Holly, I am definitely NOT saying that because you smoke, you do not support the California law about smoking. The argument about this law already smoked up at least two threads around here yesterday, and what I noticed most is that the staunch libertarians, who believe business should be unregulated, took one side, against the law, and the few people on the other side thought the state had a valid role to play in workplace health and safety law. There were smokers, and nonsmokers, in both groups.
While I acknowledged already that there are some small problems with how the law is enforced--not so serious that they cannot be remedied--the law is a workplace health and safety law first and foremost. Bar and club employees have very high heart disease and cancer rates due to their employment, all other possible factors aside. If a bar owner is the sole operator of his bar, or if he wants to rig up a conveyor belt system to bring drinks into a sealed room, or put an old bus in his parking lot which employees do not enter, he is certainly welcome to allow smoking in his club or bar. There are several ingenious ideas that bar owners have already discussed publicly to deliver drinks without exposing employees to smoke, and this represents the vigor of our free enterprise system.
When an employee is forced to serve drinks in clouds of smoke he is not entering into anything remotely resembling the freedom of choice, coexistence in peace concept you are talking about in your post. He is there endangering his health because of economic necessity.
Why would it be so hard for you to step outside to smoke, rather than endanger the health and safety of workers?
And just how does this law take private property away from businessmen? It doesn't, in my opinion.
California is a very crowded state, popular with conventioneers and other tourists. I think there will be some very limited finanical loss to other states because of the new law, but all businessmen in California are still competing fairly with each other, because the law is statewide. And much of the tourism in California comes from California residents themselves. I also believe that this type of workplace safety and health restriction will become more prevalent eventually elsewhere, since the free enterprise system does not want to be paying out a ton of workers' compensation claims for damage caused by workplace smoke.
California almost always starts trends, which soon are reflected elsewhere. The trend in America is for much tighter restrictions on smoking, period. Just wait a few years, and watch. Anyway, I think this just reflects a striking difference in your political beliefs from mine, and is not influenced by which of us smokes, or does not. Even when I smoked, I did it outside by myself, and supported this type of regulation politically. You are saying that even if you did not smoke, you would disagree with the legislation, so it's a wash. I would add, however, that since you have been smoking since you were a young teenager, you really cannot have any idea of how offensive smoke can be to others. I know so many ex-smokers who are just shocked at how revulsed they now are by cigarette smoke, that I am sure this is not an isolated instance.
I think the human right to breathe fresh air far outweighs any business law, period, and this law in specific is not unduly or unreasonably restrictive of commerce at all. |
