Anti-smokers hit close to home

These days, because of restrictive laws that jam one-size-fits-all rules down everybody's throats, you can't smoke in bars, you can't smoke in your office, you can't smoke on the sidewalk outside your office building, and ... you can't smoke in your home? Really?

Yep. City officials in Belmont, California, have reached their presumptuous little hands into private dwellings, pinching out cigarettes in any home that shares a floor or a ceiling with another home -- apartments and condos, in other words.

Reason.tv has the full story for you:

It's not just smoking, of course; it's all the vices, pleasures and specific preferences that make life worth living that are under fire across the country. If we want our cigarettes left alone, we'll have to extend our neighbors the same courtesy for their foie gras and saggy pants. And we'll have to dump control freaks like those that rule in Belmont.

Consider it the sort of detente that's necessary to maintain a little freedom.