Keith Halderman
Montgomery County Libertarian Party
11 February 1999

The people who favor this law would like to portray the measure as one that protects innocent workers from the harmful practices of selfish local businessmen and greedy tobacco companies. But the reality is quite different, this conflict is not between restaurants and their workers, it is between the people of Montgomery County and the anti-tobacco industry. The recent settlement of the state lawsuits against the tobacco companies would provide two-hundred billion dollars for the lawyers involved. Tonight's speakers from organizations favoring this measure will go to the office tomorrow and write fund raising letters based on their appearance here tonight. They are part of what Reason editor Virginia Postrel calls the class of people who are professionally angry. This is a battle between two industries: one wants to put us on the path to a beer and a pizza; the other wants to put us on the path to totalitarianism.

Let us be clear where the selfishness and intolerance lie in regard to this issue. Two years ago I attended a similar hearing dealing with this same question where I saw a young man wearing a tee shirt which read "I hope all smokers get cancer and die." A woman spoke in favor of a ban saying she had inadvertently gone into a restaurant that allowed smoking and become ill. To me her action is the epitome of selfishness. Rather than spend the one minute it would take to call and find out if the place she was thinking of going to allowed smoking. she would use the force of government to deny tip income to some of the hardest working and most underpaid people in the county and cost some of them their jobs. To save herself a tiny amount of inconvenience she would close businesses and perhaps destroy someone's lifelong dream. It is convenience not health that is at stake here. The scary statistics predicting x number of deaths from second hand smoke are a deception. They are based on the elimination of studies that do not come to the politically right conclusion, the manipulation of statistical confidence levels, and the expansion of the definition of risk beyond all reason (see attached excerpt from For Your Own Good). This ban is not supported by science, it is supported by political propaganda.

Now, proponents of the law will claim that attacks on the creditability of their junk science are the work of the evil tobacco companies. However, if Adolf Hitler came back to life and said the grass on the lawn outside this building is green that would not make the grass orange. The truth is the truth no matter how vile the person is who tells it, and a lie is a lie no matter how virtuous the person who tells it pretends to be. But even if the claims about second hand smoke made by the anti-tobacco industry were true instead of the blatant fabrication that they are, this would still be a bad law.

No one, worker or customer, is ever in an establishment that allows smoking on anything other than a voluntary basis. There are over two hundred and fifty restaurants in the county which do not allow smoking and there are thousands of other professions besides food service. The idea that someone is compelled to work in an environment with second hand smoke is ludicrous. The county council, no matter how hard it tries, can not protect the counties residents from all risk and the attempt to do so is highly destructive. Human beings must be allowed to decide for themselves which risks to accept in life, otherwise they are not free people. The basic premise of this ban says that there is no value to the act of going to a bar or restaurant and having a drink, a meal and a cigarette with your friends. There are literally millions of people who disagree with this. Their desire to do this and desire of someone to provide the experience in mutually beneficial exchange deserves to be protected.