Now smoking is a risky behaviour. It increases, to a significant and measurable degree, one's risk of developing a variety of health problems, including lung cancer. It is also habit-forming and physically addictive. However, even if we accept the much more tenuous claims about the dangers of second-hand smoke, there is no proper justification for banning smoking in restaurants and bars. Patrons who do not wish to be exposed to smoky environments are free to choose to frequent non-smoking or well-ventilated establishments. Workers who dislike what they deem to be a hazardous work environment are free either to work elsewhere or to negotiate increased compensation.

          But the true goal of the anti-tobacco lobby is not to protect non-smokers from hazardous restaurants – it is to protect smokers from themselves. Sometimes the spectre of projected health care costs is raised, but this is also a distraction, as smokers die younger, on average, and may in fact end up costing the health care monopoly less money. No, protecting taxpayers is not the real goal either. The fact is that smokers have made an unacceptable choice, and the crusaders will not rest until the smokers fall in line.

          One final example of risky health choices some find hard to understand is the risk of choosing to be without health care insurance. In fact, this is a choice unavailable to Canadians, who suffer under a universal health care insurance monopoly. Most of us cannot even fathom that anyone would make such a choice, and so we assume that all of those Americans who are without health care insurance must be so involuntarily. Such frightening interpretations serve to keep us from considering alternatives to our own faltering system. In reality, many Americans do freely choose to forego health care coverage even though they are perfectly capable of affording it (see "Two myths about the U.S. health care system").

          There are some Americans, though, who are effectively denied private health care insurance (as effectively as all Canadians are) and, predictably enough, the government is to blame, according to a Wall Street Journal article reprinted in the July 26th edition of the National Post. The working poor, who are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid, must buy their own insurance if they are to have any, but under current laws, they must shop in their own state. The problem is that some states are much more heavily regulated than others. In a less-regulated state like Missouri, a family of four could get a basic insurance policy for $172 a month, writes the Journal, but in New York that same family's only option would be a more extensive (and expensive) policy for a whopping $840. State laws mandating that all insurance policies cover things like podiatry and chiropractic are to blame for the discrepancy.

          All of that might just change in the foreseeable future if the House Energy and Commerce Committee has its way. They have just approved a bill that would allow Americans to buy health insurance from providers in any of the fifty states. The bill would effectively restore, at least in the realm of health insurance, what some claim is the original meaning of the Constitutional power to "regulate" interstate commerce, i.e., "to make regular." That family of four living in New York could buy basic insurance from that company in Missouri for $172 instead of being forced to pay extra for acupuncture coverage.

          The State today is like an overprotective parent, extremely risk-averse with regard to its "children," with the predictably perverse result of infantilizing us little by little. "Mommy" doesn't understand why you would want to smoke cigarettes, so if she catches you either smoking in the wrong place or simply allowing your little brother or sister to be smoking in the wrong place, she'll take away your allowance for a couple of weeks, and if you do it again it will be for a couple of months. "Daddy" doesn't understand, even as he gets drunk on profits from the sale of alcohol, why you would want to get high smoking pot, so if he catches you engaging in the voluntary exchange of marijuana for money, your victimless crime could get you sent to your room for literally years on end. Most of all, "Mommy" and "Daddy" don't want you playing with those kids from across the tracks – you know, those bad folks from Missouri who want to sell you cut-rate insurance?

          In a truly free and just society, the state will not limit the choices adults make with regard to risk any more than it will tell them whether to live in the city or in the countryside. Rather, the laws will allow people the maximum possible number of choices, leaving them free to carry out their own experiments in living, each attempting to create the best life she can. What if some of those people make choices we do not understand, creating lives we ourselves would not want to live? No one will force us to conform to their ways, and we in turn will respectfully refrain from initiating the use of force to make them conform to ours.

          A truly free and just society is not a pipe dream. It will take some doing, of course, but in the end, all it really takes for it to become a reality is for enough of us to choose it.