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New York City, N.Y. – The government’s war on the individual’s rights is now being expanded to include smoking in your own home if New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio has his way.
Mayor de Blasio’s plan includes attempting to coerce developers and landlords to ban smoking inside of apartment buildings as part of his administration’s agenda to reduce smoking in New York City.
The claimed impetus is so that neighboring tenants don’t have to inhale secondhand smoke.
But it also means that smokers would be prohibited from smoking in one of very few places a person can currently smoke in NYC; their own residence.
The plan was outlined in the recently released “One New York: The Plan for a Strong and Just City,” which encompasses the hiring of four health advocacy groups at the price of $9,000 each to get apartment building complexes to prohibit smoking within apartments, according to a report in the N.Y. Post.
City officials were quick to point out that the plan is strictly voluntary, but the “sustainability plan” laid out that that de Blasio’s administration was formulating legislation which would require apartment complexes to create a smoking policy and “disclose it to residents and prospective residents.”
“Everyone benefits from smoke-free housing. Residents enjoy breathing cleaner, healthier air in their homes … while owners see reductions in property damage and turnover costs,” a Health Department spokesman told the N.Y. Post.
The notion that everyone benefits is absurd, as the person whose liberty is stripped by a potential bureaucratic mandate most surely doesn’t benefit.
Smoking has already been banned across parks and commercial establishments in New York City. The current prohibitions were put into place by former mayor Michael Bloomberg, who also attempted to get large soda pops banned in the name of health, to no avail.
This is simply the continuation of big government thinking that it knows what’s better for you than you do. This can be seen in California, with the recently passed law which bans religious and personal exemptions to mandatory vaccination of public and private school attendees.
One can only imagine the police harassment from those who are forced out into the street to smoke a cigarette and they step outside of the designated smoking box. The headline will read, “Criminal Shot by Police for Disobeying NYC Smoking Ban, Officer Feared for his Life when Threatened with Flaming Tobacco.”
The nanny state thinks it knows better than you do. But they do not — nor does any bureaucrat, police officer, or politician, have the moral ground to stand on when telling individuals what they can and can’t do with their own bodies on their own property.
Perhaps someday the government will remove all human choice; in the name of keeping you healthy and safe of course.
Jay Syrmopoulos is an investigative journalist,
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