A generic beer that was too cheap for Saskatchewan
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
That same brewery gives every employee free beer every week because that is cheaper than giving employee discounts.
And now legal cannabis pricing is even worse.
I can't legally very much beer or wine back to Saskatchewan when I make a trip to Alberta, even though it's significantly cheaper there.
Edit: I knew about the "no transport between provinces" thing, but I didn't know about the receipt thing. I suspect that if you're in Alberta, with Alberta plates, you're not going to have your beer confiscated. If you're in Saskatchewan with Alberta plates, and have a trunk full of beer... they're probably going to suspect you bought it all cheap at home and are bringing it to friends.
Coincidentally, that restriction was just removed! The Minister for Intergovernmental Affairs announced it today. [1]
However, provinces and territories can still legislate their own barriers. But federally, the law no longer stands.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/intergovernmental-affairs/news/2019...
And we knew it would be. The heavy-handed regulations here have often met responses like, "well it will take time to sort this out, give it a few years." Unfortunately, the example of alcohol regulations suggests it will take decades - and still not get figured out.
As an occasional consumer, Ontarian and Canadian, I don't mind. Alcohol has a lot of societal costs.
The fact is there are social costs to alcohol and they have to be internalized somehow. Taxes are a pretty good way of doing that.
Call me cynical, but I would take a good look at how many tavern owners were behind the lobbying for this sort of legislation.
It's when things are outright illegal (see: prohibition, narcotics) or the cost of ignoring the law is de facto lower than the legal price that things become quite dangerous for consumers, like the sale of narcotics laced with cheaper, more potent compounds like fentanyl.
For better and worse, a regulated market that pushes prices upward is usually better than an unregulated market or a criminalized one.
Just when you think you've seen everything; someone actually came up with this term? Is this meant to try to convince libertarians as to the merits of statism and regulation?
Legal weed is the next one. They could have just decriminalized it but instead play this game to maximize how much they can sell it for without creating a black market.
Empirically, you should be pretty confident that removing the tax will cause deaths, illnesses, etc. to go up. Keeping it costs some people some annoyance, and reduces everyone's agency.
At the end of the day, you have to make a judgement on:
value(agency) + value(tax annoyance) > value(deaths, illnesses, etc., externalities of these on others)
(What I'm really getting at here is a way to think about this, not the actual problem. Things are extremely polarized these days. Calling something paternalistic/etc is asking for an emotional response. But if what this really means is just that someone thinks `value(agency) > value(X)`, and I don't... well, there's no immediate emotional response there. How confident am I in `value(agency)` and `value(X)` really? That seems like a path to much healthier discussion, at least to me.)
Do you believe that you'd be an alcoholic, were it not for the high prices on alcohol, or the monopolies controlling sales in most provinces? This likely says more about you than it does those who are merely annoyed by the high prices.
Do you believe you are immune to addiction? Because that says a lot about you, too.
Well I'm not an alcoholic, and it probably does say something about me.
A lot of these kinds of discussions come down to what one thinks the role of the state should be in trying to engineer behaviour. Even if you could prove that government-imposed higher prices lead to a reduction in dependency, some would prefer a freer society to such controls.
That's a pretty scary way of thinking. I don't want to attack a strawman here, but it looks like you're trying to reverse the definition of "freer" to be the opposite of what most would think it is.
You made two arguments, of which I responded to one as I considered them to be quite separate.
>In what useful sense does an alcoholic have the freedom not to drink?
If alcoholics have no agency (which is a matter of some dispute as I understand it), then freedom (as most would understand it) isn't an issue for them anyway. It is for the rest of us (society).
False.
> If alcoholics have no agency (which is a matter of some dispute as I understand it), then freedom (as most would understand it) isn't an issue for them anyway. It is for the rest of us (society).
You are evading the question.
Ok, well we'll disagree on that.
>You are evading the question.
I don't think I did at all. It is likely that we're just not going to see eye to eye on this one.
I know what I wanted to express less than an hour ago. How can you possibly disagree with me on that?
By the way: My argument is that being an alcoholic makes one less free (they can come to the conclusion that they should stop drinking and make that decision, but being addicts, they cannot follow through). By preventing people from becoming alcoholics, you prevent them from losing their freedom, thus making society as a whole freer.
I thought it was obvious the way I phrased it, but apparently I was mistaken. Sorry for that.
> I don't think I did at all. It is likely that we're just not going to see eye to eye on this one.
Agreed.
Why shouldn't it be their right to lose their freedom if they choose so?
Even if you argued that it should not be their right to control their body you would still also have to argue that the side-effect (which restricts the freedom of people that produce alcohol in a way that leads to everyone having to pay much higher prices) is acceptable.
No one of sound mind chooses to become an alcoholic. People might accept the risk in exchange for the effects or taste though, and taking that choice from them is a negative.
> Even if you argued that it should not be their right to control their body you would still also have to argue that the side-effect (which restricts the freedom of people that produce alcohol in a way that leads to everyone having to pay much higher prices) is acceptable.
The producers of alcohol are slaves to the market anyway. The reduced freedom of people who want to consume alcohol is an issue though. I dont know if restricting access to alcohol actually increases freedom. My point is that it is not obvious that it decreases freedom.
In the sense that the state will not use the threat of force in order to make them drink and in the sense that there will not be any danger to their health if they do not drink.
That -- negative freedom -- is a useless concept. It does not matter whether you cannot choose freely because of coercion by the state or for other reasons.
> and in the sense that there will not be any danger to their health if they do not drink.
So you just refuted two potential reasons why alcoholics could not be free not to drink alcohol. They do not matter, because a third reason applies: That they are addicted to it.
