Posted by
Always To The Right on Thursday, January 29, 2009 2:23:59 PM
Minnesota’s DFL legislators will introduce a bill banning smoking in private cars
while children ride as passengers. The bill’s advocates point to the
risk from second-hand smoke and increased health costs for support, and
claim a precedent with prior seat-belt and child-restraint
regulations. However, that mixes apples and oranges in an attempt to
obscure the impulse to penalize adults for politically incorrect choices
The analogies to seat belts and child retraints are irrelevant. Since
the state “owns” the roads and highways, it has the right to set safety
standards that relate directly to driving safety,
not general health concerns. Seat belts and child restraints prevent
injuries in accidents, not arguable risks of cancer decades down the
road, so to speak. Restrictions on cell-phone usage also fall under
the same immediate safety issue; states didn’t start banning the use of
cell phones while driving because of rumors about brain cancer.
Nor do they pretend any different:
“I’m a mom. I’m a grandma. There’s no safe level of
secondhand smoke for kids, especially in the closed environment of a
car,” Pappas said.
Studies have shown that even with a window rolled down, it takes
mere seconds of a lit cigarette for the air quality inside a vehicle to
vastly exceed the levels deemed too hazardous to breathe by the
Environmental Protection Agency.
Pappas may be a mom and a grandma, but she’s not my mom,
and neither is the state of Minnesota. I don’t smoke, and even when I
did I rarely smoked in my car because I didn’t like the smell buildup
cars get from smoking. Even so, I grew up with plenty of second-hand
smoke from family members — and so did generations of Americans. Child
mortality rates remained very low, and longevity increased
significantly during this period. Before the state imposes its
choices over those of free citizens, it had better show a substantial
state interest other than an overgrown nosebone.
Oh, wait … Pappas and her allies already have one:
The U.S. Surgeon General has determined there is no safe
level of exposure to secondhand smoke. In children, it has been linked
to everything from ear infections to sudden infant death syndrome. …
“Ear infections and asthma — we see far too many cases of those,” Sloan said.
It’s the health-cost rationale. Since the state pays medical bills,
it has the right to dictate your choices, which is the danger than
universal health care systems present to individual liberty. And
Pappas and the legislature won’t stop at the cars, either. They’re
also drafting legislation to bar foster parents from smoking around
their wards regardless of where it occurs. That would effectively
bounce all of the smokers out of the program, even though Minnesota
doesn’t have enough qualified foster homes for the demand we already
have. Now the legislature wants to create an artificial shortage on
top of that, all because they don’t like smoking.
I don’t like smoking, either. I think it’s a stupid habit, and I
thought it was stupid enough to finally quit when I got married. If no
one can prove that second-hand smoke stunted the longevity of American
life over the last several decades — and they can’t — I’m not about to
argue that it’s good for anyone, children included. But
government doesn’t exist to determine our personal choices or protect
us from our own stupidity, especially by making those choices criminal.
Update: I completely forgot to link back to my radio partner Mitch Berg
on this post; be sure to read his take. As for the hysteric in the
comments who called smoking around children “child abuse”, a hell of a
lot of us must be past victims of abuse, then. What else is abuse?
Forcing children to grow up in Los Angeles? R-rated movies? Time
outs? Puh-leeeze.