What happens when the government decides to tax a particular vice that seems egregious, like maybe taxing vibrators as sexual deviancy?
How much is your vibrator worth to you?
How much is your vibrator worth to you?
But take for example suburban single-family homes. We know they are significantly worse for the environment than urban apartment living - they are harder to heat & cool, require more invasive utility work, lead to car-driven transportation instead of mass transit, and destroy natural habitats. Nevertheless, I want to live in a house, not an apartment. And if the government were to tax them according to their true environmental impact and costs, I'd suck it up and pay the tax, getting a more unpleasant but higher-paying job if necessary. (They don't currently, and I'm enjoying the sweet subsidy of our unsustainable lifestyle.)
There are other things like say soda that are unhealthy, and a tax has been proposed on them. I cut back my soda consumption because it got expensive, but sometimes I really want to relax with an IBC or Jarrito or Mexican Coke, so I'll suck it up and buy a 12-pack. That's exactly the point of a tax: cut back people's default consumption because it gets expensive, while still giving them the option of purchasing if they really want it.
If it was self harm, then seems like we should start with vice taxes for added sugar and not doing cardio workouts.
> vice taxes for added sugar
At face value, this doesn't seem like a bad idea. I've heard about cities in the US that have a tax on large sugary drinks.
> not doing cardio workouts
It's probably easier to incentivize the good behavior here than punish the absence of it.
The other issue is that sin taxes just don't work. They don't stop people from partaking at all. These taxes are just a money grab.
As for societal harm, I imagine going forward we'll settle on some countermeasure against entities like Facebook. If that's a per-byte transmission tax, then so be it.