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Comment by eyeJam | Hacker News Reader

I can never find sympathy for people who complain about high alcohol tax in Canada. Is this something that really affects your quality of life? Or is it more of personal inconvenience? Alcohol taxes violate vertical equity. And they should. Lower income individuals should not be encouraged to purchase more alcohol, since they are more likely to be vulnerable to the negative social, mental and physical effects of alcohol consumption. Reducing alcohol tax leads to a greater burden on the healthcare system.

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>I can never find sympathy for people who complain about high alcohol tax in Canada.

Likewise, I have little sympathy for those who want to tax everything I do. We're on opposite sites of an unbridgeable chasm, perhaps.

I have little sympathy for those who decide they need to impose unjustified rule, taxation, force and protection private property against the workers. There's a third side to the chasm, if such a thing could exist.

Is it unjustified? By what measure? Alcohol taxes fund the social welfare system, and alcohol taxes the social welfare system. Alcohol tax is rationally connected to it's purpose. It isn't arbitrary, and if it does infringe on your rights (very dubious argument), that infringement is minimal. Alcohol tax doesn't outright prevent you from purchasing alcohol.

As you surely know, it isn't merely taxes that are at work in most provinces. Retail monopolies are another way to keep prices elevated, but even more, they expressly forbid competition in sales and distribution, which cuts off potential markets. There's no question that this infringes on the ability of people to exchange freely.

As to the effects of alcohol (or cigarettes, etc) on the social welfare system, this may be another argument against the social welfare system, or at least the manner in which it tends to operate. If the result is that government must creep further and further into regulating/taxing the lives of the population in order to control ever-rising costs, then something is quite awry.

It's less the tax and more the inability to get it conveniently, since the LCBO is closed for all holidays and also tends to keep short retail hours.

The alcohol laws in Ontario date back to prohibition and I would like to see them relaxed so I could get a beer at the corner store.

MJ is currently in a position to avoid the whole "nanny state" treatment altogether, which is what people are talking about.

> I can never find sympathy for people who complain about high alcohol tax in Canada.

To be fair, the OP to didn't mention anything about taxes. The high taxes on alcohol have to be paid irrespective of private or public distribution channels. The OP is more guilty of generalizing from ON to the rest of the country when it comes to public distribution channels.

I second the idea alcohol should be expensive, I don't much care if the Delta is due to tax or monopoly profiteering by the province -- I'm not sure I can tell the difference tbh, the latter is a de facto tax.

The government monopoly in Ontario runs advertising campaigns, sales, and loyalty programs to encourage people to buy more booze.

It's a sleazy regressive tax program, not a health program to reduce consumption.

In Ontario the profiteering is not by the province for the Beer Store. That's a monopoly owned by the beer companies themselves. So it's not a de facto tax.

>The OP is more guilty of generalizing from ON to the rest of the country when it comes to public distribution channels.

Am I? You realize that most provinces have monopoly retail system, right? Even here in Quebec, while we can purchase beer at grocery stores (something Ontario only recently allowed, from my understanding, and then only in limited amounts), we still can't buy good wine or any spirits anywhere but the SAQ.

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