Should restaurant owners decide if smoking is allowed on their properties, or should the government? New Hampshire, sadly, has decided the government paternalism should trump choice and property rights. If people truly did not want smoking in bars and restaurants, then proprietors would cater to that market demand rather than go under. People who want a smoke-free environment can already patronize restaurants that prohibit smoking. But busybodies can't stop there. They want every restaurant and bar to be the same. It's your health, but they know best.

New Hampshire's neighbors in Maine, inspired by local busybodies to the south in Massachusetts, enacted the first statewide prohibition on alcohol in 1851. Those Yankee busybodies are the political ancestors to the anti-smoking fanatics who seek to ban not alcohol from bars, but smoking. Neal Dow lives! He moved to New Hampshire, assumed a new name, and switched crusades.

The Granite State used to stand solid against the surrounding storm that is New England. The liberal winds coming from Massachusetts and Vermont couldn't move it an inch. Tax refugees from Massachusetts used to move there, providing the southern part of the state with a built-in conservative voting bloc. Bay Staters who didn't necessarily wish to move to New Hampshire registered their cars there, shopped there to avoid sales taxes, and bought booze there on Sundays to avoid the old blue laws.

Do they make conservatives like Bob Smith and Gordon Humphrey anymore? Do they make editors like William Loeb outside New Hampshire? Do any of the states in the northeast have the guts to outlaw the income tax, let alone the income tax and the sales tax? New Hampshire has a rich political tradition. I wish its future were worthy of its past.

New Hampshire is assimilating into New England. Gay marriage and anti-smoking laws today. An income tax and motorcycle-helmet laws tomorrow? What happened to the Free State Project? Live free or die? My hypothesis is when that Old Man of the Mountain came crashing down, so too did New Hampshire's cranky libertarian spirit.

It's sad and unfortunate that with the influx of Massholes moving north to get away from the oppression here that New Hampshire has been Massachusettsized.

Let's hope that Concord doesn't end up like Boston, e.g. - most pressing recent issues for the Boston City Council: Ban fluffernutter sandwiches; Ban music on neighborhood ice cream trucks; Insure that all drinks in bars are in plastic cover cups. Insanity? You betcha!

Smoke is healthier than smug.

Yet liberals always insist that they don't want to legislate morality.

Yes, they do. In fact, they want to legislate anything they disagree with and now they want to legislate freedom of speech on the airwaves.

I think I spotted the political "perfectionism" a long time ago in liberals. I'm not going to say that all children of the sixties light up, but I think it's the ethic of "the buzz" that shapes their view, even if they are now dry.

I don't know, but I see it as stemming from the "tune out" mentality. It's like this, "tuning out" is a good thing, but tuning out has it's limits. If somebody comes along to "harsh your buzz", then that's "bogus", and if we can do something about that in the future, we should, legislatively. So legislative control was adopted as a strategy to allow all good hippies to finally tune out without any fears of anyone's buzz being harshed.

We've seen 30+ years of tightening control so that we can embody the values of "free love" and "dropping out" in law. And anything that is possible to do against "The Man" of the 60s, we also want done. Putting up fences is "bogus", and something that "The Man", caught up in control issues, would do. So we don't do it. In fact, anything that weakens the hegemonic power of "The Man" is preferred.

I formulated this theme in the 80s, 20 years later, I haven't seen it fail to offer correlations.

It's interesting to me that the same people who have no use for "The Man" regularly, will use and side with "The Man" when it suits their purposes. I suppose that's human nature to some extent, but how hypocritical can you get?

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