RALEIGH – When government regulates or prohibits private, consensual behavior, you don’t have to be engaged in that behavior to be counted among the losers.
Take the proposed smoking ban in North Carolina restaurants. The initial effort to get this bill passed during the 2005 legislative session didn’t succeed. A compromise measure that would have forced restaurants to create a large nonsmoking section, complete with a wall, also fell short by a few votes (and if that sounds like a pretty heavy-handed “compromise,” that’s because it is). But I fully expect that proponents will keep pushing the idea. They passionately believe in their cause, which mixes heavy amounts of paternalistic finger-wagging in with heartfelt but misplaced concerns about the health effects of secondhand smoke and the impact of smoking-related illnesses on government health programs.
I’m not a smoker, but I still strongly oppose a smoking ban. I already enjoy the freedom not to sit next to smokers if I wish, in that I enjoy the freedom to dine or not to dine at restaurants based on their smoking policies. Similarly, restaurant owners already enjoy the freedom to exclude smokers, which would apparently make them at least as much money as they earn now.
The only possible effect of a state smoking ban on my freedom is to diminish it. To the extent that policymakers believe they have a mandate to regulate the smoking habits of restaurant patrons on private property, why should they not perceive a similar mandate to regulate other behaviors that, unlike smoking, I might wish to engage in?
We already see examples of seemingly innocuous regulations setting a precedent for future, and more egregious, agitation. People firmly established in their respective industries routinely go in front of the General Assembly to request certification, licensing, or other means of protecting themselves from competition. Their argument is based in part on the state’s longstanding practice of regulating such professions as barbers, cosmetologists, and auctioneers. These current regulatory regimes really don’t cost us an arm and a leg – though their absence would not cost us a scalp or an ear, either. The point is that when you layer tax after tax, regulation after regulation, on top of the citizens of North Carolina, their overall freedom to do as they wish, to buy as they wish from whomever they wish, can become acutely attenuated.
Our personal freedom rests on a net of laws, provisions, court decisions, and customs. If a single string in the net begins to unravel, say with a new restriction on smoking, you pay not personally see anything at stake. You may not smoke. But the overall strength of the net weakens. When it finally gives way, we’ll all be sorry.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.