Walter Tejada

When I moved from DC to Arlington last February, I consoled myself by thinking that the relative loss of the urban environment I loved so much would be partially offset by not having to deal with activist, nanny-like local governments under the likes of which DC and Maryland have been suffering since time immemorial. Instead, we have Walter Tejada, our newly elected county board chairman. Apparently, he is threatening to push on us a triple whammy of proposals – banning trans fats in restaurants à la Montgomery Cty., banning smoking in public places and encouraging people not to own cars. The last one is the least offensive – it amounts, as far as I can tell, to an advertising campaign, though there are murmurs of a shared bike program. Spending public money on such advertising is problematic, no question about it, but I suppose we need to learn to live with the fact that if that's as far as it goes, we're not so badly off.

The other two are completely infuriating, but not because I want to eat Wonder Bread slathered with margarine while puffing on a Marlboro. They cut straight to the question of a government's job. I've struggled for years with the idea of public health, and finally concluded that there is no such thing. It is not the government's job to ensure that its citizens are healthy, even if “healthy” is defined according to well-researched science. It's simply none of its business what lifestyle choices its citizens make. But wait, you might reply, we're only talking about the public sphere, and it is the government's job to care about that. It is not trying to prevent you from eating trans fats at home, after all, only in restaurants. Even if you accept that premise, the argument doesn't hold water. A restaurant is not public sphere; being open to the public does not make it so. It is a private enterprise, and the government has no business dictating what goes on in its kitchens (unless they are making a dirty bomb out of smuggled uranium, I suppose, but even that is a tough sell unless the government can prove an intent to detonate it). Banning trans fats in a public school cafeteria is one thing. Trying to ban it in restaurants is something entirely different, and much more sinister. Someone who cares enough about trans fats has the responsibility to learn which foods have them and then avoid ordering them when going out, or patronize restaurants, which already exist, that voluntarily eliminate them.

Smoking is no different. I concede that second-hand smoke from your cigarette is more harmful to those around you than the trans fats in the margarine on your plate, and more difficult to avoid. But the principle is the same. Non-smoking restaurants and even bars have long existed, and if the government stopped trying to ban smoking by fiat, they would become a tremendous business opportunity, and I guarantee you many more would open very quickly. The same public/private principle applies: I can buy a smoking ban in a county courthouse, but not in a privately owned business.

About the only sensible thing Tejada has proposed so far is allowing the addition of rental units to private houses, though unfortunately it's couched in affordable housing rhetoric. House owners should be able to add rental units to their houses simply because the house is their private property. And if your neighbors don't like the fact that a large immigrant family just moved into your English basement, it's not the government's job to ensure that your neighbors are happy – it is the neighbors' own.