Anti-Smoking Laws Violate Private Property Rights

Today across the United States of America various municipalities have enacted stringent smoking bans in varying degrees of severity. Smokers are not allowed to light up in restaurants and hotels in some cities, while in other towns bars are included in the ban, and still in other areas smoking is outlawed everywhere in public, such as in Omaha, Nebraska, where citizens are urged to call emergency 9-1-1 if they spot a fellow citizen smoking in public.

In Greenville, South Carolina the ban extended to bars, restaurants, hotels, public parks, and within 10 feet of the entrances to businesses.

However, I am to be counted among those who sound the alarm about such bans. As much as non-smokers hate to admit it, this is really not about the rights of smokers or non-smokers at all. Yes, those rights are part of the problem, but they are not the core issue.

The core issue is private property rights.

Proprietors of businesses are afforded the very same private property rights that are extended to homeowners...or at least that was the time-honored tradition in America until recent years. It was assumed that just as homeowners get to decide if alcohol or cigarettes are allowed in their homes, business owners, who also have the rights to the property where their businesses are located, have the same right to make those decisions.

Thus, if I am an avid non-smoker, and I own a business, I can decide as a PROPERTY owner that no smoking will be allowed on the premises. And in today's society, such a stance, I would think, would be fairly popular.

On the other hand, if I don't really care about smoking one way or the other, but I own a bar, and most of my patrons are smokers, in the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA I have historically had the right to decide that smoking is allowed ON MY PROPERTY. No one is forced to patronize my business. No one goes to unsuspecting citizens, handcuffs them, and drags them inside my bar to inhale the heavy smoke. If you don't like what I offer, then go somewhere else.

This is the way we do things in the land of the FREE and the home of the brave.

Let me be quite frank with you here. If I owned a business in some of these towns that now think they can introduce socialism and the control of government over private property into our way of life, I would close, pack up my belongings, and take my business and the tax revenue it generates to a town that respects the private property rights of business owners.

And on my way out of the town that robbed me of my rights as a business owner, I would shake the dust off my boots as I crossed the city limits.

If I own a business, that means I am paying for the building to house it. If that property belongs to me, then government does NOT get to tell me what I can and cannot do within my own business, as long as I am running a clean operation within legal bounds.

This basic concept of private property rights is quickly being lost in America. With the rage of the environmentalist movement, eminent domain that is used to take private property to give to big business so that tax revenues increase, and smoking bans, we are quickly reaching a critical point in this country where property is not viewed as a sacred private entity that is controlled exclusively by the owners. This is a dangerous concept that forms the basis of ALL totalitarian governments, both communist and dictatorships.

When private property is viewed as one more area where government can insert itself, then the entire basis of a free society is lost.

And THIS is why I oppose smoking bans. It is not about smoking at all. It is about private property rights, the freedom of the individual, and the freedom of small business owners to make decisions that effect their businesses apart from the intrusive, snooping eye of Big Brother.

We should let the market determine whether or not smoking is allowed. If most of my customers are repulsed by the smell of cigarette smoke, then I owe it to them to ban smoking in my business. But if my clientele smokes, then I would be committing economic suicide by enforcing some Big Brother smoking ban.

Mark my words. If the smoking ban crowd wins here, they will come after smokers who light up inside their own homes next. And at that point, the Republic is lost.