More on smoking bans

A reader takes issue with my liberal case for a ban on smoking in public places. Here's his interesting argument:

I'm not a smoker (or a libertarian) myself, but I am an economist who does have some misgivings about smoking bans, so thought I might send a comment on your piece that Nanny is Right that I have just seen referenced in your blog ...

You're right of course to say that smoking is an externality, although we could argue about the extent of the externality since the health effects of passive smoking seem to be poorly estimated in the sense that the standard errors are quite large, although it might be that people value having fresh-smelling clothes quite a lot.

But, notwithstanding [the lobby group] Forest's libertarian antecedents, there are other well-known ways of abating externalities, namely the use of quotas and taxes. In practice, the government has chosen a quota (of zero) smoking in public places. It seems unlikely to me that the optimal level of any kind of pollution could be zero.

The alternative, using taxation, has of course already been tried, and has been hugely successful in that the level of smoking would be much higher were it not for the tax of over £3 per pack, and in that the tax raises around £10 billion a year.

So, it doesn't seem to me that the only alternatives are a public ban or Coasian bargaining (which you then discount). If the costs of smoking are really so high then tax rises are the libertarian answer since at least they leave people to make their own choices, taking into account the social costs of their actions.