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'Pay for their medical bills' quickly becomes a slippery slope. Healthy, fit individuals don't much like covering the medical bills of the obese and diabetic (type 2) people, for whom the costs of care vastly exceed those that smoke or drink. There are other medical costs that could be greatly reduced if we allow the moral police to ban other risky and destructive behavior.

That actually happens in countries that rely more on socialized medicine. For example, encouraging physical fitness and healthy food in schools is no longer a “nice to have in rich school districts” but a way to save money in the government’s budget in the long run. They don’t “ban” obesity but simply work to encourage people not to be obese. Europes lower healthcare costs and obesity rates are not uncorrelated.

(It already kind of happens in the more liberal states of the USA, where Californians are much better fit than Texans).

Many insurances in Switzerland sponsor highly local public „vita parcours“ which are some kind of training walking trails. They do it to save costs and there is only a small sign which says who sponsored it.

Switzerland’s system is what Obama and Romney care was modeled on: mandatory insurance, but prices are regulated and group plans are disallowed. As such, no company can really reduce costs that way (but it’s good PR), so it’s up to the Swiss government to ensure most healthiness (which they definitely do in ways many Americans would find authoritarian, eg the extra tax males have to pay if they are unfit for conscription).

Being Deaf I am unfit for conscription. Thirty years ago I would have needed to pay that tax (in French: Taxe d’exemption de l’obligation de servir) [0].

However I was allowed to serve in a different service: civil protection [1]. In case of war I would have gone outside and done measurements for radioactivity, chemical and biological warfare agents. My departement was called ABC (atomic, biological and chemical). I am happy and lucky that the war-games never got real.

Later people with disabilities were exempt from the tax. But then I was thirty and already discharged.

Links are to French text, sorry, no English text available.

[0]: https://www.vtg.admin.ch/fr/mon-service-militaire/generalite...

[1]: https://www.babs.admin.ch/fr/zs.html

The problem is that "having a glass of wine every now and then" is okay and doesn't come with many (if any) external costs. Why should I pay through the nose for alcoholics who abuse it? Plus, I happen to be a fairly well-paid software dev who can afford the occasional beer, but if you're a low-income earner then this occasional beer or glass of wine becomes a luxury, which doesn't strike me as entirely fair either.

I don't think "science" can really help all that much here, because a lot aspects surrounding this aren't really scientific questions. Yes, you can be informed by science to answer questions like "how addictive is this?" and "how harmful is this in what dosages?", but that doesn't really answer the question of who should pay for what, what is "fair", or what should or should not be allowed.

(and the answers to these questions aren't always clear either: is cycling a net-negative or net-positive? Health benefits from exercise, but higher risk of injuries – and why should we tax alcohol to account for all external costs but not cycling or other activities where risk is higher than some others?)

> Also work on changing the culture of it being cool to drink till you pass out or even the obligatory social drinking.

Definitely agree with this. If I say "no" then I mean "no", and trying to "oh come, just have a drink"-me is a very quick way to end up on my shit list. I've seen people do this even with people who never drink alcohol even when they know this.

Usually these high health sin taxes also help fund health systems in the majority of developed countries with socialized medicine, so it does shift the tax burden. So for high bad-health-behavior taxes you get lower income taxes for example.

They're basically the equivalent to getting a lower health insurance premium if you keep your blood pressure low or sign up for a gym for example.

In the Netherlands at least it's just added to the general funds, rather than being ear-marked for health care. Also, it turns out smoking actually saves on overall health care costs because smokers die younger; I only looked at the Netherlands, from [1]:

"On a yearly basis smokers have higher health care costs (€3.5 billion) and use more caregivers. Over the complete life-span non-smokers use more health care, especially elderly care (€8.6 billion) and care givers (€1.4 billion). This is because life expectancy is longer. In a smoke-free society health care costs will be higher per capita"

The overall gist of the article is still that smoking is bad and that a smoke-free society would be good (I agree), but health care costs don't actually seem a strong argument, in the Netherlands at least. And aside from lower health care costs, there are also less pensions to give, which saves money.

The costs of alcohol were estimated to be "€2.3 tot 4.2 billion"/year[2] (2013), which also includes police, damage, loss of productivity, etc. Health care specifically is about €450 million. The income from alcohol tax was about €1 billion, which certainly covers the health care costs, though not all of them. I'm not sure if they should: that a small group of people destroy things when drinking doesn't really need to be paid by other alcohol consumers, IMHO.

Anyway, turns out it's not as simple as "smoking = costs society money". Details may differ per country; I just looked at the Netherlands because that's where I'm from.

> They're basically the equivalent to getting a lower health insurance premium if you keep your blood pressure low or sign up for a gym for example.

I'm not sure we have this kind of thing here. Besides, what if I stay healthy by running or cycling? What if you're genetically pre-disposed to high blood pressure? You can market it as a "discount", but it's really a "premium" for people who don't do this IMHO (reminds me of getting a "discount" at some camping sites if you arrive by foot, which isn't really a "discount" but just a way of packaging "you pay for parking").

