Landlords' Rights

I realised the other day that while I’ve spent a lot of time criticising other people’s stupid opinions of the smoking ban, I’ve never explicitly put down in writing my own. So here they are, in the form of a response to some more of other people’s.

This blog entry is one of the better ones on what I consider the most opposing side. It makes two main arguments:

1. Hitler introduced this same policy. It is a fascist policy. It is therefore not the kind of thing an enlightened civilisation ought to be doing.
2. A bar is no more public space than your house. Anything legal in your house should be legal in a bar.

The first of these I’ve deconstructed many times before and I see no reason to do so again, so I shall merely mention in passing the Slippery Slope Fallacy and the Genetic Fallacy (and maybe Godwin’s Law) and leave it at that.

The second is more interesting, because there’s no real counterargument: it starts with assumptions that are true (smoking is legal on private property; bars are private property) and it follows valid logic and arrives at a conclusion (smoking should be legal in bars). This is a simplification, because there is at least one dubious implicit assumption which I have chosen to ignore. (Also, for the purposes of this discussion I am assuming that the bars in question have no paid employees, perhaps being operated by the owner or owners only, or operating on a very optimistic version of the honour system. Or coin-op beer pumps. Who knows what world the blogger was living in?) But you already know (presumably) that I disagree with this argument’s conclusion, and the inconsistency there is what I want to address.

The argument, you see, is not an argument for or against a ban in principle. It only opposes the idea of a ban that applies to bars but not houses. This argument says you can ban smoking everywhere or nowhere but nothing inbetween.

Personally, if I was forced to choose between those options, I would choose the former, which means that the “landlord’s rights” argument is, as far as I’m concerned, nothing more than a rally to ban smoking in private residences (which, if smokers have children, would seem only reasonable anyway). In any case, smoking is (in real terms, regardless of what this week’s tabloids may say) more dangerous than some drugs which are banned outright, and it clearly is addictive. If we accept our current drugs legislation, it’s hard to argue banning smoking outright would, at least in principle, be any kind of human rights violation. But I wouldn’t advocate such a ban for one simple reason: smokers are addicted to a legal drug. If the government complicitly allowed millions of people to become addicted to a drug, like they did with tobacco, and then banned it outright, forcing addicts to either go cold-turkey or break the law, that would be incredibly harsh. So smoking shouldn’t be banned in private residences until many years’ warning has been given (or the number of smokers has dropped to an insignificant level). But after that? Yeah, ban it outright if it seems like it’d help. What good is it anyway?

Lastly, while I’m here, let me just attack another common type of argument. I’ve seen a couple of things lately that have been pretty similar. They say things like “look how many pubs’ profits have fallen already” or “my local pub’s atmosphere has become tense already”. The latter of those was pulled from a letter in The Times. The key word there, to my eyes, is “already”. It is intended to mean “if this is what happens after a month, think how bad it will be in a year!” but the correct interpretation is “this is what happens after a month; it has no bearing on what may happen after a year and is therefore irrelevant.” Think long-term, people. This is more important than a couple of weeks’ weird looks at the bar.