Anarchy and Smoking

Don't tell me government is bad, or that government gives me at least as bad an answer as anarchy gives. Tell me how anarchy would protect the (negative) rights of non-smokers. When there was no government regulation, the fact that smoking was anarchistic (and subject to market pressure) did nothing to protect non-smokers, and if you took away the laws that protect non-smokers today, who can say that the situation wouldn't revert to what it was? But please don't tell me government is as a whole bad. Tell me about smoking.

You may be too young to remember the good old days of anarchy and smoking, but that's why we set a minimum age for legislators and presidents. That's so they're old enough to have seen something in life other than the words they've read in a book, regardless of the language the words are in.

When I say, "Show me that anarchy can even work," advocates come up with small personal examples of anarchy, but the smoking analogy, the Anheuser Busch analogy and the Judge Fullerton analogy pertain more to the replacement of statism than any everyday examples of anarchy that I have heard.

Pretend that you didn't know the history of oppression of non-smokers and honestly try to predict what anarchy would do. If you're honest, you'd admit that you make up something that sounds good, and that would get a different result.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• smoking
• anarchy

[neskuma]

maybe it was mentioned already:

fashion can be the answer... some time passed with annoying smokers intrusions of nonsmokers until awarness of the problem grew intensively fashionable... for now it was solved by existing "government" means... but we cant be sure "anarchistic" means wouldnt have this great effect...

:-)

sk1u0000

[notstefbot]

No one mentioned fashion, but I also believe it is an extremely powerful force. Perhaps even a strong force with irrational prejudices. I mentioned fashion as a force that defeated rational predictions in my video "Pall Mall." I think I even used that word. Thanks.

[SanityClaws]

The cost of smoking is now greater than the profit to be made= smoking ban.

[notstefbot]

You may be right as a whole. Oddly enough, a bar I only occasionally go to for brief periods recently tried to go smoke-free and changed back after about a week.

[Lizardthing]

notstefbot

You have no reason to believe that anarchy would work. Who would take the trash out?

If anarchy ruled, I would sneak into your house and burn your bed, then I'd steal your dog. There are people like us who wouldn't abuse the power, and then there are people who would go on a killing spree because the police wouldn't exist.

[WorBlux]

Social change comes before government change, every single time. Smokers and smoking are less popular now than they ever were before. There is no reason to believe that a coalition against tobacco and secondhand smoke would not have arisen in a anarchic society.

Another agent to push change in many places would be the requirements of health and liability insurers on employees

[tehinternetsgamer]

And that's what it would take. Every single person would have to be of the same mind. Every single one. Because it would only take one leader, one person to organize a group of people together and they'd have the capability to topple this so-called utopian anarchy that you cling so dearly to.

Give me a corrupt, bloated centralized government over this anarchy nonsense any day.

[tehinternetsgamer]

Now. While our gift of human intellect does give us the potential to deny our instincts and try to 'better' ourselves... The concept - the delusion - that every single person on the planet could achieve (or would even want to achieve) that is ludicrous. Insanity. Idealism.

[tehinternetsgamer]

There is no more burden for me to prove human nature than there is burden for you to acknowledge what is glaringly obvious.

Humans are social and communal animals. We gravitate towards groups that we identify with and that provide us with what we need. Furthermore we're herd animals. Some people are leaders, most are followers.

In order for your anarchist ideal to work would require all humans to suddenly forego all our genetic programming and become so-called free-thinking idealists.

[brainpolice2]

Come on. Your appeals to human nature carry no more weight than anyone else's. Prove and define human nature. Furthermore, there is nothing about the institution of a government that somehow magically changes human nature. So appeals to human nature cannot be used in favor of government, as a government will be made up of human beings just like everyone else. Any pessemistic view of human nature you put foreward does absolutely nothing to validate government.

[tehinternetsgamer]

No, your argument represents a misunderstanding of basic human nature.

[brainpolice2]

No. I'm not necessarily talking about people going their separate ways into different communities, I'm talking about people going their separate ways in terms of which institutions within a community one patronizes and which preferences one caters to. So your argument represents a misunderstanding or mischaracterization.