Archive Columns: Smoking & Drinking

The Proposed Philadelphia Smoking Ban

The Proposed Philadelphia Smoking Ban

    Michael Nutter calls his proposed smoking ban a public health issue because he wishes to make it one.  But let us distinguish wishes from facts.  As things now stand, the matter is a private health issue.  Bars are not public spaces, but private businesses open to the public.  So Michael Nutter must now cope with this fact:  private owners allowing private citizens to do legal activities in a private place even though Michael Nutter would prefer otherwise.

    Michael Nutter's solution to this frustration is not to go someplace that doesn't irritate him.  His solution is to force every place to his tastes by redefining private places as public. That is, his solution is not the exercise of individual freedom; it is enlistment of state control.  (This seems to be a worrisome penchant of Nutter's.  Perhaps, going on the hammer and nail analogy, when you are a legislator, every problem begins to look like an opportunity for new law.)

    The smoke problem in bars though is one that the market will solve with far more efficiency than any local fiat, and it will do so without restricting either owners' or customers' choices.  Left to the free market, there would be smoking bars, smoke-free bars and smoking bars with smoke-free sections.  In Nutter's world, there will only be smoke-free bars.  So even if non-smokers replace, or even outnumber, the banned smokers in existing establishments, there will be fewer establishments over all than would exist in a city that catered to every taste.

    Fewer bars means fewer employees.  If, as Nutter claims, his real intention is to help employees, it is odd that he should do so by putting forth a measure that will, with arithmetic certainty, reduce their numbers.  Granted, those who remain after Nutter's plan will have better conditions, but those who don't will find themselves on the sidewalk, ironically, with the smokers. In any case, the employees' solution is the same as Nutter's: avoid places that irritate you.  Those who work in such places now presumably don't mind it as much as Mr. Nutter thinks the y should, or if they do, they nonetheless prefer working to not working.  If  things were left to develop on their own, the pie would be bigger and more varied and people - mind you, without Mr. Nutter's help -  would tend not to work in places that they find intolerable.

    There is a long and laudable history of improving workplace conditions for employees, of course, but typically these are in manufacturing industries with special perils.   It is hard to see why an employee who has no right to his job in the first place should suddenly have a right to conditions that are better than those voluntarily accepted by paying customers.

    But apart from the stupidity of trying earnestly to engineer satisfaction by shrinking a market and limiting freedom when, in fact,  more satisfaction, a larger market  and no loss of freedom could be guaranteed by doing nothing, there is another dimension to consider, both practical and aesthetic. One wonders what kind of city Michael Nutter envisions after he has so fastidiously cleansed it.  At bottom, every city thrives on variety and the commerce of ideas.  Some of this variety and many of the best ideas tend to come from creative, risk-taking, eccentrics.  When the level of acceptable risk is set somewhere below having a cigarette in a bar, one cannot help but fear the loss of some interesting people.  Paradoxically, Michael Nutter wants a Philadelphia where you can sit in your cafÈ reading Hemingway and feel safe that anyone who is actually like Hemingway will never be sitting next to you.  What is even more mystifying, and just a little illiberal, he doesn't want Hemingway to have a place of his own to go to either, where without bothering the bourgeoisie, he can light up and shoot the breeze with Sartre.  So to speak.

    It is difficult not to suspect that what concerns Nutter is not really employees' welfare, but his own.  He wishes, when going about the big city, to be free from annoyance.  We all wish this, of course.  So many annoyances!  And yet, so many of them seem to be other people's delights!  Think Mummer's Parade; think motorcycles; think cigars...  Most of us, i.e . those of us who are not a little too pious, meddlesome and authoritarian, come to realize that in those instances where we are free to avoid annoyances, it is better simply to avoid them.  It is often hard to celebrate diversity, but it can be fairly easy to tolerate.

    That is why Nutter should put away his law and simply let it be known to bar owners that he will take his custom to where the air is pure.  It is rumored that virtually all bar owners would rather make more money than less, so I think Nutter will find that restraint and a little patience will repay him admirably.  It would be a valuable lesson for him to learn as well.  That way, when something else annoys him, Michael Nutter might learn that there are better things to do than try to make us all a little better, which is to say, a little bit more like Michael Nutter. 

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