Was public smoking decreased by market forces or ordinances?

Yeah, smoking is awful, but let the market decide
Melvyn D. Magree
Originally published in
Reader Weekly
May 11, 2000

The recent debate about an ordinance banning smoking in restaurants raises three issues that aren’t discussed enough in any law-making: how widespread will conformance to the ordinance be; how and at what cost will enforcement be; and how might the same result be obtained by other means?

I am in sympathy with Greg Gilbert’s and others desire to have smoke free restaurants.  Second hand smoke does not make for a pleasant dining or drinking experience.  Many no-smoking areas in restaurants are a joke.  How can you have a no-smoking table next to a smoking table or even in the same room?

I’ve been at Hacienda del Sol where one smoker three tables away contaminated the whole room.  I always asked to be seated in the back room at Louis’ on London road because the smoke from half of the front room contaminates the whole room.  During a long wait for a table at Blackwoods I didn’t bother to get drinks from the smoke-filled bar.  And I only stop at Hugo’s in Brimson if I’m sure I’ll be the only one at the bar.

I’ve talked to servers who detest working in the smoking areas.  They say they have to wash their hair when they get home so they can stand themselves.  And I’ve talked to owners who would rather operate as non-smoking but think they will see less business if they do.

With a no-smoking ordinance, many restaurant owners and employees will be very pleased.  It will level the playing field for them.  On the other hand, some restaurant owners who feel strongly that a no-smoking ordinance is an intrusion into the operation of their businesses will wink at patrons who smoke in their establishments.  And smokers who feel strongly about their “right” to smoke will gravitate towards those establishments.

How much effort and money will the city be willing to expend to ensure the ordinance is obeyed uniformly?  Even if the city were willing to make a big effort to expend the effort, could not those resources be better used elsewhere, say on sidewalks and alleys?  Also enforcement would work in some quarters to further increase disrespect and distrust of government.  This in turn further erodes our ability to have a civil society.

It may take a bit longer, but a private anti-smoking campaign may be more successful and far cheaper than a city ordinance.  A good start is the full page ad sponsored by the Twin Ports Youth and Tobacco Coalition on the back cover of the previous issue of the Northland Reader.

Other headlines for ads besides “Secondhand Smoke is Poisoning Our Children” could be “If Restaurants Take Pride in Their Food, Why Do They Let Smokers Contaminate It?” or “The Wine’s Bouquet Was Magnificient But the Air Was Foul Indeed ”.

Anti-smoking organizations could publish lists of smoke-free restaurants or even ratings on how truly “smoke-free” no-smoking sections are.  They could also provide window signs for no-smoking restaurants that are a bit more inviting than “No Smoking” such as “We Value Our Food, Please Don’t Smoke.”

And we can all let management know what we think of their environment.  If you are unhappy with the smoke in a restaurant, tell the manager.  If you are pleased that a restaurant has a no smoking policy, tell the manager.  And be sure to go back as often as you can.

If you don’t think it will work, consider all the fast food restaurants that are now smoke free.  It was customers that got them to change, not ordinances.  Now let’s work on the better restaurants.

If you think about it, market forces can provide solutions to some other problems that currently are going through courts or legislatures.  Market action could provide solutions more quickly and cheaply than litigation and laws.

Postscript: 2017-11-02
Well, it seems we’ve had a combination of market forces and ordinances.  It is really nice to not even worry about smoke, except possibly on a patio.  And it’s great to walk into buildings without passing a phalanx of smokers.

Now if we can only get smokers to pay attention to the no smoking signs at bus stops.  I’ve never had the nerve to ask smokers if I didn’t make them smoke why are they making me smoke!

Republicans are all for choice except…

“Americans have choices. And they’ve got to make a choice. And so maybe, rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love, and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest in their own health care.”
Jason Chaffetz, Republcian Rep., Utah

But Republicans don’t want to give people much choice when it comes to transportation.  We should all rely on cars and planes.  Forget trains, buses, and subways.  They would rather build more and more freeways, taking away the tax bases of central cities.

The cost of a cell phone pales in comparison to cost of a car, even a decent used one.  Then there is all the gas, service, and parking places for it.

And the car has destroyed many a downtown because people prefer going where there is “free parking”.  But what is the cost of that free parking: rain runoff (filled with contaminants) and heat radiation.

And what is the cost of health care compared to a cell-phone.    We each pay $238 for medical insurance deducted from our Social Security checks.  We don’t pay anyway near that for our cell phone service.  And the iPhone that is not fully paid for costs only $16.67 per month.

And what is the cost to the rest of us for an uninsured person?  Companies should worry about people showing up sick because they can’t get afford medical care.  All of us should be concerned about somebody who doesn’t get care for a communicable disease.  Did you ever hear about Typhoid Mary who worked in food service?  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon.  Although she never became sick from typhoid, she was a carrier who infected many of the families she cooked for.

Health care for all of us means better health for all of us.  True conservatives would want to keep as many people well as possible.

Adam Smith warned "Don’t trust Donald Trump’s appointees!”

 "The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it." - pages 142-143, Adam Smith, PDF version of "Wealth of Nations" transcribed by the Gutenberg Project.  You can download a text copy from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300.

Who are this "order of men”?  Those who live by profit.

Who has Donald Trump appointed to be in his administration?  Billionaires who have lived by profit many times over.  Is this a populist government?  Do pigs fly?

Given my small readership, I doubt you can make much influence.  But who knows how much influence you might have by passing this on to your Senators and Representatives?

The above quote originally appeared in “The Invisible Adam Smith”, 2012-10-25 Only 146 have viewed this page to date.  I feel like I’m just blowing in the wind.  But, Bob Dylan wrote, “The answer is blowin’ in the wind, my friend.”

