🚀 go-pugleaf

In my view, a comparison of a business owner's decision to permit smoking
with a decision to ban men from his restaurant is not well taken. There's
a bit of a difference between basing dicrimination on a habit or on fairly
unchangeable bilogical traits. 

We don't need to pull the heavy weapons out on this issue. Smoking is a
voluntary activity that causes many non-smokers a bit of annoyance, and a
few non-smokers real problems. Simple courtesy dictates that smokers not
inflict their smoke on others. Unfortunately, courtesy is not so simple
these days, so we are reduced to using the law.  

Jon's free enterprise argument suffers from the usual defects of absolute
positions - nice theory, bad reality.  In thiscase, the economic analysis
is unrealistic because it assumes unimpeded flow of economic information
and absolute ability to adjust one's economic behavior.  Simply put, the
analysis fails completely in a one restaurant town.  It fails less
completely in a place like Chicago, where greater choice exists.  My sense
is that an economist would be able to analyze the matter better -
something about failure at the margin,

My suggestion is to permit smoking on Tuesdays and Fridays.  8)=