Taxing Thirst

Though it's unlikely she'll ever admit it, Malory Shaughnessy, a Maine-based crusader against substance abuse who wants to raise alcohol taxes, is in a twelve-step program.

I don't mean to imply that she is addicted to drugs or alcohol. Rather, based on her dour editorial in the Bangor Daily News, I'd say she is incurably ravenous for tax increase after tax increase (times twelve and maybe more). Little steps, each time, and yet by the time she's done, we'll probably be looking at a six-pack of Bud that costs the equivalent of a nice Lafite Rothschild.

Like scores of other nannies, Shaughnessy wants to have it both ways. She says she only favors a little price hike, just pennies per bottle, no big deal; but then, a few paragraphs later, we learn that the increase is dramatic enough that it should stop a chunk of the population from over-imbibing, and that the extra tax will produce massive piles of money that the state can use to further combat drinking. Obviously, those statements can't both be true.

Apart from the fibbing and the obfuscation, the problem with people like Shaughnessy is, they don't ever stop. We've seen it with smoking bans: every time smokers gave in just a little in hopes of buying peace, the various groups of self-appointed vice-fighters yo-yo'd back around in mere months with new demands for bans, and new tax proposals. It'll be no different with the forces of temperance and teetotalism.

Incidentally, the word temperance connotes restraint. Well, hey, how about a little restraint from the other side? How about just leaving people alone? I see no credible self-control at all in the tireless promoters of drug and alcohol crackdowns. And what's more, I predict that within a generation or two, the New New Puritans will argue that just as there supposedly are no safe levels of tobacco smoke, alcohol isn't truly safe in any quantity either.

Scoff if you want. You can drink to my foresight in 15 or 20 years; just be prepared to pay through the nose.

Comments

[Jerry]

I don't think they ever understand that if you tax people out of a bad habit, number 1 it creates a black market and number 2 if the tax makes people stop buying alcohol, there won't be any money? Seat-Belt laws, speeding tickets, etc. Everything that you try and tax away, if it worked, would then short out whatever program you were trying to stockpile money for.

God I hate Nannystaters.

[GreginOz]

re "just be prepared to pay through the nose."?
No thanks Roj, instead I will SNORT it through the nose...AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA CHOO!

[Martin Owens]

I think you have hit the nail on the head here, Rogier.

This isn't about cigarettes or booze ( or gambling, or pornography, or CO2 or whatever). This is about bossing people around. The professional Do-gooder is a bottomless pit. Give him/her/it everything on the list of demands today, and the only result will be a new and worse list tomorrow.

No one would think of giving an alcoholic the keys to a liquor store, or a degenerate gambler a suitcase full of cash. Why, then, are we so hell-bent on giving political power to people so clearly afflicted with the itch to play God?

[markm]

What, you expect "temperance" advocates to be temperate? Not since Carrie Nation...

I can't find the link, but in the 1830's many US cities had a "temperance club", just a social club where the members would meet and have dinner with a little wine or beer, but no one getting drunk. I consider such a club a welcome advance in civilization in a country that then led the world in the consumption of distilled spirits (mostly home-brewed), and where it wasn't uncommon for drunks to stomp their friends to death in bar fights. They didn't force others to change, they just set a better example, including moderate drinking.

But then it became political, and the nuts have been in charge ever since.