Jefferson, Smith, and Large Corporations

Although Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence was written as a complaint against the King of England it really was a complaint about royal and parliamentary support of abusive crown-chartered private corporations.

Similarly, in the same year Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations warned of the corporate control of government and corporate abusiveness towards the British public.

Now we have Paul Krugman warning of the control of government by Delaware-chartered corporations and their abusiveness towards the American public.

And many of these corporations wrap themselves in the flag and Adam Smith!!!

To paraphrase "Where have all the flowers gone?" when will we ever learn?

Paved surfaces – public vs. private

Because of the freeze-thaw cycle of late winter, pavements all over crack and as vehicles drive over them potholes develop.  This is true of city streets and private parking lots.  Who does a better job of repair?

Some of the streets in our neighborhood have a few small potholes that can be easily driven around.  On the other hand, the Mt. Royal Shopping Center parking lot has many huge, axle-buster holes.  Driving around these is like driving a gymkhana.

I bet the city potholes will be fixed before the shopping center sinkholes will.

Reminders from George Washington

Tomorrow, if tradition is followed, a U. S. Senator will read George Washington's "Farewell Address".  Correction: the reading is scheduled for 2:00 p.m. Monday, 2013-02-25.  .Jeanne Shaheen, D-NH, read it last year, and so a Republican Senator will read it this year.  Click here for more about this tradition.

No matter the party of whomever reads it, from Congresses past and current actions, I feel that Congress, and many others, politicians or not, ignore some very important parts of Washington's address.  Click here for the full text from the Library of Congress.

Here are some of my selections that I feel we as a nation have ignored:

"Hence likewise they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which under any form of government are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty. "

"To the efficacy and permanency of your Union, a government for the whole is indispensable. No alliances, however strict, between the parts can be an adequate substitute."

"The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government pre-supposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government."

"However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."

"The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism."

[The spirit of party] "serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.'

To facilitate to them the performance of their duty, it is essential that you should practically bear in mind that towards the payment of debts there must be revenue; that to have revenue there must be taxes; that no taxes can be devised which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant…"

"…permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others should be excluded and that in place of them just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest."

More corporate inefficiencies

Yesterday's blog on bureaucracy, "Government has no corner on bureaucracy", was getting rather long, and so I stopped before I thought of too many more. Here are three of those.

Very early on, before downsizing became a big buzzword, I counted 21 levels of management above me - supervisor, x manager, manager of a, y group manager, group manager of b, z director, director of c, and so on. If every manager had five people reporting to him, then they could organize the whole world and beyond.

At one location it was a standing joke that if you wanted to mail something outside the building you should take it to the public mail box outside. It would get there at least a day faster than if it went through the company mail room.

Years later in another location an accountant wondered why so many companies leasing equipment weren't making payments. He discovered that our company wasn't sending out invoices.

Government has no corner on bureaucracy

I ordered some ink cartridges from Hewlett-Packard and selected 5-7 business days for shipping. Here is the FedEx tracking log for the package.


Since this is ground delivery, for Sep 8 to Sep 11 the periods at each stop and the time between stops are to be expected. The package waits for the next truck to go from one distribution center to another and it takes time to drive from one center to the next.

The mystery is why the package took three and a half days to go the 150 miles between Brooklyn Park and Duluth. Part is that the package was put in a truck Brooklyn Park on Friday night. Did the truck stay in Brooklyn Park until Monday? Did the truck arrive in Duluth late Friday and then was parked without unloading? Where was it parked? At a FedEx or a USPS facility? In either case, why is the next login for the package at 4:11 Tuesday morning? Is that when it arrived at the Post Office, or when somebody in the Post Office got around to logging it into FedEx's system?

Whatever the case, the last stage, from the Post Office to our door was done as fast as possible. It was left at our door around 9:00 this morning, the time we usually get our mail.

Now some will jump on the Friday-Tuesday delay as an example of government inefficiency. Others will say the Tuesday morning arrival and delivery shows how efficient the government can be. We just don't know the full situation. What we can say is that the whole chain is an example of public-private co-operation.

It's a toss-up on who is more efficient on interstate and intercity delivery – the Post Office or the package companies. However, the Post Office is more efficient with its house by house delivery over the package companies block by block delivery.

We have also had a recent situation that would have the believers that government is inefficient feeling vindicated. We had some mandatory sewer work done that cost us more than we would have liked to have spent. After we had paid our bill to the contractor, a grant was made to the city to reimburse home-owners for a part of the cost.

We made a beeline to the Public Works department and left all the papers we thought would be relevant. Nothing happened. We called the Public Works and were told it would checked on. Somebody came to our house to get signatures on some papers we thought we had filed and about some other possible loose ends. No check. My wife called again and was told it should have been mailed. No check. I called today and was told that it was found in the office and we should have it within a week.

Given that there are several steps that are required to process payment in any large organization, it easy to see how something can get stacked up on somebody's desk and even put in a wrong pile. See "One of the many hidden costs of health care" http://magree.blogspot.com/2009/08/one-of-many-hidden-costs-of-healthcare.html on how long it takes to bill me for a non-covered expense.

However, unnecessary steps or misdirected activities are not a monopoly of government organizations. I've seen many in large corporations. I was working in a regional headquarters for Univac in Rome, when a call came on behalf of the president of the company that somebody should go to Switzerland to see the executives of a customer; there apparently was some serious problem that needed immediate attention.

When the high-level manager arrived at the customer site, he was asked why he was there. He replied that the president of our company had said there was a problem. They pondered a bit and said that they had mentioned the problem to the president at a conference some months ago. The problem had long since been resolved!!

Another high-level manager loved to tell about the executive request he received while visiting a customer in South Africa; "While you're in the neighborhood, would you go to Australia?"