BLOOMBERG BUTTS IN.(New York City's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, proposes to completely ban smoking in restaurants and bars)

You might suppose, at first thought, that the opposition to Mayor Bloomberg's recent proposal for a complete ban on smoking in bars and restaurants would be both passionate and powerful. Like the owners of guns, the consumers of cigarettes are so attached to their cylindrical objects of desire that they are willing to court death for them. And there are more than a million cigarette smokers of voting age in this city. This is a figure that might be expected to give pause even to a politician as unconventional as our billionaire Republicrat mayor. It's about the same as the number of rent-controlled and rent-stabilized apartments, and although these programs have their own equivalent of secondhand smoke--to wit, the fact that everybody else's rent is a little bit higher on account of them--rent control and rent stabilization are sacred cows. Ciggies are oxen to be gored at will.

The assent of the City Council will be required to change the current law, which, while forbidding smoking in restaurants that seat more than thirty-five patrons, exempts stand-alone bars and the bar areas of restaurants as long as they're separately ventilated. But the general expectation seems to be that the Council will go along. The opposition, which a year ago included the then-Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, and was strong enough to block a somewhat weaker proposal, has diminished to a point where it is almost as feeble as the arguments it tries to muster. The tobacco lobby, for all its fearsome power on Capitol Hill, doesn't swing a lot of weight at the local level, where voters can smell their representatives' breath, and in New York City Big Tobacco is about as popular as the National Rifle Association. The Empire State Restaurant and Tavern Association, which is the bar owners' lobby, plans to put up a fight, but its formerly staunch ally, the New York State Restaurant Association, has been showing signs of going wobbly. The Post, in an editorial the other day, lamented what it called Bloomberg's "zealotry" and denounced his proposal, with apparently unconscious humor, as "overkill." But the paper's tone was one of resignation in the face of the inevitable: "That's the way such things work in New York: Social change is engineered by taxing and regulating a product well beyond the bounds seen elsewhere." (The Post's "elsewhere" evidently excludes the two states, Delaware and California, and the seventy-odd other municipalities that already bar barroom butts.)

The taxing part is a fait accompli. On June 30th, the Mayor signed a bill upping the city's cigarette levy from eight cents a pack to a dollar-fifty, which, on top of the state tax (another dollar-fifty), has raised the price of a pack of cigarettes here to around seven dollars and fifty cents, the highest in the country. This being New York, where what might be called compassionate liberalism still has a toehold, there were objections that the new cigarette tax is hardest on the poor--as, indeed, it is, on account of smoking's being more prevalent at the lower end of the economic scale. But this is a better argument for making income taxes more progressive or for retaining inheritance taxes than it is for going easy on the coffin nails. (The cigarette tax, by the way, is the real death tax.) Besides, even if the poor pay more when cigarette taxes go up, they also benefit more, as do members of minority groups. In 1998, the federal government's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, after analyzing fourteen years' worth of health data, ...