand or fall based not on their fundamental value as exercises in freedom — but on whether or not they’re profitable to the government.

The Liberty Equation, Revisited

I’ve written in Whiskey & Gunpowder before about what I call the “liberty equation,” most recently in July 2007, as a companion essay to a speech I gave that same month at FreedomFest in Las Vegas. Back then, I wrote:

“Today, it’s the tendency of politicians, commentators, advocates on both sides of an issue — and increasingly, American citizens — to distill the debate about any personal liberties to one of numbers. Statistics, not principles, rule the day…

“Is there any liberty-based debate in the public discourse today that doesn’t center on an argument about numbers — that hasn’t become merely a contest of “dueling statistics?” The point of those statistics is always the same: To determine whether a freedom makes bottom-line sense in a twisted equation in which liberty is allowed to stand or fall based solely on its mercantile merits…

“The smoking debate is a good example. Few are talking about smoking in terms of its intrinsic value as an exercise in personal freedom. Most only talk about it in terms of economics: Mainly, whether the increased costs of health insurance and medical treatment for both active and passive smokers is greater than the profits bars, restaurants, public sports venues, and the like (tobacco-company profits are rarely mentioned) gain from smoking.”

As you can see, my beef with politicians isn’t so much that they’re self-serving, greedy, grandstanding hoodwink artists. Everyone knows this. I’d even go so far as to say that our elected leaders are so consistent in their avarice that the lack of a ban on tobacco constitutes conclusive proof that smoking MUST be an overwhelming net economic positive to America’s bottom line. However, since that’s not PC to say that in the media — and no politician would garner any votes talking about it — we never hear it. But I’m digressing…

What boils my noodles is that this kind of bottom-line thinking rules the day instead of concern for the proper care and feeding of freedom.  Politicians and the mass media have used the smoke and mirrors of number-crunching to transform the way Americans think about their liberty. They’ve colluded in force-feeding us their balance-sheet mentality for so long that we’re starting to be brainwashed en masse by it. We’re all weighing statistics the media spews at us, counting money politicians promise us, and doing all sorts of convoluted math in our heads to try and figure out how to prove the merits of the freedoms we love — or to justify the regulation (or eradication) of freedoms we don’t…

No longer do we seem to remember that liberty has value in and of itself, and that the free exercise of it is a healthy thing, whether we always find it tasteful or not.

No longer do we seem to realize that it’s not the government’s job to protect us from ourselves.

And no longer do we seem to have the righteous indignation to question exactly WHY our freedoms are regulated or abrogated — we simply accept it as part of a “greater good” scenario the politicos and pundits are pushing…

Am I the only one who thinks this sounds a lot like Marxism?

Jim Amrheim
Freedoms Editor
February 19, 2008