SF Outdoor Smoking Ban Hard to Enforce
Lawlessness was rampant Friday on the green green grass of San Francisco.
On the first day of the ban on smoking in public parks, countless smokers were lighting up, inhaling, blowing gray curlicues into the glorious afternoon sunshine and generally flouting society's newest edict.
"You got nothing else to do out here?" said Joe Gallo, a visitor who was celebrating his arrival from Boston an hour earlier with deep draws on a Cohiba cigar in the middle of Union Square.
"I mean, we've killed 100,000 Iraqis, and the president has lied to us, and you're telling me this is the most important thing you have to worry about in San Francisco," Gallo said. "Amazing."
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Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier, who last year wrote the ordinance that is believed to be the most comprehensive outdoor smoking ban in the United States, was getting just a bit fired up herself about the city not living up to its end of the deal.
"Our job is to write the law," she said. "We're not supposed to enforce it. This is frustrating."
"When I (heard) that nothing is being done, I thought 'Wow, that's outrageous,' " she said. "This is the law of the land."
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posted by Lee Killough @ 3:29 PM
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1 Comments:
"Our job is to write the law," she said. "We're not supposed to enforce it. This is frustrating."
"When I (heard) that nothing is being done, I thought 'Wow, that's outrageous,' " she said. "This is the law of the land."
Sounds like a typical bureacrat. I think the worst threat to liberty in the U.S. comes from laws like hers -- these laws are termed "regulations" to make them sound less like policy prescriptions, which are moral decisions, and more like mechanistic administrative decisions. But they are policy prescriptions nonetheless.
When Congress or state governments pass laws giving bureacrats the power to regulate our lives, they are handing over power to the executive branch which is reserved to the legislative branch, thereby avoiding responsibility for the consequences of these regulations, both intended and unintended.
Some might give the excuse that it would take legislators too much time too mess with all of the regulations. But that is precisely their job.
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