Spinko Tournament - Conservative Showdown - Smoking Rights

The resolutionPro now claims that "on balance" means "in a majority of circumstances." I thought it meant, "upon a showing of a majority of the evidence." When setting up the debate, in the Comments, I told Pro that I didn't know want it meant to have "on balance" a right to regulate. Pro responded by changing "right to regulate" to "should regulate." That made sense with "on balance" meaning what I supposed. In the comments I was clear that I thought the debate was about involuntary rather voluntary exposure to smoke. Pro attempted to use a semantic trap to evade my clear condition for the debate. Pro's Rule 1 forbid semantic arguments, so Pro is in violation of the agreed upon rules.Pro's argument that there is no clear line between voluntary and involuntary remains. The argument derives from the notion that since everything affects everything, and bad things happen, nothing can escape regulation by the government. In particular, Pro seems to argue that since there is no line, all smoking should be banned. I argue that government should not impose regulations upon smokers that require second hand smoke to be less than the natural ambient levels in the environment.HarmsPro makes false claims of my conceding several points. I conceded that smoking is bad for health. I did not concede that any exposure to second hand smoke is dangerous and threatening. I gave the example of gasoline fumes. The fumes are never good for you, but clearly when the concentration is low enough they are neither dangerous nor threatening. If there is only one smoker in the United States, say in a isolated cabin in Alaska, the resulting smoke would not be good for the other 311 million citizens, but it wouldn't be dangerous or threatening to them. It would be negligiblePro falsely claimed that I conceded second hand smoke increases heart disease by 30%. The study Pro cites makes the claim for non-smokers living for a long time with one or more heavy smokers. It is not prima facia to claim that therefore exposure to any amount of second hand smoke produces a 30% risk. When I say it is not prima facia, I means that ordinary common sense tells us that a slight whiff of second hand smoke will not produce the same health hazard as the worst case of continually heavy exposure.Even though the claim does not stand on its own, I nonetheless refuted it. I went on at some length comparing trace second hand smoke to other low risk events. I said, " Keep in mind that low-level risks are rarely measured. There are imputed from high level exposure." That assertion is broadly true because low level risks from a specific cause are impossible to isolate from other causes. Pro gave only evidence of the harm from a very high level of second hand smoke, and provided no evidence of the quantitative harm of very low levels. Pro claims I "never gave a threshold to weigh the arguments with. At this point theres no way to link this argument to consequentialism since we dont know how to weigh it." That's false. I established that wood smoke is as dangerous as tobacco smoke, and that there is always some level of wood smoke in the air. I then gave the threshold, saying "it would be unreasonable to regulate wood smoke --or tobacco smoke-- to levels that are below the natural ambient levels."I established that modern technology makes it practical to reduce the smoke levels in place having many smokers to levels of smoke below that of of the ambient outside air. Thus, if the door is opened to the outside, the outside air is then improved by the purer air escaping.Pro insisted that there must be a quantitative threshold for cost-benefit analysis. Pro selected "no smoke whatsoever" as the threshold, and jumped from that to claiming that government should ban all smoking. Pro provided no evidence that trace amounts have a measurable bad effect. How would it be possible to show that air purer than unfiltered outdoor air is bad for a person? It's not possible.Medical costsPro makes two arguments with regard to the medical costs from smoking. First he says that because the US doesn't have a single-payer system, it is not relevant what the total cost burden is on the health care system as a whole. Then he says that smoking in the United States is a problem because it is increasing the total costs in the health care system. First let's sort out the facts of the health costs. Pro cites evidence that the costs of treating heart disease and cancer are expected to continue to rise in the United Sates. The expected increases in cost cannot be due to smoking because tobacco use has been in a steady decline since 1990. http://www.cdc.gov... Other things cause heart disease and cancer, but Pro only cited the cost of treatment, not the prevalence of the diseases. Treatment costs rise because all medical costs risk. Pro's evidence does not contradict the study I cited, which showed smokers die younger resulting in net savings of health costs. For smokers, we expect the costs of treating heart disease and cancer would be higher than the population norm. However, the costs of treating other age-related maladies decreases, more than offsetting those costs.Pro says that lacking a single-payer system the costs are irrelevant. That's mostly true, which rebuts his second claim that the rising costs are a disadvantage. The exception is that with smokers checking out early, there is a lower total burden on the health care system. Now, it remains true that "checking out early" is not good for those who choose to voluntarily subject themselves to smoke, but that's a problem for those who take the risk, not for the health care system. Individuals are free to engage in all sorts of risky activities, from driving automobiles to hang gliding, with the risks borne by themselves, including higher insurance premiums.More semanticsNear the end, Pro starts speaking in tongues, saying "Only aff has substantial fiating power. This is true because it prevents neg abuse from simply saying well lets not do the resolution and do X instead. And this protect abuse on the level that the aff’s research burden would have been exploded to a very large amount. Thus, the neg cant fiat this as a solution." He does not offer an English translation, so I must hazard a guess. I think Pro is saying that the resolution requires either that either (Pro) government should have some regulation of smoking or (Con) that there should be no regulation of smoking. That's not my understanding of the resolution. It was clear at the outset that I was advocating no regulation of voluntary exposure to smoke, while supporting regulation that would prevent, say, maliciously blowing smoke in the faces of babies. By allowing regulation of involuntary exposure, I obtained "fiating power" to which Pro now says he has exclusive right.So what is the debate about? Pro (as best I can determine) argues that since there is no threshold on the hazards of second hand smoke, the government has the right to ban all smoking. I claim that at the most extreme, government should not ban voluntary smoking in which the second hand smoke to which others are subjected is purer than the ambient air. I always maintained that government could regulate involuntary exposure, so discussion wood smoke and air filtration is relevant to establishing the threshold for regulation. There are many parallels for using ambient exposure as the threshold. The full-body scanners used by the Transportation Safety Administration at airports are safe because they produce less exposure to radiation that the traveler get from flying at altitude. http://blog.tsa.gov... Workplace exposure to arsenic is compared to ordinary background levels of arsenic. http://www.greenfacts.org... Government should not ban smoking based upon involuntary exposure less than ambient.