smooth

Right now companies are opting out of paying for their employees' medical bills. Premiums are skyrocketing, and people continue to do all the things you list because they have a right to.

I don't know the corporation's position on why a person can't smoke. But the health care is a legitimate issue, if they wanted it to be. They could have barred someone from smoking, but that doesn't mean they have to bar you from eating junk food. I suppose they could, but the fact that they choose not to doesn't undermine the policy.

In fact, one could argue that their choice not to control every aspect of your personal life, and your agreement to concede partial control over your affairs, bolsters my point that consensual agreements between workers and employers about appropriate conduct is as much a legitimate contract in a capitalist economy as your decision to work somewhere that doesn't care what you do on your free time.

edit: my apologies, I forgot what thread I was in. I didn't mean to take this discussion so far afield.

My main point is that I'm glad someone is watching out for the youth still in schools. Parents aren't as capable as they were years ago. Significant amounts of fathers are absent from many youths lives--both from carelessness and prison sentences. Mothers have to work for income instead of earning a wage for working at the home. Even dual parent families were eventually pushed into the workforce. This dilemma of adequate minor supervision in an advanced industrialized nation is now effecting all class levels, except for the wealthiest slices of society and those who haven't been pared from the upper-middle class bracket yet.

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"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann

"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman