I wrote a big essay called LIBERTARIANS, SMOKING, AND INSANITY: How Ideology Affects Ideas About Freedom and Health a few months ago, suggesting that even those who defend the right to smoke including my fellow libertarians should acknowledge that smoking is a very bad idea, often fatally so (see ACSH's booklet, Cigarettes: What the Warning Label Doesn't Tell You). I also criticized the doctrine of free will and the idea, promulgated by Dr. Thomas Szasz, that mental illness is a myth (or at least is merely a lifestyle choice) not that I called smokers crazy, mind you, but I wanted to make the point that it is naive to say that each choice in life is as good as the next regardless of whether one chooses a diet full of fruits and vegetables or a home in a cardboard box on the roadside where the CIA can't send its miniature robots to steal your dreams.
I annoyed a few people with the essay, including some friends, but the whole world has a chance to give to me a piece of its mind on November 7. That's when I'll speak on the aforementioned topics at a freewheeling forum hosted by a libertarian group called the Junto (run by Victor Niederhoffer, investment-analyzing author of Practical Speculation in an Uncertain World). This takes some courage on my part, not only because we're in the midst of a heated debate here in New York City over whether to ban smoking in restaurants but because the Junto, as I've learned from attending a few times in the past, can get pretty nuts, to use a non-technical psychological term.
I heard my friend Jeffrey Friedman, a political science professor at Barnard, talk to the Junto. His theme was the problem of public ignorance and how it affects government behavior, but Junto meetings tend not to stay on topic, so the whole night went sort of like this (I'm paraphrasing but not exaggerating, I swear):
JEFFREY FRIEDMAN [to Todd Seavey]: Do you know the procedure?
TODD SEAVEY: I think they do several minutes of announcements before letting the speaker talk.
VICTOR NIEDERHOFFER, INVESTOR AND LEADER OF JUNTO GROUP [starting the meeting]: Let's hear a response to last week's speaker.
ELDERLY BRITISH MAN [stands in front of group]: Ah, yes, well, it seems to me what with the significant military expenditures we are currently
NIEDERHOFFER [interrupting]: Tell us what you do. Aren't you involved in Human Ecology?
ELDERLY BRITISH MAN: Right, yes, well, rather, but I shan't have time to get into all that, you know...as I was saying, we now spend on defense some 400,000 billion
[Twenty minutes pass in this fashion, with announcements, interruptions, and tangential monologues interweaving, until...]
NIEDERHOFFER [without turning around, yells loudly enough to address a large, mysterious figure at the back of the room]: What about you, Mister E? What do you think the future holds?
"MISTER E" [speaks in grim, booming voice through large jowls]: Beginning in July, we will witness a series of increasingly severe natural disasters. Temperatures will fall. Talk of global warming will give way to talk of global cooling. Cold temperatures will inspire wars, as they have throughout history. The Chinese will invade Vietnam, as they do in times of cold and want. Vulcanism will increase, due to the wobbling of the Earth on its axis...
"Mister E's" pronouncements were then followed by about a half hour of reminiscences from a tattooed elderly gentleman who'd been stationed in Japan after World War II, had wives in various countries, and had ultimately been thrown out of Japan, possibly for some infraction involving his trafficking in antique pistols, though we never learned. Two hours into the meeting, we finally heard Prof. Friedman's views on political science. (Click here for a fuller account of that whole strange evening.)
I expect my experience (see above for time and place) will be as unpredictable as Friedman's, but I will try to stick to the topics of risk, arguing that while some people are more risk-averse than others, there are objective aspects to probability that should not be overlooked when considering public health. If (in some places) there is widespread fear of genetically-modified foods, it does not follow that scientists, who know better, ought to be devoting their time and energy to assessing and re-assessing the safety of some harmless legume. Similarly, just because many people are complacent about the familiar habit of cigarette-smoking doesn't mean that they've rationally calculated that their enjoyment of smoking outweighs the likely pain associated with lung cancer, emphysema, and other disorders. So libertarians ought perhaps to be more cautious about describing consumer preferences as the arbiter of rational risk assessment.
Whether history will record that it was rational for me to risk facing a boisterous and opinionated crowd like the Junto and espouse these views remains to be seen.