[untrained skeptic]

A customer is free to offer his patronage or not to a business owner. If smoking is allowed by a proprietor, there is no circumstance in which the customer is forced to enter, nor is there any circumstance in which a person is forced to work anywhere.

I agree in general, which is why I voted against the ban.

The flip side of that argument is that now one is forced to open up a store on their property, hire employees, or invite in customers.

Let me bring up some similar, yet different issues.

The civil rights era brought up the issue of should employers be allowed to refuse service to people based on race.

You could argue that no one should be able to force a proprietor to offer service to someone, and that those people could simply go elsewhere. However, in reality they often didn't have a choice of just going somewhere else.

Do you have a right to shop, work, and eat in a smoke free environment?

Non-smokers aren't a small minority, they are a majority. The stories about second hand smoke being harmful are mostly if not completely garbage, so it really isn't a health issue.

Therefore I don't see why the government should have any authority to raise convenience and comfort for non-smokers over the rights of property owners.

But let me bring up the issue of employers banning guns locked in employees cars at work.

People have a right to keep and bear arms. However, property owners such as the employers have rights to determine who is allowed on their property and what they bring with them on that property.

How to balance between those two conflicting rights is a proper role of the legislature.

I think that allowing employees to keep their weapons locked in their cars is a reasonable balance of those rights. It allows employees to be armed on the way to and from work. It doesn't create a dangerous situation for employers, since it is ridicules to think that a ban by an employer prevents an employee from bringing a gun to work. Such a ban does not prevent those who with to do harm from doing it.

It is a restriction of the property rights of the employer, but it is done to preserve the rights of the employees, and is a reasonable balance of those rights.

[Madame Dufarge]

Before the smoking ban hysteria, many businesses spent thousands of dollars on ventilation and separate smoking areas, a market-based solution that was working just fine.

This wasn't enough for the parasites making a living off Big Smoking Ban. New frontiers had to be found and goal posts had to be constantly moved to guarantee their sinecures.

Each of these demands was a further encroachment of property rights, but since smokers had been so thoroughly demonized by Big Smoking Ban, this tyranny of the majority was allowed to infect the body politic like a fungus.

Attempts to rationalize these bans encourage the growth and hasten the rot.