Vincent DeMarco, president of the Maryland Citizens’ Health Initiative Education Fund, recently wrote to the Baltimore Sun to stick up for Maryland’s sin taxes. He seems to view it as the obligation of government to reduce activities it determines to be bad:
In his Commentary disparaging both Maryland’s life-saving one dollar per pack tobacco tax increase enacted in 2008 and our proposed dime a drink alcohol tax increase (“Alcohol tax: Haven’t we been here before?” Aug. 13), Mark Kilmer left out some very important facts. Most importantly, he omitted the fact that the tobacco tax increase resulted in 74 million fewer packs of cigarettes being sold in our state, which helped to give Maryland the sixth lowest smoking rate in the country. This saves tens of thousands of lives from preventable tobacco caused illness and death, and saves us all billions of dollars in health care costs.
Two things struck me while reading this argument. First is the selective nature by which people think it is the duty of government to mitigate risk at the expense of all other factors. Government is a very poor agent for determining acceptable risk and weighing it against personal benefits.
How individuals evaluate costs versus benefits for different behavior can be very subjective. While one person might find smoking disgusting and therefore would not risk anything to smoke, another person might find it gives them great pleasure and enhances their quality of life. Why should other people step in to override their personal calculation that the pleasure of smoking is worth the risk of premature death?
People who attack smoking with sin taxes or proposed bans rarely target things like driving the same way, yet more than 30,000 people die in traffic fatalities every year. That’s probably because the benefits of driving are more obvious. But it’s still a subjective evaluation. Most people put their life at risk to drive because they know that being able to get to work, school or the grocery store is more important to them than the extra level of risk. But some people still find it excessively risky.
The point is that it is the individual’s decision to make. Government has no place to make such determinations, so whether or not a tax on tobacco saves live shouldn’t matter. Banning driving would save a lot of lives, but that doesn’t make it a legitimate function of government. Government exists to protect our fundamental rights (including life) from infringement by others, not from ourselves.
The second thing that struck me is how it’s so obvious to statists that taxes influence behavior when talking about sin taxes, but never when looking at other taxes. Taxing tobacco does indeed reduce smoking. Yet when it comes time to project revenues from changes in the tax code, you might as well be speaking Greek to point out that taxing income reduces incomes, or that taxing capital reduces capital. When you tax something, you get less of it – no matter what it is.
