Actual Freedoms Lost in DC

Folks, this is what a loss of your freedoms looks like:

The D.C. Council gave final approval yesterday to a broad ban on smoking in bars, restaurants and other public places, voting 11 to 1 to add the nation’s capital to a growing list of smoke-free cities and states.

Although Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) continued to voice concerns about the measure’s effect on small businesses and the city’s hospitality industry, the overwhelming support on the council suggested that the ban’s proponents have enough votes to override a mayoral veto.

Simply put, if you ever aspired to owning a bar or restaurant in Washington, DC, you have no control whatever over whether you wish to allow smoking in your establishment. The city has decided that you may not, regardless of how you wish to do it.

That means that not even you could smoke in your own place, say if you were in there alone, after hours, working on paperwork or hosting your own private party.

Ah but this is a good loss of liberty, I’m told. After all, smokers are such a small minoority and there are, I hear, health risks from secondhand smoke. This is protection, is what this is. We should give up our freedoms of choice to protect ourselves from vapors and particulates and various airborne agents, shouldn’t we?

Bullhockey. The very simple fact is that human beings, at least at this point, choose into which bars and restaurants they do and people are more than willing to patronize the establshments that serve their needs the best. If they don’t want to eat and drink around smokers, they will go to a place that doesn’t allow smoking. And if there is a demand for such places, those places will come. That’s just the way things work in a free and capatalist country.

Unless, that is, the hand of government decides otherwise.

Oddly enough, the very folks who cry loudly about losing the rights they still can’t demonstrate to me that we’ve lost due to the PATRIOT Act and the NSA program are often the selfsame people who cheer this particular loss of freedom.

I guess they’d rather have you protected from cigarette smoke than anthrax dust or radioactive vapor.

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Category: General