How Smoking Bans Assault Private Property Rights, and Your Freedom

Jim over at New Richmond Online requested that I explain to him how smoking  bans are unconstitutional.  I can’t.  I can, however, explain how smoking bans assault the very fabric of American’s freedom, and how they provide a slippery slope to government oppression.

The first thing we all need to understand is that private property ownership is the cornerstone of freedom.  The right to own property is absolutely essential to freedom, and without it, we would be at the mercy of others. 

The government is essential in this aspect of our freedom, because they are the entity that acknowledges and upholds the our right to own property.  They uphold that the deeds to our homes are legal documents, which thus prove ownership, and disallows your neighbor to take over your home as his own by force.  The government upholds contracts and private property ownership, and has the duty to protect your private property through the justice system if someone attempts to take your property from you.  Without government acknowledging and defending one’s right to private property ownership, we would be left to fend for ourselves, most likely with a 12 gauge.  (Which may sound like fun to some of you, but I’d rather just have the government use my tax dollars for something useful, like protecting my basic rights.)

With that said, the right to own private property also allows for people to do legal things inside their own homes, and places of business.  Without this right, a person does not truly own their own property.  They are being told that they cannot perform perfectly legal acts (such as smoking) on their own property, which begins to dissolve the rights of the property owner.

The fact is, smoking cigarettes is a legal act.  If  you cannot perform a legal act on your own private property due to governmental regulation, or allow others the right to do so, you no longer have rights to your property. 

When the government begins to disregard a person’s right to act within the confines of the law within the walls of their private property, that person’s basic private property rights – which again, are the cornerstone of freedom – are no longer respected or upheld by the government that is supposed to assure them.  This is where the slippery slope comes in.

If government can tell you that you cannot use a legal substance on your private property, what’s next?  Will you be told that you cannot smoke in your home?  That has already been proposed in England, where nanny busybodies are dreaming up ways to “save the children” from secondhand smoke.  Will you be told that you must only eat certain kinds of “healthy” food in your home, and that you can’t enjoy a six-pack of beer over the weekend?  Will you be told that you can only flush the toilet twice per day and shower every other day, to conserve water and natural resources “for the greater good”?

I’ve heard many arguments about hair nets, hand washing, and various other regulations that are placed on business owners as an example of the right of the government to ban smoking on private property.  This argument is garbage.

First of all, a patron has no assurance that when they walk into a restaurant that the cook has washed his hands and will not give them some sort of illness.  The patron has no assurance that the cook will wear a hairnet.  This is why the regulations are in place.  The risk is largely unknown, so the assumption of that risk upon the patron without his or her knowledge of it, makes it something that could be justifiably regulated.

When someone walks into a smoking establishment, or applies for a job at a smoking establishment, they should know it.  I have no problem with legislation being passed that forces businesses to post big signs on their doors that say “WE ALLOW SMOKING!  ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK!”.  That shifts the risk onto the free will of the patron entering the establishment.  No one is forcing that person to enter the property without assuming the risk, themselves. 

Even garage sale proprietors know this assumption of risk, when they post signs at their sales that say, “NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ACCIDENTS”.  The property owner is essentially saying, “There may be things here that you could be physically harmed by, and you are entering my property out of your own free will, and are assuming all risk that is involved.”

How is it, then, that garage salers are allowed to assume risk while they are browsing through someone else’s useless junk, but bar or restaurant patrons are not allowed to assume their own risk when entering a smoking establishment? 

I’ve also heard the argument that says:

“But OSHA regulates workplaces for employee safety!”

I wonder why – if people are so certain about the dangers of secondhand smoke – that OSHA, the guardian of everything “safe and healthy” in the workplace, has never passed regulations on secondhand smoke.  Have you ever wondered that?  Well, it’s because even OSHA knows that this hysteria over secondhand smoke is bogus, and based upon junk science which only benefits the government nannies, the anti-smoking non-profits, busybody haters who need someone – anyone – to discriminate against to make themselves feel better, and the pharmaceutical industry.

Smoking bans on private property are an out-and-out assault on our private property rights as American citizens, and there is no valid reason in a free society that government should have the right to tell a private property owner that they cannot allow the use of a legal substance on their private property.  The only way that smoking bans can be justified is if we are no longer living in a free society, and if government has suddenly decided that it knows what’s best for us and wishes to control every aspect of our personal lives. 

Ask yourself this question:  If our elected officials – and all of the other busybodies out there – were so certain that secondhand smoke is such a danger, then why not outlaw smoking completely?  If government cares so much about us that they want us to be healthy and see to it that we are through laws and intrusive legislation, then why don’t they care enough about us to make it illegal?  They did it with drugs, didn’t they?

I would rather see prohibition – the banning of cigarettes and cigars – than a smoking ban.  It would make a hell of a lot more sense, and would ensure that our private property rights were not assaulted.