[1]: https://www.ntvg.nl/artikelen/de-rekening-van-roken#lb-3

[2]: https://www.rivm.nl/bibliotheek/rapporten/2018-0146.pdf

> "If I say "no" then I mean "no", and trying to "oh come, just have a drink"-me is a very quick way to end up on my shit list."

I could not agree more.

"I've seen people do this even with people who never drink alcohol even when they know this."

I habe been on the receiving side of this more often than I like.

The latest research I saw, sorry don’t have a source at this time and about to go to work, states that even small occasional drinks are bad for health. Alcohol is a known carcinogenic and I believe the latest stance is there are no known benefits that outweigh the risks.

Science would have banned/heavily taxed eggs in the 80s. Does science inform us about addictive products above and beyond what our every day observations tell us?

The level of evidence about eggs was spurious at best even in the 80ies. As with a lot of food science preliminary studies and ideas get overblown in media.

But at least the scientists I know would wait for the level of evidence to be high.

But as policies would be made by politicians I doubt it would work without populistic influences.

Yes, I remember the endless LDL and HDL cholesterol public health debates in the 1980s, especially arounds chicken eggs. When I was older, I learned that the Japanese consume a phenomenal amount of eggs per capita -- over 300 per year(!). (Raw egg over rice is a common breakfast dish.) Yet, the Japanese have much lower incidence of heart disease (per capita) than the United States. The reasons are multi-factor -- not all of which are understood.

Tax it too much and you'll create underground market. There's probably billions of dollars worth of amateur cigarette contraband around Europe. Fighting that wastes tons of money. But fight isn't about recouping some $, but about some sort of fairness?

What do you think about recent Chinese moves against youth excessively playing video games?

I don't know too little about that to voice an opinion.

First problem with taxing is that it takes money without consent and with force, aka theft. But that aside, do you want to get your favorite monopoly hooked on and addicted to the money taken from people’s activities that are harming themselves or others?

I don’t really see that as a problem. Taxation (aka taking money by law) is a corrective measure to a free market failure: namely accounting for externalities. Sure, we could argue about whether some taxes are good or bad, and whether certain things should or should not be taxed, but the utility of taxation overall as a corrective measure is well understood.

I made two points since i know many add exceptions for some parties when defining theft. Care to reply to the second point?

Maybe I’m being dense, but I don’t really understand your second point. Could you be more explicit? Are you saying that the government could get addicted to a certain level of addiction in society to fund itself?

If government is dependent on smokers smoking a lot to fund its activities, what happens if some smokers decide to quit? The government has vested interest to keep number of smokers high.

Taxes are theft? I never heard this line of reasoning. Care to explain?

How would a government pay for protection, infrastructure, education, and a lot of other things governments provide to their citizens?

If people in a region need protection services I am sure they will figure out a way to pay for it. Otherwise said service may not be really that important. If you worry about not getting 100% of people to pay without coercion and threatening taking their freedom to move, good news, even now over 50 percent of Americans don’t pay taxes or pay a tiny amount. The interested parties will take care of it easy.

And those who can't afford to pay for their ambulances and fire departments and roads and schools, fuck 'em, right? It's their fault for being poor, they should try harder.

Libertarians are funny people. It boggles my mind how anyone can be clueless or compassionless enough to be one.

In a free market it will be unlikely to have many poor people, as they will see the reality and settle where they are truly productive. Parents care about their children (even if you don’t think so) and reliable education will be offered to them. Fire department can be arranged by neighborhoods, nobody wants their house burning down, or very high insurance payments. Remember how much resources governments waste, they will all get cheaper, how much they tax, people will get way richer.

And yes, I believe everyone will be better off with free markets, otherwise i’d be a commie too. It’s not that I don’t care about others. I care more than most do. I see they working jobs that are not necessary, or governments destroying their purchasing power.

Fortunately I am doing pretty well, even with after the money government takes, and if I was evil or not compassionate I wouldn’t advocate for change, but rather take advantage of current system and move to the side that benefits from peoples diminished value of work. It would be way easier for me.

> In a free market it will be unlikely to have many poor people, as they will see the reality and settle where they are truly productive

That's a very wild claim, unsubstantiated by anything. The history of industrial revolution shows otherwise ( regular people are exploited to death until some regulations come to stop the most rampant abuses). Do you have anything to support your case?

> And yes, I believe everyone will be better off with free markets, otherwise i’d be a commie too.

So for you there's only communism and absolute free markets? So you're in the clueless libertarian case. Considering the freeish markets available today fail miserably at correcting for externalities such as pollution and climate change, how do you imagine absolutely free ones would do so?

It’s the slogan of the kind of liberal economics that’s way far too the right and involves things like private roads and (more facetiously) private McNukes.