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Comment by abrowne | Hacker News Reader

One difference is the alcohol rules are a remnant of (post-)Prohibition and are meant to make alcohol harder or more expensive to get.

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Right, but if the goal is to make alcohol expensive and unavailable the ideal lever to pull would be a vice tax. Instead of that money going to random unaccountable middleman, it goes to the people - who are already shouldering much of the social cost of alcohol (healthcare, policing, etc). I'm not sure i support vice-taxes, but they're clearly better than just giving it to whichever random rich person or industry insider that manages to insert themselves.

Politicians get blamed for taxes. Middlemen are a safe hidden tax that has the bonus of padding their campaign funding.

Maybe we should get together an angry mob

I support vice taxes, at least insofar as their good intention is concerned - making it hard(er) to engage in the vice, while not prohibiting it.

However, consumption based taxes (direct or indirect) also disproportionately proscribe lower income people from engaging in such activities. Tax a carton of cigarettes? Worthless if I can just hit the Rez or hop to another town that doesn’t tax. Screwed if you don’t have that kind of mobility. There’s a disturbingly classist nature to them, which gets all the more concerning when it involves fundamental rights - if only the rich can afford to own a gun, get an abortion, speak freely, for example.

Additionally, vice taxes at some high point are effectively prohibition. Make alcohol too expensive (directly/indirectly) and bootlegging becomes more popular, with its attendant health risks, crime, etc. Make cocaine too expensive and meth gets more popular. Sell untaxed cigarettes and witness how laws are only enforced with an implicit threat of violence that may become explicit (ask Eric Garner).

Tough job, controlling societies.

all laws are enforced with threat of violence. dont beleive me try not filing your taxes. first you will get nasty letters from the IRS, fallowed by a court summons where you may end up evicted from you home by the sheriff/police try to resist and see what happens ultimately all laws are enforced with the threat of violence its only a matter of how polite the system is to you first

Yes, but it's vanishingly rare to see crimes like securities fraud enforced with ACTUAL violence. "Vice" laws disproportionately effect marginalized communities, down to the amount of violence used to enforce them.

That's probably because it's vanishingly rare that people physically arrested for securities fraud resist. That doesn't mean the threat's not there.

That's probably because it's vanishingly rare for people to be physically arrested for securities fraud.

Yup, agree with everything you said. Just want to add that all of those problems are also present with the “byzantine monopolistic middlemen” model.

Yes it's true that states want to reduce alcohol consumption; drunk driving, alcohol related illnesses and crime are all tied to alcohol use, so there is a public health aspect.

But like many things that are opined on on HN, it's a little more complex than what you wrote, in that they were also trying to prevent tied houses (1) and vertical integration wherein brewers would basically tie into every local bar, creating a local monopoly.

Washington State got rid of the common three tier (2) system in 2012, and it seems to have lead to higher prices. (3)

The options we have for alcoholic consumption might not exist without these sort of regulations.

To be clear I'm not an expert on liquor laws and their economic impacts, but my point is that it seems like there is a complex interplay wherein regulation, enforcement, and power relationships between companies can affect availability and pricing in complex and sometimes counterintuitive ways.

And that's not even getting into smaller regulatory policies that I don't know enough about to even throw out an opinion on. Unlike food, alcohol distributors aren't isn't pay for play slotting fees for shelf placement, and many states require distributors to post and hold prices for 30 days, for example.

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-tier_system_(alcohol_dis... 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tied_house 3 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4608622/

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