Zander: you don't like my definition, posit your own and we can debate their relative merits. I don't see where I've contradicted my own.
Far from being a statist, I'm an anarchist. I believe all associations should be voluntary, which leaves government pretty much out. I think the referenda (and they are referenda --
popular demands by nonsmokers to control the excesses they perceive in the behavior of some smokers) referred to are bad uses of law. But back to the anarchism: I think most laws are poor examples of the type.
I'm not arguing
for the laws, by any means. I apologize that my terse first post on this thread left that unclear. I was reacting in the environment of the previous smoking threads I had participated in... that's why I referred back to one of them.
Let me state clearly that I am not for smoking bans. I am for smokers' voluntary control of their smoke, to keep harmful emissions out of the commons -- the public air.
Smokers "get away with" a great deal. The commons (city streets) are fouled by both their emissions and their litter. (They are also fouled by the car emissions, but that's another issue.) They get away with it because, in cities, we're all faceless... it's simply too hard to track down who caused each harm and hold them to right it.
In an anarchic world, people would be forced by their neighbors to pay more of their own way.
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or, - eliminate the possibility of redress for those who have been harmed./
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Ah...of course...victimization [the scourge of our nation] raises its ugly head.
"No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him." T. Jefferson.
If government has
any right function, redress of real harm is it. Eliminating that redress is the action of a statist. Being an anarchist, I would reduce "government" to a public forum at which I describe the harm I've sustained, whereupon I go and exact the redress myself.
Smokers should be prohibited from smoking in any area in which anyone objecting to smoking is present or might be present. That about it?
A simple 'yes' or 'no' would help our discussion...
What are you, a lawyer? You're refusing to recognize the difference between "objection" and "harm." Go back and read pax's post about the effect second-hand smoke has on her. Now tell me how you could tell at sight that thus-n-such a stranger has or doesn't have a condition as severe. If you're willing to live dangerously and risk the liability of your smoke causing a reaction like that, fine... just don't balk when you get the medical bills.