This is why (a) I don't call myself a republican or a democrat and (b) why I don't espouse "political" principles. In my thinking, you advocate the right thing, and it doesn't matter if it's indicative of a "nanny" state or of "freedom".

In my opinion, getting people to stop smoking, even by coercion, is a greater good than slavish "aw-shucks-that's-an-unintended-consequence" adherence to to an artificial political ideal.

Plus (conservatives should love this), the Dallas Morning News ran an article about a week ago pointing out how business is up at Dallas restaurants since the Dallas ban went into place.

There's no downside to banning smoking.

Well, we'll just have to disagree.

Getting people to stop smoking with legislation is too much of an encroachment on freedom for me. I do not believe that to be a greater good. Who decides that it is the greater good? I certainly don't need government to protect me from myself, so getting me to stop smoking, by law, for my own health benefit, is not the right thing or the greater good as far as I'm concerned.

Now, I do not have a problem in banning smoking in places that one cannot avoid. In that case smoking is an encroachment on others. I also have no problem with legislation banning smoking in government buildings or on government property.

However, what has been done in Dallas, the mayor banning smoking in private businesses, is outrageous. After all, these are not establishments that one cannot avoid going to. Freedom is a wonderful thing (not an artificial political ideal), and laws of supply and demand work wonderfully well. If the demand is suitably high enough for a completely non-smoking business (bar, restaurant or whatever) the market will supply it.

The downside to banning smoking is that it is an erosion of personal freedom.

I certainly respect your opinion and I agree with your sentiment about government involving itself in personal behavioral decisions. However in this instance, it is the taxpayers who are being defended. The cost for taxpayer funded healthcare in America is expolding (Medicaid and Medicare) and a huge amount of these costs is for preventable diseases associated with obesity and smoking. Heart surgeries, knee surgeries, hip surgeries, gastric bypasses, cancer, COPD, and the list goes on. When people make harmful personal choices and then expect others to foot the bill, the government has to get involved.
Regards,
BSR

BSR, the problem with your argument is that you are starting with the assumption of a nanny state. Once you have a nanny state, then any state intervention to "protect" (generally to limit benefits or expand scope) the nanny state programs can be defended on the grounds that it's costing somebody, somewhere unfairly. The real answer to bad side effects of government programs is not to expand the programs' reach (and thus further expand the realm of bad side effects), but to curtail the programs.

If the problem is that people who smoke are not paying the full costs of their behavior, change the programs such that people will pay the full costs of their behavior. For example, you could make it such that the diseases and other problems you note above will not be covered for smokers, thus limiting the program's scope while ensuring that the costs of smoking fall fully on the smoker.

The argument you are making, and the different argument that queno made, boils down to this: the government has the right and responsibility to control my behavior. I am not a statist — indeed I am very close to an anti-statist — and I cannot buy this argument. History simply shows too strongly that governments with such powers consistently abuse them until they have consumed as much freedom as they possibly can, leaving as little as possible to the people. So any argument that starts with "but the government can be trusted on this one, despite all the bad effects of all the other times we've given them such power" simply falls flat with me.

And it's why I, too, cannot be a Republican any more than I can be a Democrat. Sadly, we don't have a practical party espousing personal liberties in the US (we used to have two, prior to the 1890s or so), since the Democrats and Republicans don't espouse personal liberties and the Libertarians are utterly impractical and ideologically blinkered.

BSR,

I'm not really sure that these measures are designed to protect taxpayers as much as to control a perceived vice, but in the end motivation is irrelevant to me. Also, smokers and obese people do typically have shorter lives and need less long-term health care, though I don't know how much that offsets the expense of the care they do need.

But you are right, health care costs are soaring. One of the biggest reasons for this is the omnipresence of government in the health care industry. This is allowing practitioners to charge more and conduct unnecessary tests (adding costs), because government (and its seemingly bottomless pockets) will pick up the tab. There is so much health care fraud going on, and the government is funding it.

Government needs to largely remove itself from the equation, give the tax money back to the people, and let them be responsible for their own health care choices. This will significantly reduce health care costs. Government may still have a role to play (helping the very poor), but it will be a much reduced role.

"When people make harmful personal choices and then expect others to foot the bill, the government has to get involved."

Therein lies the rub. Number one, when people make harmful personal choices, they should not expect others to foot the bill. Number two, government does NOT have to get involved. That is a fallacy, as Jeff points out, predicated on the assumption of the government as nanny state. The government can tell these people to be responsible for their choices, and that it is not the role of the government to protect them from their own bad decisions. If we stopped footing the bill for these people, maybe they'll stop expecting us to foot the bill. Then, maybe they'll stop making those bad choices. And if they don't, then they can deal with the consequences. That is what freedom is all about.