In the 1950s, the most puritanical place in America was somewhere in Kansas. Today it is Los Angeles.

Exhibit A: A proposal by the L.A. city council ^[1] to ban smoking outdoors. Outdoors. Say on a patio or hotel balcony.

Puritans are people who want to live according to a strict moral code of their own devising and want to make you live their way too.

The first round of Puritans murdered their king, Charles I, and ignited the English Civil War, which left many cities aflame and thousands dead. The next wave of Puritans nearly starved half of their number to death in a botched attempt at communal farming and (later) killed the Indians who had fed them one cold November afternoon. Next, came the infamous Salem witch trials (which find their echo on politically correct campuses today). Held at bay for almost a century of progress, the Puritans roared back with a long campaign for prohibition. They finally got their way, with legislative maneuvers that Machiavelli would envy, and Prohibition passed in 1919. The result: the emergence of organized crime, the corruption of police, high officials and normal people, a tsunami of gangster attacks and the idea–new at the time–that ordinary citizens didn’t have to obey every law. The level of lawlessness has not yet retreated below its 1919 level. And, of course, the end of Prohibition, helped bring the New Deal. But the Puritans were not done. Their children grew their hair long and sampled LSD, but had the same attitudes. America should not be able to test its atomic weapons. Invasions by communist armies of our democratic allies should be treated as “civil wars” and ignored. At first, they were simply Puritanical in their foreign policy, but, as they aged, the authoritarianism came home. When I wrote in the 1990s that smoking bans would be followed by wars on fatty foods and coffee, people laughed. Rhetorical excess. When I insisted I was serious, they smiled as if at an infant. (When Chicago banned fois gras and New York targeted trans-fats, no one called to apologize.) The modern form, what I call”hippie-Puritanism,” has one innovation: it is godless. That means that the last check of Puritan ambition is gone. With God went the idea that other people are ends, not means. The rest of us are simply extras in their private movie of moral vanity.

Now L.A. and a host of other cities (some disturbingly east of the earthquake zone) are considering outdoor smoking bans. They have already banned smoking in offices, eateries, bars and beaches. Outdoors is next. Followed by a ban on smoking in your private car.

What is behind this Puritan impulse? Public health, you say. Well, that is what they always say. Witches were problems of moral health (the witches, not the witch hunters’, mind you) and alcohol was destructive to mind, body and society. Of course smoking and eating excessively can have negative health consequences. But Puritans have to morals of slaughterhouse operators: they want the cows to go to their deaths perfectly healthy. What does it matter if they were bored?

Puritanism, and those who are cowed before it, ignore the key question: Who decides? Who decides if a goose’s displeasure is better avoided than my displeasure at being deprived of fois gras? Who decides if a passerby’s momentary displeasure is of more value than my hour with a Churchill?

At the metaphysical level, these debates could go on forever. But on the practical level, the solution is simple: the owner of the property makes the rules. When government became unlimited and this simple understanding of private property was lost, the stage for social civil war was set. As usual, the Puritans are the aggressors. In the name of peace, the rest of us keep surrendering. At some point, enough people will realize they have run out of room.

That moment may come with Obama’s plan for a nationwide smoking ban ^[2].