The Eugene City Council sent a message of control to the campus community Monday night by passing the party response fee and smoking ban ordinances. The council told party-goers to control themselves: Don’t gather in groups of more than 25, don’t be too loud and don’t allow underage people to drink. If students go to bars instead of risking an out-of-control party, the council voted, they must control themselves there, too, and not smoke.
All of this control has the editorial board concerned. We don’t see how the council’s actions will better the community. In fact, these ordinances run counter to the freedom that America values and the limited police powers that keep us safe, and they should not have been passed.
First, let’s look at the party response fee. The response fee is needed, police say, to prevent underage drinking and to recoup funds spent on policing parties. We find it impossible to believe that empowering police to collect funding by knocking on doors and looking for crime will actually cut down on underage drinking.
Underage drinking is certainly a real threat to young people. Alcohol consumption poses grave health hazards even to adults, and people under the age of 21 should wait to drink. But if America wants to stop underage drinking, we need a society-wide effort.
Children should be educated about alcohol in required classes in middle school, high school and college. The media should stop portraying drunkenness as the ultimate joy in TV shows, movies and advertising. By watching ads on TV, students would think that drinking solves all their problems and brings hordes of attractive people to their feet. If alcohol isn’t treated as a forbidden delicacy, kids will stop wanting it.
The police also say the response fee is needed to pay for enforcement, but society doesn’t fund law enforcement in that manner. Criminals don’t pay police salaries. Laws provide fines and jail time in order to deter criminal behavior. We do not then charge for the policing costs, as well as for the fines for the crime. That sounds like double jeopardy.
As a society, we pool our money to pay for public safety. If Eugene wants to fund police differently, why stop at students? The city could save even more tax money if we got rid of publicly funded police altogether. Instead, let’s have bounty hunters. They could capture criminals, and the criminals would pay the costs.
We make the point broadly, but policing is supposed to be a community caretaking function, which everyone pays to protect the whole community. The response fee singles out students — despite what councilors at Monday’s meeting said — and encourages police to cite them in order to collect a paycheck. This ordinance turns police into bounty hunters, and that’s scary.
If they can’t host parties, what are over-21 students to do? Head to the bars, of course. Unfortunately, students’ lives are being controlled in bars, as well. The smoking ban also poses a threat to the liberty our country was founded on.
Generally in America, we allow businesses some autonomy in how they operate. We certainly have regulations in place to protect greater societal goods, such as environmental regulations to lessen the poisoning of the planet, and labor laws to prevent wholesale greed and grievously unsafe working conditions. But the planet still gets poisoned, and some jobs are more or less safe than others.
Workers choose the level of risk they’re willing to accept for the benefits of employment. Higher risk jobs pay more, and alcohol service jobs follow this trend. Bartending and cocktail service pay a lot of money and require little or no education. If the risk isn’t worth it to an individual, fast food restaurants are always hiring, and no smoking is allowed in those establishments.
The smoking ban takes freedom away from businesses and consumers, with only the health risks of smoking as justification. True, smoking is unhealthy. But then, so is drinking. Adult consumers and business owners should have the choice to sell, purchase and consume legal products, unhealthy or not. Let the free market decide how many non-smoking bars exist based on demand, and employees can decide where to work.
Overall, the City Council needed to be controlled Monday night. Problems may exist with partying on campus and with the health risks of smoking, but society will never be able to legislate problems out of existence. The council should look for preventative solutions to these problems, instead of penalizing students and taking consumer choices away.