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Tuesday, September 19, 2006 

Smokeless

Anyone who knows me knows I don't smoke. I don't like smoking. But this is just very, very disturbing.

Murray Gibson, executive director of the Manitoba Tobacco Reduction Alliance, applauded Globe's new policy.

"No one has a right to smoke, even in their own home. It's not an established right," he said Monday.


...how about people's right to not be interfered with unnecessarily? I need to go find my copy of Mill's On Liberty.

My pseudo-landlord prohibits smoking indoors, and within 10 metres of the building, and, as a radical libertarian, that's exactly how I like it. It may be difficult to enforce (and might not even be legal), but that is neither here nor there, because it works in practice.

Any concerns about liberty can be ignored, as the "policy" mentioned is a private company's policy, not government policy.

The central issue - whether a human being or any human organization has the right to curtail freedom to this extent - doesn't depend on whether or not it's the government. I suppose you could say that you can choose to rent or not rent from your pseudo-landlord, but you can also choose not to live in a country... the difference is one of scale, not type.

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Ian Mathers is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Stylus, the Village Voice, Resident Advisor, PopMatters, and elsewhere. He does stuff and it magically appears here.

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