THE OUTLAW ECONOMIST
Starbucks, Booze, and Political Correctness
Basic economics should be as easy as “how to start a lemonade stand”, but government regulations and intervention have made it “how to start a lemonade stand as long as it doesn’t offend someone, is aesthetically pleasing, and allows for apple juice unions to continue to operate down the street”. So while any introductory text dealing with the economy should address operating costs, hiring, and profits and losses, its gotten a bit more complicated thanks to bureaucrats. We’ll start with something simple, why smoking has been banned in many public places around the U.S. Let’s say you’re a bar-owner in Smalltown U.S.A. Your patrons are 40 hour a week blue collar joes who just want to have a smoke and a beer after work. Why shouldn’t you be able to allow that as the owner of that property? There has never been a reason, based on logic, why these bans exist. The CDC itself has never published data that supports claims that secondhand smoke alone causes lung cancer. So, with no knowledge of the system’s inner working, the reasonable assumption is that smoking is banned in public (and private) places because it offends certain people, people who believe that even though they have the choice to stay out of an establishment, that establishment should cater to their prejudices in case they decide to walk through the door. As 20/20 correspondent John Stossel put it in his 2004 book, Give Me A Break, “I don’t smoke, so I like a smoke-free environment, but when both the owners and customers are okay with it, can’t it be their choice?” When I walk into a Starbucks, I’m offended by the way they name their coffee and the pretentious laptop poets that sit and talk about what they learned in their government schools. Should I lobby my congressman to have these things stricken from that environment? Of course not, I’ll just get my coffee elsewhere, where they use terms like “large”, “cream and sugar”, and “coffee”. So why do anti-smokers get their way so often? And what does this have to do with economics? Non-smokers make up a large enough portion of the population that they can affect public policy right down to private businesses. The first, and most important thing to learn about economics is that non-consumers can hurt private business owners by way of the federal and state government. In a completely free market, this would not be an issue, as consumers would only be called such according to their relationship with the seller. A non smoker wouldn’t be a consumer in a bar where he or she didn’t frequent. Starbucks isn’t going to miss my dollar, but the bar down the street will, because I can’t smoke and have a drink the way the owner intended. Now that its been established that government stifles the free market via lobbyists and politically correct “consumers”, the next thing to know is that it doesn’t have to be that way. Freedom of choice is the cornerstone ideal in a free market. The economy is unjustly controlled by government intervention. John C. Keyser May 15, 2007