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I've always been super weirded out that we're willing to poison people for not paying their fair share of taxes. The extra abstraction layer seems to make peop

I've always been super weirded out that we're willing to poison people for not paying their fair share of taxes. The extra abstraction layer seems to make people comfortable; if after your tax evasion trial you were found guilty and the judge walked up to you, put a funnel in your mouth, and force-fed you poison, society would be outraged. But if you structure it as a discount for buying poisonous alcohol, then it's perfectly fine. (Alcohol is an especially weird thing to tax, in my opinion. Take some sugar water. Leave it sitting around. Boom! Alcohol. Tax evader's dream.) I haven't really kept up on what the opioid epidemic is up to, but I also think it's weird that we cut opioids with acetaminophen. You don't want people to overdose on "the good stuff", so we put something in it that destroys your liver? That seems a little cruel to me. Any cop can reverse an opioid overdose. Nobody can reverse an acetaminophen overdose. You just die. I guess "first, do no harm" is ambiguous and only applies to actual medical doctors, not necessarily bureaucrats? Public policy can be weird at times. We should, as a society, poison people less.

tialaramex 4y ago
In many countries (e.g in Europe) they don't - poison people that is, the usual formulation for the cheaper untaxed "denatured" alcohol isn't poisonous but it has Bitrex in it so that people won't drink it. Well, I say it isn't poisonous, it's alcohol, alcohol is poisonous anyway, for much the reason you identified with paracetamol, the liver can't process more than a tiny amount and is seriously damaged if you use more, but people do. Anyway, it's a sin tax. We tax things we want the population not to do, to discourage them, and because if they insist on doing them anyway even though they're a bad idea, why not collect money? In my country we tax petrol (gasoline), sugary drinks, booze, cigarettes, all above the normal levels because those things are a bad idea and it'd be better if you stopped.

tialaramex 4y ago

In many countries (e.g in Europe) they don't - poison people that is, the usual formulation for the cheaper untaxed "denatured" alcohol isn't poisonous but it has Bitrex in it so that people won't drink it. Well, I say it isn't poisonous, it's alcohol, alcohol is poisonous anyway, for much the reason you identified with paracetamol, the liver can't process more than a tiny amount and is seriously damaged if you use more, but people do. Anyway, it's a sin tax. We tax things we want the population not to do, to discourage them, and because if they insist on doing them anyway even though they're a bad idea, why not collect money? In my country we tax petrol (gasoline), sugary drinks, booze, cigarettes, all above the normal levels because those things are a bad idea and it'd be better if you stopped.