Note: This was published a while back in the Daily Journal. John Auld, Jr. is the president of the Partnership for a Healthier Johnson County and had previously wrote a letter to the editor citing examples of how the definition of freedom has supposedly changed throughout time. His argument went through those examples, and then he took the leap that smoking bans are a new evolution of freedom. This is my reply:
John Auld, Jr. and the Partnership for a Healthier Johnson County have a single goal: to destroy Freedom. That should be apparent from the letter of his that was published on March 22nd. He employed one of the tools that all destroyers of Freedom have always used: redefining the word.
That's one of the observations of F.A. Hayek in his Road to Serfdom. He described the “new freedom” that the socialists of the early 20th century in Europe called for and achieved. Their “new freedom” was another name for the equal distribution of wealth, and not the definition known to the great apostles of political freedom: “...the word [freedom] meant freedom from coercion, freedom from the arbitrary power of other men, release from the ties which left the invidividual no choice but obedience to the orders of a superior to whom he was attached.”
I'll leave it to the historians to describe the affects of the “new freedom” that swept Europe in the early 20th century. I will state that it gave the National Socialists and Fascists of Europe the tools and intellectual climate to commit the atrocities for which they are remembered.
Mr. Auld isn't calling for the “new freedom” of the socialists, but the consequences of his “new freedom” would end with the same result. Mr. Auld wants to be free from the responsibility of his choices, of his consciousness, of his free will, of his liberty. He and his fellow crusaders want to forfeit their liberty to other men in the name of safety and security. They have cloaked their hatred for liberty under the guise of the right to clean air.
They argue that they have a right to clean air, and that it's a violation of their life if they're “forced” to eat or work at a smokey restaurant. Nevermind that they chose to stay when they were asked for smoking or non-smoking. Nevermind that Mr. Auld's Partnership's web site links to a directory of smoke free restaurants. Nevermind that the coercive force of government was not standing on call to ensure that they did not leave. Nevermind that I would also have the right to eat a meal in a smoke filled restaurant.
Yes! If people have a right to breath clean air out in public then I also have a right to breath smokey, carcinogen, tar filled air out in public as well. I was not forced to breath one or the other, until now.
The fundamental right that gives me that choice is liberty, and I had the liberty to determine what kind of air I wanted to breath. Apparently that responsibility was to great for Mr. Auld and his fellow crusaders.They obviously do not possess the integrity to choose between clean air or a mouth watering steak at the local pub so they went running to our governments. The same governments that pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisble, with liberty and justice for all.
