Idiocy and complicity of bar owners and the public combines with media bias to advance the smoker pogrom. There could always have been smoking bans if people wanted them. They didn’t. Bar owners can ban smoking any time they like. Even despite decades of hysterical “passive smoking” scare-mongering most of them do not even today. Drinking and smoking have always gone together.
Imposed smoking bans hurt the restaurant trade and, especially, the bar trade. Many bars always go under in ban-afflicted regions, particularly the little local pubs, while the bars that survive, including most of the larger venues, inherit the non-smoking patrons of bankrupted competitors. Thus bar owners in general fear competing without allowing smoking in a free market but the larger venue operators hope for advantage if smokers are forcibly cast out, reducing the overall trade, but also killing lots of little neighborhood bars. In short, the big boys contemplate a net advantage to themselves, under a regime of oppression. In Wisconsin, as reported (admiringly of course!) by WKBT-TV, some owners of larger bars are touting a “level playing field” state-wide ban. This will in fact level many of the little pubs. Folks who campaign for oppression, in seeking to acquire the wealth of its victims, deserve the government they get. Hold your stomach and look at this:
WKBT internet report (stored) (video stored)
Another “believe it or not” situation exists in Louisiana. A legislator there is campaigning zealously for a barroom smoking ban. Get a load of a “WBRZ balanced news” report which claims: “We give you the facts and let you decide.” They give the prohibitionist legislator his say. Then they give us sound bites from “two bar owners.” One is among the tiny minority who has decided to ban smoking on his own. Because he’s as happy as might be the owner of any vegetarian restaurant we are supposed to believe that oppressive imposition of the same regimen will please every bar owner. The other is a dim-witted lady named Laura Fraga who conventionally permits smoking in her bar but invites the expulsion of her best customers, drivelling, “Whatever they [legislators] tell us to do I’m gonna will support them one hundred per cent.” Smokers’ rights, Fraga opines, “might not matter soon.” Not one word of dissent occurs in the WBRZ report. When it comes to advancing the smoker pogrom, of course, “the facts” reported must be carefully chosen. We at FORCES invite our readers to decide: Who is most nauseating in the WBRZ reports, the two cherry-picked bar owners, or the two antitobacco acolyte reporters?
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