Fargo Update
Anti-smoking measure snuffs out personal freedoms
Anti-smoking activists clearly have established that equal rights mean nothing to them. Don’t people who smoke have as much of a right to commune in a bar of their choice with other smokers as nonsmokers do with other nonsmokers
FARGO — Let’s say I want a garden in front of my house, so I plant the seeds in the spring, care for them accordingly, and they grow. In the middle of summer, weeds suddenly start to grow.
Do I get my weed whacker and cut down everything, then till it all back into the earth?
No. I grab a hand-shovel and a hoe, and I remove the weeds so I can keep my beautiful garden.
Measure 4, the indoor smoking ban, is the weed whacker to the garden of freedom in North Dakota, and Herald readers should vote against it.
The first of many flaws with this measure is that, as in the illustration above, it wants to address a problem in a situation by removing the situation, not by trying to fix the problem.
According to the private coalition that wrote this bill, Smoke-Free North Dakota, the only way to make sure nonsmokers are unaffected by second hand smoke is to outlaw indoor smoking. Wrong.
Taking Schatz Crossroads in Minot as an example, commercial air filtration systems can use HEPA filters that clean 99.99 percent of air particles as small as .3 micrometers from an entire room every three minutes. Business owners also can couple this strategy with creating walled-off smoking and nonsmoking sections.
Furthermore, Smoke-Free North Dakota attacks vaporizers and e-cigarettes, claiming that their emissions are harmful, too. This is false, as the only thing these items emit is water vapor, not smoke (because nothing is burning).
Next, the proposed law is unconstitutional and violates the most fundamental moral, political, and economic natural right Americans have.
Smoke-Free North Dakota has debased the right to private property, and in dictatorial fashion, determined that business owners cannot own and operate their business in the fashion the owners want.
As John Locke presented, private property is the doorway to pursuing happiness, the key to owning your own labor and the means by which you can take transform a resource into a product, thereby living freely on it.
In North Dakota, entrepreneurs have transformed what were once shells of empty buildings into businesses that employ thousands and cater to the desires of thousands more. To remove their natural right of management would be not only unconstitutional but also, and simply, wrong.
The right to private property must always be maintained, or else we lose our freedoms.
Anti-smoking activists clearly have established that equal rights mean nothing to them. Of course, they cater to the freedom of assembly of nonsmokers, but what about smokers? Don’t people who smoke have as much of a right to commune in a bar of their choice with other smokers as nonsmokers do with other nonsmokers?
Of course — especially when we consumers have created a strong demand for fully non-smoking establishments. As a result of this demand, we nonsmokers now can fully exercise our right to spend our money at the establishments that best cater to our desires.
This is supply and demand at its finest — the true mark of a free market economy.
And as a result, here’s the question that needs to be asked: Is this law really about secondhand smoke, or is it actually about tobacco prohibition?
I believe it’s the latter; it’s a law that seeks to prohibit a legal action.
This law would add to the epidemic of job-killing over-regulation. It would diminish the free-market system and move us closer to a control system, similar to those of communist Russia and China.
Please, vote for private property rights and freedom. Vote no on Measure 4.
Vega is a student at North Dakota State University. He is the Republican Party’s first vice chairman of state Legislative District 16.