For an obvious example, banning slavery restricts the freedom of slavers, but vastly increases the freedom of freed slaves.
* Someone can sell themselves into, or otherwise enter, slavery.
* When that slave has a child, the owner can order them to enter a contract in the childs name that makes the child a slave.
Serfdom started in a similar manner, at least in some places: A free peasant agreed to become a serf in exchange for protection, then their descendants inherited that status.
Restricting access to slavery made society freer. Not giving anyone the freedom to buy and sell human beings actually made everyone much more free.
In the practical sense there are many freedoms which if they are restricted produce a net gain in freedom. Imminent domain encroaches on freedom to own land, but think of how much freedom a highway gives people.
When the government forces everyone to pay tax for national healthcare, it gives every single citizen much more freedom.
Freedom from alcohol's harms vs freedom to consume alcohol is a typical, valid, discussion to negotiate societal vs individual freedoms.
You mean removing the laws that enforced slavery made society freer? Because slavery in North America, at least, was backed by law. It took government to make slavery possible.
>Examples of government-backed theft (property and money)
We don't see freedom the same way. We will not agree on this matter.
This is true in the sense that property rights always depend on law and the government making the law.
This rebuttal is getting recycled so often that I nearly addressed it before anyone said it. But since you've said it, I'll say that it is true only to the extent that government holds a monopoly over dispute resolution in matters of property. As it stands, indeed, any kind of ownership is dubious, considering that many are required to pay what amounts to rent (property tax), or lose their land. This is on top of the ability of the state to simply take land and other forms of property, based on whatever the local legal system allows (eminent domain, asset forfeiture, etc).
I'd add that this isn't necessarily an easy problem to solve, so I don't propose that anyone has a utopian answer to it all.
In any social system in which “property” can be a meaningful context, there will be either an entity or an aggregate of entities which together exercise ultimate power in dispute resolution in the form of a monopoly on legitimate violence, and whatever entity or aggregate does so is called “government”, and “property” itself exists as an application by government of it's monopoly on violence to constrain behavior of individuals contrary to the property rights it defines.
Yes, slavery is imposed by government through force—but only in the exact sense that all property relations are.
> As it stands, indeed, any kind of ownership is dubious, considering that many are required to pay what amounts to rent (property tax), or lose their land.
Fee ownership (whether fee simple which is the dominant modern form or others that have fallen from favor like fee tail) has usually involved such payments. Allodial title has not, but allodial title has been typical of direct holding by the sovereign.
That's similar to the cheapest wine, although such shops don't really sell the cheapest wine.
Some seasons of the year, home made wine can be found for even less.
The cheapest beer and the cheapest soda should be compared, since they both save significantly on marketing and brand costs.
In that case, soda is about 25¢ (ja! Apfelschorle) and beer 50¢ (5,0 original export). Both from rewe.de.
Would you mind linking your favorite papers concerning this? Most of the ones that I could find did not include an evaluation of the prices.
I would only assume that such laws would have the biggest effect on people who are already alcoholic, lowering their quality of life as they would have to spend much more on alcohol and potentially having to avoid spending money on meals or rents.
Say the cheapest beer is manufactured for $1, the minimum cost of beer is $2, and the tax is $1. Then, when a consumer pays $3 for a beer, $1 goes to the government, $1 for manufacturing costs, and $1 is profit for the producer.
Instead, imagine no minimum cost but a tax of $2. The consumer pays $(3+c), $2 goes to the government, $1 for manufacturing costs, and $c profit. Competition would drive c low, and manufacturers would be rewarded for low manufacturing costs instead of profiting from the minimum price.
It's the most effective way of disincentivising heavy drinking without needlessly punishing moderate drinkers.
Scotland introduced minimum alcohol pricing last year, with a minimum price of 50 pence per unit. The policy was developed in collaboration with the University of Sheffield Alcohol Research Group. The price of most wines, branded spirits and premium beers was unaffected, but the effect on the cheapest and strongest drinks was dramatic - the price of a 3 litre bottle of white cider increased from £3.69 to £11.25. That has a substantial impact on the very heaviest drinkers, who suffer the greatest harms and cause the greatest societal costs.
https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/polopoly_fs/1.565373!/file/Scotl...
I moved to Canada from Italy three years ago, and I still have trouble understanding this reasoning. If you exclude the Nordics which have similar sin taxes, in the EU beer costs less than half what it costs in Canada, but every weekend I see way more drunk people on the streets of Vancouver than I have ever seen in Milan or Paris.
Maybe that's the point: different strokes for different folks.
I know in my Canadian hometown there was UK style 'pub culture' and everyone hung out at the pub and drank every day until closing. Not healthy.
For whatever reason, alcohol became quite a problem and so there's some tinkering with prices. I'm not sure if massive taxes make a whole lot of sense anymore, but certainly a 'lowest possible retail' price is rational.
The average Canadian apparently drinks about 79L per year [2] (which is 230 bottles a year, or 4.5 bottles a week), and this works out to between $28.40 and $70.89 in tax (depending on what you drink). For perspective, if that was all bottles of Coors Light, that is going to cost about $376 total (of which about $70 is tax). If it's all microbrew draft, you're probably going to spend a lot more overall but only pay $28.40 in tax.
Personally I don't see this is a major burden. If the money doesn't come from an alcohol tax, it comes from somewhere else (either in cuts to services, or increases in other taxes). Even if you want to argue "less taxes" (and less services) should be the goal, I'd still rather prioritize the tax cuts on income taxes, or general sales tax -- "sin" taxes would be the lowest priority taxes I think should be reduced, since drinking is not an essential activity (in the way buying food is) and for average or below levels of drinking it's a pretty minimal burden (especially compared to the amount of income tax most people pay).