Exclusive to this site, January 12, 2001

SALSSO Bars in Ottawa?
by
Pierre Lemieux

 

Suppose that an individual owned, or leased, a piece of private property where he built a bar or restaurant and wished to cater to a very special, minority clientele. Imagine that he puts up a big SALSSO sign outside, standing for “Smokers And Lovers Of Secondhand Smoke Only.” What would be wrong with this? Smoke haters only have to patronize other businesses. And “this is a free country,” isn’t it?

Should a business owner be forced by law to put up a SALSSO sign if he wished to cater to a smoking clientele? Should intelligent bureaucrats and politicians force profiteering shopkeepers to warn stupid consumers about what kind of customers are inside? If some government can dictate the language in which shopkeepers post signs in “their” places, why not force their Ottawa counterparts to have SALSSO warnings if they want to cater to the apartheid-stricken 25% minority of smokers-niggers? We are far down the road from this kind of issue.

The Ottawa rebel bar owners who are converting their establishments into private clubs – as if to roll back the nationalization of their property – remind us that SALSSO bars, restaurants, flights, or whatever, are forbidden by law. We still allow SALSSO marriages and SALSSO houses, but for how long? Now, “forbidden by law” means that the tobacco police will impose fines to those who don’t obey. If some rebels don’t pay the fines, their assets will be seized. If one of them tried to prevent the seizure, state praetorians would eventually come, and with something else than love messages in their holsters.

What would be wrong with SALSSO bars, restaurants or, for that matter, churches? We already have the equivalent (and without the outdoor warning) for, say, homosexuals, or meat eaters, or Mormons. The advantage of private property and freedom of contract is to allow minority tastes to be catered to – provided of course that the minority is willing to pay for satisfying its own preferences, as opposed to forcing others to subsidize them. On the contrary, political and bureaucratic processes arbitrarily and coercively handicap some individuals in order to favour others.

In other words, between the two extremes of banning smoking establishments or forbidding no-smoking ones, there is the Western solution of liberty: let everybody try and make his own private arrangements.

There could be an argument that, on a free market, smokers would be disadvantaged, i.e., could not get their preferences catered to, as they are statistically poorer than nonsmokers. If this were true, laws forbidding shopkeepers to cater to smoking customers would be useless. It is indeed because smokers are willing to pay for their preferences that antismokers coercively prevent them from voting with their dollars.

Against freedom of choice and diversity, public health is meant to be the final argument – in everything. McDonald’s is now forbidden to sell Snoopy dolls in China because, argued a state newspaper, the promotion “instigated a buying spree ... and seriously affected the physical and mental health of children and teenagers.” “Public health” has become a spare label for statism and authoritarianism.

The totalitarian tendencies of the public health movement were already apparent in Nazi Germany. It is now a well-documented fact that the Nazis invented most of our anti-smoking policies. Nazi slogans proclaimed, “Your body belongs to the nation!”, and “You have the duty to be healthy!” In 1941, the Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research was created under the direction of Karl Astel. A dedicated Nazi who committed suicide in April 1945, Astel viewed opposition to tobacco a “national socialist duty.” As president of the University of Jena, he banned smoking in all university buildings.

The world is packed with coincidences? I am always reminded, in these matters, of former Québec premier Jacques Parizeau who saw himself as a nationalist and a socialist, but sued, and won against, an analyst who suggested he had a National Socialist bent! Being hopelessly puzzled by that, I must still have some Newspeak to learn.

Or perhaps we should say things as they are, call a cat a cat, and a fascist a fascist. The Ottawa bar rebels are on the side of property, liberty, and civilization. They are fighting for all of us, smokers and nonsmokers alike, against at best the tyranny of the majority, at worst a disgusting group of snitches and bureaucratic whiteshirts.

Buy Smoking and Liberty by Pierre Lemieux at Amazon.com. Original French version also available.