Which argument itself ignores what to do about unintended consequences to others, be that specific and local (drink-driving, bashing) or aggregate and community-wide (passive smoking).

Then you open the Pandora’s box of, “what is a human life worth?”

Some people want to put an infinite value on human life, but that leads to perverse outcomes (like crossing the road should be forbidden, and eating and drinking and pretty much everything else that involves living). Therefore life is not infinite in value. Therefore there is a point where sin taxes outweigh the value of life saved and should be reduced or abolished.

Where is that point? I haven’t the foggiest.

PS This ignores the (perfectly valid) argument that people’s lives are their own and the risk they incur as a result of their actions is their own as well.

Just one of the differences.

Passive smoking causes social harm, but alcohol too can harm the bystander, e.g. family members or friends assaulted; family members “going without” basics because Dad or Mum have drunk the wages or drunk the pension; strangers killed or injured by drunk drivers; etc.

This morning someone told me that a local cop said that at 3am (?), when the pension payment goes into people’s bank accounts, there are some pensioners on the street trying the ATM so they won’t waste a minute before buying their next grog. Sad but apparently true. Apparently ethanol can be addictive….

“In terms of choosing a best practice set of regulatory interventions to reduce alcohol related harms it would be naïve to suggest that restrictions on the availability of alcohol have little or no place in the best practice regulatory toolkit. On the contrary, the research evidence (Commonwealth of Australia 2004, pp.188-192) indicates that physical restrictions on availability rank only after prices/taxes as effective instruments.”

I can see that levying higher consumption taxes on goods that have higher income elasticity of demand is more progressive than a flat tax on consumption. (For the non-economist, this basically means that luxury taxes are more progressive than a flat GST on everything).

But I don’t agree that the regressive nature of commodity taxation is necessarily a problem that has to be addressed therough the tax system. The best option would be for a flat tax on commodities (and perhaps a higher tax on some addictive commodities with ’sin’ properties) coupled with a means-tested transfer payment to ensure that everybody could afford the necessities of life, even after the tax rate(including some low-level luxuries).

The design of the tax system shouldn’t be premised on equality objectives, they are far more efficiently accomlished through transfer payments from government.

If you did that, more people would stop smoking

Evidence-based safe medical solutions which ideally work close to 100% of the time are the answer. Maybe the tax money could go into researching them.

The smoking and health mob cut their own throats when they advocate magical thinking as therapy. Doesn’t work in any other medical setting. No-one has ever seen, identified or measured a “willpower”.

Unfortunately price inelasticity and income inelasticity are strongly negatively correlated - after all, the whole point of having more money is to have more choices in what you consume. So efficient commodity taxes tend to be regressive and progressive commodity taxes tend to be allocatively inefficient.

last sentence should say

I’m all for this form of nanny statism

I dunno if alcohol and tobacco are really linked conceptually - the salient thing they share is legality. The social cost of alcohol adds hugely to the health cost, while for tobacco it’s mostly just health - but this includes the health of innocent bystanders.

To translate to non-economics:

Basically what this means is that people don’t care what you charge for some things, they will stil consume them (and get the benefits of consumption) in (almost) the same quantities as they would without the tax. Addictive goods fall into this category.

For other goods, a big increase in prices (due to consumption taxes) leads to a big fall in consumption of the good. These distortions reduce the overall allocative efficiency of the economy. And allocative efficiency is what makes the free market so good.

So, if you tax things that people are going to consume regardless, you raise the revenue with the smallest possible distortion of people’s consumption patterns.

My unfounded assumption is that, since things like bathtub gin and backyard moonshine are potentially fatal right on first consumption, the state had a compelling interest in standardizing the terms of production and quality certification, and a small tax is defensible both to cover the costs of certification and also, as it were, to lend the procedure a degree of gravity and seriousness. I can’t figure out how that principle would extend to tobacco, which just can’t kill you on the spot the way poison moonshine could. Is it just slippage? Or maybe the assumption is historically wrong? Why are alcohol and tobacco lumped together, conceptually, but not other things?

The idea that sin taxes are justifiable because they defray the health costs from greater risk exposure seems to me, on the face of it, to be yet another step down the yellow brick road of silliness. All actions taken by humans on earth have contingencies; life’s a risky business. Perhaps the folks making this argument ought to re-read Borges, ‘The Lottery in Babylon,’ to see where this sort of thing leads. Or else, if they are serious about this argument, then I would want to see the specialized hospitals for tobacco- and alcohol-related diseases, built expressly for such patients, and only with these stipulated revenues. Otherwise they’re not being terribly serious.

The power to tax is one of the strongest powers a government can take on. It seems to me that people ought to, at the very least, be in the habit of being extra careful and circumspect about the kinds of powers they relinquish to a government. The law of inertia being what it is, etc. etc. Talk about cultivating dangerous habits: lazily consigning powers to government, without careful thought, causes many more deaths than drinking and smoking.