I came across this article in the Rocky Mountain News this morning, talking about a proposal to ban smoking in restaurants and bars in Denver. Of course there’s an outcry about it, and I thought to myself…
This is all so predictable! We’ve seen this same sequence of events in every city that proposes an anti-smoking ordnance for restaurants. The restaurants cry out, “No fair, we will lose business! I’ll have to lay people off because nobody will come to my restaurant anymore!”
And then the local smokers say, “You’re infringing on my rights!”
And then the local nonsmokers say, “You can still smoke outside or at home or whatever, just not where it’s affecting my right to clean air.”
And then the ordnance gets passed.
And then two years later, people look back and see that no restaurants went out of business, patronage is at the same or higher levels than before, and the outcry was for a bogeyman that never came.
Here we go again.