Of course it wouldn’t end with choices left up to the public. The left seems driven to take away all but the correct choice.

“Mayor Bill de Blasio is ramping up the city’s war against smoking — at home, The Post has learned,” the New York Post reported last week. “The administration is planning to select and pay four health-advocacy groups $9,000 apiece to pressure landlords and developers to prohibit smoking in their apartment complexes so neighboring tenants don’t inhale secondhand smoke.”

Here’s the most laughable part of the article: “City health officials emphasized the initiative is voluntary — at least for now.”

Now, let’s agree on some things. First, smoking is bad. People shouldn’t smoke. Also, secondhand smoke is bad. People who do smoke shouldn’t do it around others who object. And kids shouldn’t start smoking — ever. We should continue to make cigarettes difficult for kids to obtain.

But smoking isn’t illegal (at least not yet). It’s an individual choice. Pressuring landlords to ban smoking from their buildings is a loss of personal freedom.

A central tenet in American life has been that people can do whatever they want in their own homes.

Not anymore, apparently.

“Smokers would be barred from lighting up in one of their last sanctuaries: their own living quarters,” the Post reports. “Smoking is already banned in public places, including bars and restaurants, workplaces, sports venues and parks.”

Oh, it’s not just smoking. They’re also forbidden to do something that is not smoking, because it might (in some cases) be confused by others for smoking.

“Today the New York City Council approved an ordinance that prohibits the use of e-cigarettes in all the places where smoking is prohibited, which is pretty much everywhere except private residences and some outdoor locations (not parks, though!),” Forbes magazine wrote last year. “The ban takes effect in four months, although business owners will have another six months to post ‘No Vaping’ signs.”

Why? Because, as one city council member explained, “many of the e-cigarettes are designed to look like cigarettes and be used just like them, they can lead to confusion or confrontation.”

Because seriously, New Yorkers hate confrontation.

Here’s what’s wrong with government taking away our freedom of choice. For one thing, government doesn’t always know best.

“To take one example, take a look at the food pyramid still promoted by the Agriculture Department — a high-carbohydrate recipe that claims to offer a healthy diet. Studies show that carbs cause obesity, but the government still pushes its old message — which is a guaranteed way to gain weight,” Investor’s Business Daily notes.

Remember eggs? Government declared them bad more than 40 years ago. Except now scientists say they’re not bad.

As Michael Guillen wrote in U.S. News & World Report in March, “This isn’t the first time science recants what it believes to be true, nor will it be the last.”

The point here is that eliminating choices is the cheap and easy way to go about changing people.

It wasn’t going to stop at public bans.