Voting with your dollars

Kansas City has been spending a lot of time discussing smoking ordinances and potentially banning smoking from restaurants and bars in Kansas City.  On the surface, smoking bans are a no-brainer.  Smoking, and smoking-related illnesses, kill hundreds of thousands of people each year.  Restaurant and bar owners contend that it is their right to allow people to smoke in their privately owned restaurants. 

They're right of course, as I have the right to either smoke, or allow others to smoke in my privately owned residence.  It would make sense that if I have that right in my home, they would have the right to make that decision in their own restaurants.  Yet non-smokers persist at trying to get these ordinances in place.

Bars and restaurants are a supply and demand business. By spending their money in certain bars and restaurants, people determine which ones stay open, and which ones close.  Non-smokers make up around 75-80% of the population.  Most non-smokers don't like smoking.  So why is there not more demand for smoke-free bars?

Non-smokers could create smoke-free bars without having to go through the government...by voting with their dollars.  There are a few non-smoking bars in KC.  If non-smokers flocked to these bars, other restauranteurs would recognize this, and more places would voluntarily go smoke-free.  Then, non-smokers could vote with their dollars to make these places popular --- while all the while ignoring establishments that allowed smokers.  If people would vote with their dollars, supply and demand would create many more smoke-free establishments without any legislation whatsoever.

We don't need more legislation protecting us from ourselves...the public should be able to affect the market through supply and demand.  We don't need laws mandating non-smoking in bars in restaurants, banning trans fats, or making McDonalds produce healthier food.  These products exist because there is demand for these products.  If people don't want them to exist,they should just not buy them, en masse.

I always feel like the same people who want smoking bans at the restaurants they visit are the same people who complain about Wal Mart running out small businesses yet shop there anyway because the prices are lower than elsewhere.

As consumers, we have way more power than we utilize. We need to be responsible for our dining decisions...and not request the government to make laws to control something that as a consumer group we can create demand for ourselves.

Comments

[Dan]

You're right, of course, that capitalism is one way of affecting change in our society - but so is democracy. The market could, theoretically, get drug companies to only market safe and effective drugs, but I want the FDA helping it along. The market could get auto manufacturers to work on making more efficient vehicles, but it seems that government intervention has been necessary to move them along. There's nothing wrong or unusual about having our democracy help correct the market.

Also, this is not a matter of tryng to save smokers from themselves. It's about trying to prevent smokers from interfering with MY air. I sincerely have no problem with smokers doing what they do anyplace where I can't smell them.