I want to note that I wasn’t specifically addressing Julian’s position as such. You are right that as a libertarian polemicist he doesn’t have the same kinds of obligations and objectivies that a leader of the libertarian movement was. But I wasn’t attempting to address Julian as a leader, I was addressing him as a spokesman. I thought that Julian could give me insight into why the libertarian movement is behaving as it does.

Now I agree with Julian and Tim, the evidence that second hand smoke is a health risk is flimsy. I also agree with Julian and Tim that the reason people want to ban smoking arises from the fact that people find smoking gross and stinky, not because they fear for their health. But Julian would you not agree that another reason peopl support the smoking ban is because second hand smoke is physically painful. When I am at a bar with smokers, I have trouble breathing, I get head aches, and my eyes and lungs burn.

However, I find the argument that people getting intoxicated are worried about their health to be laughable. Alcohol is just as bad if not worse to your health than smoking is, especially when you account for its societal affects. And I am highly skeptical of any faux concern for the waiters, waitresses, and bar tenders. In my experience, most bar goes don’t give a rat’s ass about those people.

So I think its intellectually dishonest to bill the smoking ban as a public health concern, even though I know why people have, and unnecessary. I support the smoking ban because smoking negatively impacts my quality of life.

I understand the libertarian reasoning against a smoking ban. But I reason that restricting someones freedom to smoke isn’t that big of a deal, that it is more inconvenience than hardship. There’s a difference between suspending heabeaus corpus and forcing people to smoke outside in the cold, meaning, that to me at least, to improve people’s lives its sometimes okay to restrict freedom. I suppose that proves that I am a paternalistic authoritarian of some sort, and I am okay with that too.

Dismissing a scientific consensus because you do not like it makes you no better than those yahoos down in Kentucky that run that Creationist Museum with cavemen riding on the backs of dinosaurs.

You also glossed over my point about the serious consequences of contact with smoking/second hand smoke being seriously delayed, and therefore not taken into account by many people when they make choices of places to

And Mr. Sanchez, two of my great aunts currently have holes in their necks and talk through controlled belching because their (deceased) husbands smoked like chimneys for decades. I can assure you my motivation for supporting smoking bans is not because I don’t want to make an extra trip to the drycleaners every month.

Peace.

I can’t speak for Julian, but personally the reason I write about smoking bans is because they piss me off. And the reason they piss me off is that it’s an issue that, for me, goes to the heart of what a free society is all about: allowing people the freedom to make choices their fellow citizens find distasteful, even if doing those things can have a detrimental effect on one’s own health. This applies to the choice to smoke. It also applies to the choice to work in a smoky environment. (and don’t give me this nonsense about workers having no choice. There are thousands of entry-level, smoke-free workplaces out there)

Smoking bans are a naked case of the majority imposing its will on a relatively powerless minority, justified by the flimsiest of pseudo-scientific rationales. That pisses me off, and I have the luxury of blogging about things that piss me off without worrying about whether my positions are “currently politically popular.”

And I disagree with Mr. Sanchez’s characterization of the sentiment behind public smoking bans as distaste. (“what you personally find distasteful”). More like disasterous.

Smoking bans, to me at least, are like FDA bans of DDT. They cause health maladies to smokers and non-smokers alike. But as with DDT, the ill-effects of cigarettes are far removed from the actual act of smoking (no matter our certainty that they are the cause). So the market forces that should kick in to influence people’s decisions are distorted because the drawbacks are severely delayed and not a part of the equation.

It’s hard to describe how maddening I find it to see positions that are fundamentally *liberal*… regarded as the unique province of an admittedly marginal ideology… Libertarians support free …but I hope that doesn’t make supporting free speech some kind of cracked out, narrowly libertarian idea.

The reason, as far as I can tell, that some liberal positions are regarded as the unique province of libertarianism is because those positions are the unique province of libertarianism. Are you arguing differently? For example, in the smoking ban case, are there mainstream ideological groups who oppose smoking bans? Furthermore, are there mainstream ideological groups who oppose smoking bans for liberal reasons?
This is unfortunately true about free speech as well. American politicians and the electorate consider free speech as a cracked out, narrow idea (this is not a position I subscribe too by the way, I would be in the cracked out, narrow idea camp myself). Most people do not even know what the first amendment is, and when they have done polls on whether people would support the bill of rights in many cases a plurality have voted against it (I can’t find the polls, you’ll have to take my word for it). One of the inherent paradoxes in a liberal democracy is the fact that democracy has very strong illiberal tendencies.

Libertarians are, obviously, something of a minority: On very many issues, the majority thinks differently than we do. If we just shut up about every issue where many people disagreed with us, we wouldn’t be libertarians anymore.

I agree that if you shut up about every issue where people disagree with you, you wouldn’t be libertarians. But my question is why argue about this particular issue? Are you arguing that libertarians should have a drop down drag out fight about every issue that violates their liberal principles? Resources being finite, I got the impression that the libertarian movement picked its battles strategically—meaning you don’t put a dog in every fight that you could.

(2) Perhaps the very point is that we want to acknowledge that smoking (like lots of other lifestyle choices) is distasteful to many people, and try to keep alive the notion that perhaps “what you personally find distasteful,” even if you happen to be in the majority, is not a good guide to what should be prohibited.

But libertarians can make that point concerning numerous issues, and have quite persuasively on many occasions. The trick is to pick issues that illustrate the benefits to people of following your principles. If the negative externalities outweigh the gains to people, then that is going to severely undermine any persuasive libertarian appeal.
For example, as a gay rights activist, I am strongly in favor of 1) allowing legally consenting adults to marry whoever they want, regardless of gender or sex and 2) allowing people to enter into multiple marriages.
Of those two positions, position (2) would be an albatross around my neck. Polygamy is one of the favorite slippery slope arguments traditional conservatives use when opposing gay marriage (though that isn’t what I am advocating that’s how it would be perceived). Position (2) is also extremely unpopular and weirds people out. If I were to attach support for position (1) with position (2) I would severely undermine my chances to achieve position (1).
That’s what I am talking about when I reference political pragmatics.