June 2001
Drawing a Line in the Ash
by Filip Palda
This summer, Ottawa will join the ranks of cities that have banned smoking in restaurants, bars, and other public places. The problem with this by-law is that restaurants and bars are public only in that they are places where the public convenes. Restaurants are not public property. Politicians who refuse to make this distinction and insist on redefining private property as public property are playing an Orwellian word-game which invites citizens to use government force to seize each other's wealth.
The argument between smokers and non-smokers is epic. Both groups cross each other like Montagues and Capulets in dusty backstreets, ready to draw steel at the least provocation. In an atmosphere charged with hostility, government should not hire itself out as muscle on the side of one or another, but rather encourage both sides to come to a peaceful understanding.
A by-law that forbids smoking in restaurants allows non-smokers to profit at the expense of restaurant owners and smokers. Restaurants are real-estate whose use is open to the highest bidder. In a free market, smokers and non-smokers "bid" to rent restaurant space. The Ottawa by-law will force some smokers to stay home for dinner and so knock bidders out of the contest for restaurant space. A recent study based on surveys of restaurants in New York by Michael Evans suggests that the 1995 smoking ban there caused up to a 9 percent drop in revenues.
To better understand how any kind of ban may help and harm different groups, consider what would happen if Ottawa forbade the Senators hockey team from selling corporate boxes. Some businesses would find other means of entertaining their employees, and the space freed up would go to lower-paying fans. The Senators would lose money and corporations would lose the use of boxes.
Disappearing corporate boxes would not sadden hockey fans. Nor will the harm to restaurateurs and smokers of the Ottawa by-law moisten the eyes of non-smokers. That is because non-smokers are dazzled by the prospects of immediate gain and fail to see the larger consequences of asking government to strong-arm our fellows.
What is to stop a future generation of snackers sensitive to loud noises from pointing to smoking bans and arguing that politicians should also ban music in restaurants? In Ancient Rome, the dictator Cornelius Sulla murdered thousands of prominent citizens, exiled their families, and auctioned off their estates. Bidding would start when the auctioneer planted a spear in the ground and was soon over, but the anger of Sulla's "proscribed" victims festered and encouraged generations to seize and reseize each other's property by using the force of the state. If Canada is not to slide into a slow-burning war between citizens, we must resist using the state to settle our disputes.
Our most peaceful dispute resolution mechanism is the private market. The idea behind the market is that you work hard, take risks, earn money. Money allows people to have some say in how the good things in society get divided. The division is peaceful when people believe that hard, productive work— and a bit of luck—are a fair way of deciding who gets what.
The division of goods in a free market can accommodate a variety of tastes because no central authority dictates what must be produced. Each producer is free to find a niche and satisfy a particular clientele. This may explain why in Montreal, Canada's capital of "la bucanne," dozens of coffee shops have begun to outlaw smoking in order to please their clientele. In the US, long before smoking by-laws came into effect, thousands of restaurants had banned smoking. By allowing consumers to segregate themselves into smoking and non-smoking restaurants, the free market allows people to agree to disagree.
Ottawa's by-law fits the tastes of its citizens as poorly as did those overalls and grey tunics that Mao-Tse Tung forced onto generations of despairing Chinese. Any city that wants to imitate Ottawa might first want to consider Thomas Paine's idea that "The laws which common usage ordains have a greater influence than the laws of government. In fine, society performs for itself almost every thing which is ascribed to government."
Filip Palda is Professor at l’École Nationale d’Administration Publique in Montreal, and Senior Fellow of The Fraser Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago.
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