From the Archives: Taxing Sin

Because of two complementary desires—the desire to tell other people what they are doing wrong and the desire to extract people's money for government spending—sin taxes aren't going away anytime soon.

Cigarettes and cigars are under fire, drugs are legalized so we can tax them to get people to consume less (huh?), governments sponsor lotteries to make it easier for people to feed their gambling addiction (huh?)…

Read the full piece on my Substack here.