It looks like quite a hearing is shaping up in the City Council, as Gifford Miller and the members elected from neighborhoods will try to stand up to the mayor’s bid to ram through a total ban on smoking in restaurants and even bars. The room, reports our Errol Louis, is apt to be packed, for it’s unusual for a mayor to testify before the council in person. Mr. Louis is for the ban, and we ourselves understand that smoking in excess isn’t healthy. If you don’t smoke already, we don’t recommend you start. That said, some of the rhetoric that the politicians and regulators are flinging about in advance of the City Council hearing is just a big smokescreen that runs counter to American values of liberty and free enterprise.

One canard is that tobacco companies are the big political gorillas here, spending lots of money on high-powered lobbyists. In fact, the political contributions and lobbying expenditures of big tobacco are dwarfed by those of the trial lawyers. The settlement money those lawyers wrested from the tobacco companies has been converted into a massive anti-tobacco fund. The case against smoking is also being pressed by government agencies that are now often more or less invested in the tobacco business themselves, and they have nearly limitless resources.

Another is that restaurant owners and bartenders actually favor the ban, even though their trade association opposes it. This isn’t borne out by our reporting. Here is Philip Korshak, general manager of the Rodeo Bar at 375 Third Ave.: “The idea of being concerned about the health of people who are drinking seems extraordinarily silly.” Here is Jerome Caldwell, bartender of the Dead Poet at 450 Amsterdam Ave.: “Let the people smoke if they want. It’s just ridiculous. It’s not right. Leave the people alone, let them do want they want. It’ bad enough you can’t smoke in Yankee stadium.”

Here is Bob King, bartender of Mexican Radio at 19 Cleveland Place — and a nonsmoker — “I just think they should leave the smokers alone. They’ve been through too much already with the new tax. Smokers need a reprieve. What is this, California?” Here is Judy Maeda, owner of Global 33 at 99 Second Ave.: “I’m a non-smoker, but New York restaurant and bars have been hit enough from September 11 and the economy.” The smoking ban, she said, would be “another deterrent. People already don’t go out. We don’t want to make it any less appealing to go out. Help us, don’t hurt us.”

Then there’s the argument that the ban is aimed at protecting innocent workers stuck in smoky workplaces. But this is not communist Russia. Workers do have a choice. This is a free economy, and no one is forced into a job as a bartender or waiter in a smoke-filled restaurant. If employees don’t like it, they can work somewhere else, or organize a union and bargain collectively for better conditions, like labor did in, say, the mines.

The most ridiculous claim is that customers really want smoking banned. In truth, there are already ventilation requirements. And nothing is preventing a bold restaurant owner now from opening up a bar or a restaurant that does not allow smoking. He might have an easier time attracting some employees and some customers. If the smoking ban would really be so good for business, there’s nothing stopping the free market from moving restaurants and bars in that direction even in the absence of a city law. If you hear a bar owner or restaurant operator saying the ban is good for business, don’t believe him. If he really believed that, the owner would ban smoking in his own restaurant and let others ruin their own custom by permitting the consumption of the divine herb.

How this is all going to go at the City Council is hard to predict. The council and its leaders have shown a good bit of gumption so far in the face of a billionaire mayor who is threatening to wreck the political careers of anyone who goes against him. The council members who are trying to stand up to the mayor are not fools or tools. They know their neighborhoods and they know that New York has always had different personality than places like Los Angeles. The question has become a test not only of the logic of the regulatory regime being proposed here but of the City Council’s independence.