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Donna Mancini letter to C-J on
smoking ban editorial:
September 15, 2003
Dear Editor:
Your September 14 editorial, “Smoking as Freedom,” is a museum-quality example
of the anti-smoking hysteria that has pervaded the American left for the past
several decades. Many studies, including one done by the World Health
Organization, have concluded that second-hand smoke is a “minor irritant,” not a
significant health risk. However, you choose to cite a melodramatic study that
purports to show a link between second-hand smoke and disease. Yet your “sky is
falling” rhetoric is not matched by equally dramatic proposals to eradicate the
“dreadful evil” of smoking. In your September 8 editorial, you state that you
are not big fans of smoking bans, and in your September 14 editorial, you speak
of “joining the search” so that some of Senator Dan Seum and Councilman Doug
Hawkins’s constituents “can be spared.” If you truly believe your own
propaganda, why not advocate the complete outlawing of smoking, even in private
homes, cars, and outdoors? If smoking causes disease in restaurants, then it
surely does so in private homes. Do you shrink from the logic of the
anti-smoking hysteria because you know the American people would not tolerate
such an intrusion into their liberties? Is it because you recall the folly of
prohibition, with its corresponding rise in organized crime and the widespread
contempt for an unenforceable law?
Or is there a more Machiavellian reason? The one thing the left loves more than
telling people what to do in one area of life is to increase the size of
government. Is that why you support higher cigarette taxes, but not the outright
prohibition of smoking? That way, you can sanctimoniously denounce smoking,
while government rakes in more cigarette tax revenue than all the profits of the
tobacco industry, funding a never-ending stream of handouts, lifetime employment
for an army of busybody bureaucrats, and the ability of government to intrude
into every aspect of American life-except, of course, the press.
Sincerely,
Donna Mancini
Chairman
Libertarian Party of Kentucky
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