The idea
In review of current laws which impose dificulty or taxation on one sector of the community, to a higher degre than others, we invariably find those laws have a foundation in the lobby groups hired by the same governments to promote agenda, suitable only to their partnered big buisiness interests, while government intrusions were amplified beyond the minimal levels of imposition we normally expect from governments
The measure of qualification for a law should always be to ask; did power create knowlege to subnstantiate new rules? This endeavor is also known as the purchase of politics, which in most civilized democracies, even when innitiated through a third party, is an illegal use of the public purse.
We can see this in the promotions of many campaigns originating out of financially conflicted UN agencies such as the World Health Organization who contend that all things are connected to public health.
What politicians loosely refer to today as “science” was the identical process utilized to prove that Aryans were the superior gene pool. Are they now in that corner too? It was not untill the devastating effects of those nanny state "protections" of the gene pool, that scientists at the behest of UNESCO in seasrch of an answer to Nazi eugenics promotions, realized; that if we all originated from the same gene pool, and therefore all variance is environmental. The same misdirection can be seen in the promotions of hatred, developed by the fears of second [and now third] hand tobacco smoke.
If you would contend, the "science" is irrefutable, I have a huge problem with your reasoning skills.
A sign on the door offers all the protection we ever needed and offers the least intrusion by governments, in order to provide all the protection a phobuic or neurotic personality ever required while protecting the maximum measure of freedom and respect that we all value first and foremost.
The public health groups who find a danger in the smoke you would normally expect to find in a bar, where everyone supposedly goes to protect their health. Judging by the evidence they offer, those fears would only find scant reason to develop any level of theoretic concern, if those so called experts, spent an inordinate amount of time sitting on a bar-stool. Perhaps in order to solve this problem those people at the heads of the government funded and conflicted big pharma lobby groups, should be directed to their local AA meetings and that level of risk would decrease dramatically.
Epidemiology is exclusively opinion and postulation, it is everything science is not. The smoking ban divisions of community or what the Public health opportunists and spin doctors refer to as “denormalization”, is an abusive act, supported only in an exercise of power creating knowledge. Those who give any of it credibility deserve every bit of the inevitable hubris that will eventually flow from that kind of knowledge, during their prosecutions.
Why is it important?
Governments should be an immovable rock of credibility and confidence in service of the people alone. When that confidence wains as we see with the "denormalization" of smokers and within the controversial global warming vs climategate promotions, that government credibility and its hold on any moral authority to rule, fades with the fad, when common sense and observational skills eventually come back to the fore.
Is it hard to understand that the purchase of denormalization campaigns out of the public purse will always end in buyer remorse, when it is discovered; what was actually purchased amounted to nothing more than an addiction to chaos? "On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill was once the measure of the Government contract with the people and the true base of the Liberal platform. Those thoughts are so far removed from the current methods of governance, one has to wonder if we have all lost sight of purpose and direction entirely, or have we simply given up, with no current ability to make our opinions known to goverments, when governments seem to be focussed exclusively, on the agenda driven opinions of well heeled media "experts".
Epidemiology is the ever evolving culmination of opinions and postulations, most often driven by the expectations of those who fund such studies. It is everything that science is not. When I hear "the science is irrefutable" or "the science is settled" in reference to government direction and legislation, I have to wonder; how those we elect, know so little when it comes to the definition of such a simple word. That word is "Science".
If you continue to compare one group of people to another, opinion over opinion, and only publish the negative aspects of the “other”, in comparison to the so called normal majority. Eventually you come to a place where “other” means other than human.
That unfortunately is the end game of those who profit tremendously by the current bandwagon of bigotry and misanthropy, more casually refered to as Public Health. The one group among us in urgent need of regulation, because they have done such a poor job of late in regulating themselves, to any degree of integrity, that would afford us any level of confidence in trusting anythig they distribute. Especially anything they promote in the media with focus group testing, to maximise the effect, while in search of ever more oppressive laws of "protection" and "safety" which are evolving as the high water mark of obsession and fanaticism as the new norm.