On Smoking and Other Things

Author’s note: The following article is commentary about the proposed ban on smoking in private clubs which the local board of health is considering. Smoking is already banned in Northampton from bars, restaurants, etc. While the article does not concern freedom of speech, directly, the reader will see that these subject matters involve many of the same underlying concerns that the reader may find worthy to think about, as I do.

There are undesirable secondary effects to a lot of things besides smoking and pornography (the latest two vices the City has been eager to banish as a practical matter). For instance, alcoholic beverage consumption leads to alcoholism, traffic fatalities, domestic violence, etc. Smoking is harmful, at least to those who regularly smoke, no doubt about it. But, government and political leaders should focus instead on ameliorating undesirable secondary effects in less intrusive manners, in my opinion.

For example, if people don't like people smoking outside, then the City could bring it back inside, with air filtration systems and no smoking areas to "protect" those who are sensitive to it, instead of trying to control the intimate details of people's private social lives. Requiring extra sales taxes to be paid for tobacco products is an example of where government regulation does directly address undesirable secondary effects, rather than the intimate private behavior of the citizen. (There’s solid evidence that smokers place a disproportionate financial burden on the health care system.)

I am concerned by how many liberals and conservatives, alike, feel justified to dictate intimate aspects of our private lives (albeit often in different respects), and turn a blind eye to how they would encroach upon our rights to be wrong, as well as right, in how we choose to live among ourselves. The more we allow the will of the majority to dictate intimate aspects of our lives, be it a conservative or liberal majority, we may have more democracy, but less and less freedom.

We need to accept the notion that tolerance of those who would voluntarily live differently than we would wish them to live with respect to their private lives, is essential for a community and a society that is to be rightly called free, as well as democratic. Otherwise, one day we may find ourselves trapped, suffocating in a place which is more totalitarian than free, except in name.

Yours/Always Controversial