01 February, 2008

Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Smoke, Do Not Collect $200

So I was driving a lovely young lady to the airport this morning and I was listening to the radio on the way back. First, I don’t know how low your IQ has to be to qualify you to be a radio disc jockey, but these folks were certainly no Marilyn Vos Savant. To give a brief example, they were amazed (AMAZED) to have found a version of Monopoly on the internet that used Euros. This is NOT amazing. Not even remotely. In fact, what IS amazing is that anyone would be surprised by the fact.

The Neanderthals with headsets next reported on the DC smoking ban; which brings me to my main point.

Evidently, if a business can show a profit loss of at least 15% as a result of the smoking ban they will be able to reintroduce smoking in their establishment. Why 15%? What about the businesses who lose 14%? Or 10%? Or even 5%? It’s not like any of these businesses were exploiting people. Smoking is legal and you never HAVE to go to a particular bar or restaurant. Implicit in this policy I see the assumption that most establishments will actually gain (or at least not lose any) business from the ban. This is no surprise. I would expect there to be a demand for strictly nonsmoking bars. So why not just let businesses decide which consumers to serve? The likely answer is we tried that and all bars ended up being smoking. But this only leads to two conclusions, either (1) people actually don’t care enough about smoking to demand nonsmoking bars, or (2) smokers are that much more fun to hangout with that people don’t want to make the choice—they would rather force the fun smokers to hangout in their boring bars.

There is an optimal level of smoking in bars and it certainly is not zero. I propose issuing smoking licenses similar to liquor licenses to any bar that wants to allow smoking. This will be a Pigouvian tax in effect and the revenue can be used for whatever the nanny-staters want. Any guesses as to why this isn’t being adopted around the country?

And in other news: George Clooney has been named UN "Messenger of Peace”. Our troubles are over!

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