Why Smoking Bans Are a Bad Idea

Thomas Lambert, an associate professor at the University of Missouri – Columbia School of Law, deftly takes apart the arguments of smoking-ban advocates.

For instance:

Sweeping smoking bans may actually increase the incidence of smoking. A large percentage of smokers acquire the habit at a young age, and they frequently do so because smoking is 'cool.' Smoking is cool, of course, because it is rebellious. The harder antismoking forces work to coerce people into quitting smoking, and the more they engage the government and other establishment institutions in their efforts, the more rebellious — and thus the 'cooler' — smoking becomes. Even advocates of the use of smoking regulation to alter social norms acknowledge that overly intrusive regulations may result in this sort of 'norm backlash.'

And:

If patrons and employees are willing to pay more for a smoke-free environment (via, respectively, higher prices for the business's goods and services or lower wages) than smokers are willing to pay for the right to smoke, then business owners will be motivated to ban smoking. Otherwise, they won't. Thus, there's no need for the government to force establishments to go non-smoking; the market will provide an optimal number of nonsmoking facilities. 

But what of the poor people who have to work in smoking-allowed establishments?

 Isn't there an externality in that they are forced to bear costs (and assume risks) over which they have no control? Again, the answer is no. Workers exercise control by demanding higher pay to compensate them for the risks and unpleasantries they experience because of the smoke in their workplaces. Adam Smith theorized about such 'risk premiums' when he wrote that '[t]he whole of the advantages and disadvantages of the different employments of labor and stock must, in the same neighborhood, be either perfectly equal or tending to equality . . . . [T]he wages of labor vary with the ease or hardship, the honorableness or dishonorableness of employment.' He was right. A vast body of empirical evidence demonstrates that employers do in fact pay a premium for exposing their workers to risks and unpleasantries. Such risk/unpleasantry premiums motivate employers to select the optimal amount of smoke in their restaurants. They also alleviate any injustices occasioned by what might otherwise appear to be a violation of employees' rights. Thus, smoking in public establishments does not, in any meaningful sense, impose genuine negative externalities in the form of risks and unpleasantries to the patrons and employees of such establishments.

Read it all.

Comments

[Amsterdamsky]

My beef with this is that in the US and I assume the EU solvents and dust are highly regulated in the workplace with loads of inspections and fines and of course in the US lawsuits years later for exposure. It is stupid not to regulated cigarette smoke and to fine a company for trivial amounts of dust or clogged ventilation. They should really be treated in the same way. Got ventilation smoke away. No ventilation you get disected alive by jewish lawyers.

[Deoxy]

I mostly have no problem with that...

As long as restaurants with "smoking" and "non-smoking" sections are proscuted for fraud (it's like having a "peeing" and "no peeing" section in a simming pool), and restaurants that allow smoking have to have a sign on the door warning as such.