Now, I understand the arguments in favour of a smoking ban on public and employee health ground but over at Freedom and Whisky in Only following orders David Farrar highlights that the smoking ban is also an erosion of private property rights.

You know by now that I can get Land Value Tax into almost any discussion! And here is an apt one for those that tell me that real estate is absolute property and therefore not something the state should tax. Yet in the smoking ban the government of Scotland (and the rest of us soon enough) is removing a property right - the right to decide who you allow onto your property and what they can do there.

So far as I am aware, smoking is not, yet anyway, illegal. Yet the powers that be are able to prevent you doing perfectly legal things in your own property. Real property is not absolute property, but a bundle of rights that can be altered, in modern times at least through democratic processes, which is at least better than for most of human history where they have most often changed by force or diktat.

In fact the only absolute property one has is, as John Locke pointed out, property in oneself. Assuming you are not a slave, the only thing you ultimately have which is absolutely yours is yourself. Indeed this is why slavery is itself such an horrific practice. This is one of the philosophical bases behind the argument that land tax is better than income tax. Income is the fruits of your labour, the efforts of the only thing you absolutely own, yourself. Land rights are utterly contingent on the society and jurisdiction of which it is a part, so the profits on land ownership are, as Adam Smith said, a better specie on which to base tax.