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I don't understand how people can disagree with this. He's perfectly correct. How often does one cite the price of cigarettes to quit smoking them?
by skylan_q 12y ago
I don't understand how people can disagree with this. He's perfectly correct. How often does one cite the price of cigarettes to quit smoking them?
- glesica 12y agoThat's nonsensical. It all depends on the utility of the smoker. Cigarette taxes are, in theory at least, Pigouvian taxes in the sense that the goal is to reduce the harm caused by smoking. They accomplish this in two ways, first, by providing funds to deal with the associated medical costs and two, by reducing the number of people who choose to smoke. Whether you agree with the assessed level of negative externalities or not (I don't, actually), the tax hasn't "destroyed" anything. Smoking still exists. Fewer people get sufficient utility from smoking to go on doing so, but that's the point of the tax in this case. Too many people were smoking previously due to market inefficiencies. Now the "correct" (again, I believe the externalities were lower than many people believe they were) number of people are smoking.
- alexqgb 12y agoIt's not that he's incorrect. It's that his observation is generalized to the point of being a useless distraction from this particular conversation. Had he indicated how the potentially destructive power of taxation is actually being used destructively and deliberately in this particular case, he'd have said something knowledgeable and interesting. But of course, that's not what happened.