On the KPTS public affairs television program Kansas Week, the recently-passed Kansas smoking ban was at issue. Bob Weeks is in the Wichita studio along with host Tim Brown. Stephen Koranda, Kansas Public Radio Statehouse Bureau Chief, is in the Topeka studio.
Additional coverage of the meeting of smoking ban opponents is at Kansas smoking ban opponents meet in Wichita. More coverage of smoking bans is here.
Isn’t it ironic that Bob Weeks appears regularly on a public television broadcast to state his views? I believe that there are several private television stations that do not take public funds that this show could have appeared on. To repeat a common argument stated on this blog, “Most Kansans do not watch this show. Why should money be taken from hardworking Kansans by force to subsidize a show very few people watch?”
Here in Chicago, especially during the warm weather, the only complaints are from the neighbors of the bars that comply with the two year old ban.
I don’t think that Chuck intends to have a serious discussion about this, but here’s a response.
The issue as to whether to use public facilities often discussed. Since libertarians feel that government should not have a role in providing as much as it does, should they use, or not use, these facilities?
Sometimes, as in the case of roads and highways, the government has a monopoly or near-monopoly on ownership. In order to go anywhere, we must make use of the government roads.
In other cases, since we have paid for these facilities through our taxes, we use them, just as other taxpayers do. But, at least in my case, this is done with resignation. I would much prefer to use facilities provided through voluntary cooperation rather than government coercion.
I hope this gives some idea of how difficult it is to live as a lover of liberty in America. When we use facilities that we paid for against our will — but paid for nonetheless — we are aware of the contradiction. If it provides the basis for petty insults to be hurled, that’s just another example.
Hello Mr. Weeks. I hope that you don’t equate a simple observation I made about the taxpayer-funded forum you frequently have chosen to explain your beliefs as hurling a petty insult; it just seems to me like a huge contradiction with your overall message.
I understand your point about the necessity of using a government monopoly on roads and highways (although there is no real practical private alternative to this), or using public services that a person, in part, helped pay for, even if reluctantly.
There is, however, no monopoly on the media – there are dozens of private media enterprises in Wichita alone, including radio, television and print. This very blog is an example of new media was of getting out your message, all without government funding. Your comments and observations could be uploaded to YouTube, for example, at next to no cost to you. There, you would not have to be resigned to using a service that was not provided by a voluntary association.
I do wonder if the very station you appear on meets the kinds of criticism you have made about other programs you consider bad or wasteful. Public television is frequently a target of those who advocate for the restriction on government spending; its ratings are often low and may be on subjects of limited public interest. The success of other political commentators on private television and radio programs indicates that there is a profitable market for this kind of programming. Would not leaving the taxpayer supported system be both wise and consistent with your philosophy?
Smoking bans are a process promotion of hatred and isolation in the hopes of undermining your value of personal and parental autonomy. They call it denormalization, the question to be asked?
If smokers are not normal people, who are normal people and how are smokers any different?
What is disgusting in all of this, is the observance of how many so willingly and enthusiastically participated.
There is nothing new to see here, we have seen this insanity form many times throughout history. Smoking bans are simply the example or entitlement, to demonstrate a need by cold and calculating government agencies to “protect” you further. One might ask; who then is working for whom?
In reaction to Hitlers promotions of smoking bans and other counter autonomy rally cries of “protecting the children”, we set down human rights in agreements signed at Nuremberg. How soon we forgot?
Protecting the children is a new desperate form of the Rockefeller cult verses, used by eugenicists nearly 100 years ago, describing “the problem family”. Protection of the gene pool with “best babies” contests, “never marry below your station” and always the denouncement of “mixed” marriages. Hitler simply called it protection of “the fine Aryan race”.
Today we call it Public Health and Socialized Medicine; the campaign to entitle health protections through controlling adult choice by coercive moral impositions, in place or legitimate treatment and cures.
Can you hear the jack boots?
Oh good Lord, here comes Hitler again. That’s just ridiculous.
No. Not ridiculous. Frightening and true. Private property rights, and the right to live the way you choose, is what makes us the envy of the world. That is WHY people swim rivers and hike through deserts to get here. The hope we have, that the results of our labor can be kept by us, and left to our children, and that work is rewarded, is the American dream. I can be fat or thin. I can smoke or not. If I want to be successful, I will work. IF I want good health care, I will work. If, by some twist of fate, I cannot work, and am destitute, I will go to the Church for charity, not the government. The reason churches HAVE tax free status is that they are supposed to take care of the poor, and sick. I would rather donate to a church, by choice, than to the government, by force!
There are very few people left that were alive when Hitler was on the rise and in power. I believe it is totally irresponsible for people to throw about incendiary (and ridiculous) language about Nazis and jackboots. The Nazis believed a fascist state where the nation was based on a racial concepts. They subverted democracy by building up private armies before they obtained power, and they ruled by terror and force. I don’t see that here.
If you are working at your job, someone else should not have the right to force you to consume byproducts of their drug use or environmental toxins. Cigarette smoke is just that. A person working in a smoke filled environment will have the contents of what is in the air fill their lungs, ultimately reaching their bloodstream and their brain. Why is this acceptable? If smokers cannot have the common courtesy and responsibility (imagine that) to not force others to be adversely affected by the byproduct of their drug addiction by stepping outside on their own, then I would hope government would address this problem.
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