Economics Ia

It’s time: Snuff out public smoking
Allow cigarettes in private places, restaurants included -- just not in common space
BY ROBERT POLLOCK NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Sunday, September 29, 2013, 4:20 AM

DANIEL BARRY
A “No Smoking” sign is posted in the pedestrian plaza in Times Square, May 23, 2011. Is smoking banned too frequently in public places — or not often enough?

As I left last Sunday’s Jets game, choking on a supersized cloud of cigarette smoke created by thousands of desperate addicts, a long festering op-ed idea returned to mind. To wit: Our current smoking regulations have things precisely backwards.
Economic logic, individual rights and public health concerns all suggest the nasty habit should be banned in public places, where non smokers cannot escape the noxious fumes. It is only in private locations (yes, including those restaurants that so choose) that smoking should be allowed.
In economic parlance, secondhand tobacco smoke is what’s known as a “negative externality.” Like other forms of air pollution, or water pollution, or even loud noise, it’s a byproduct of activity that inflicts costs on others. It’s precisely to reduce or eliminate negative externalities that many laws and regulations exist.
But one doesn’t need high-falutin economic jargon to get the point across. The language of manners will do just fine. As one anonymous newspaper columnist observed all the way back in the 1860s, “A man would be considered a rowdy or a boor who should willfully spatter mud on the clothing of a lady as she passed him on the sidewalk.
“But a lady to whom tobacco fumes are more offensive than mud can hardly walk the streets in these days but that men who call themselves gentlemen — and who are gentlemen in most other respects — blow their cigar smoke into her face at almost every step . . . I can’t explain such phenomena except on the theory that tobacco befogs the moral sense and makes men specially selfish.”
Smokers hog areas of common passage like doorways without thought for others. The defense that many such areas are “open air” is a feeble one, as any asthmatic will tell you. I know I am not alone among my friends in routinely jogging to get windward of smokers on the street.
New York City’s ban on smoking in public parks and plazas is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t go far enough.
Many of my ideological brethren on the libertarian right have the smoking issue wrong. Because many anti-smoking campaigners are left-leaning nanny-state advocates, conservatives and libertarians have reflexively chosen a lenient attitude towards tobacco. But there is all there difference in the world between allowing public use of a product almost certain to cause harm to others and allowing people to consume sugar and saturated fat to their hearts’ content.
So let’s have no more quibbling with studies about just how harmful secondhand smoke is. It isn’t good for you and it’s a major nuisance. The correct libertarian policy on public tobacco use — i.e. the one that protects the rights of nonsmokers — is a draconian one. (Libertarians should have no problem with strict auto emissions standards either.)
And what of allowing the return of smoking in private spaces, like restaurants, that choose to allow it? It’s also the rights-respecting thing to do. Would-be customers and employees could be forewarned and make choices.
The trouble for those who would ban smoking altogether is that no one has ever offered a consistent theory of when people ought to be coerced for their own good. No to smoking but yes to skydiving and motorcycling?
In any case, the practical effect of allowing private smoking would likely be small, as consumer taste seems to have shifted in favor of tobacco-free air.
It’s time to finally put the harm of smoking where it belongs — on smokers. Smoking in public spaces ought to be punishable by a fine at least equivalent to that for littering. If you aren’t convinced people who smoke in public are litterbugs, ask yourself: Do I know a smoker who properly disposes of his butts?
Pollock was the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed editor from 2007-2012.

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