Why sin taxes are a sin

[Marc Perkel]

On 3/22/2011 10:34 PM, Avri Doria wrote:
> On 23 Mar 2011, at 00:59, Marc Perkel wrote:
>
>> So it's really a sin tax.
>
> why do you not believe in sin taxes.
>
> assuming you accept the idea of taxes in general, why should we who want to engage in behavior that is sometimes harmful and sometimes has a social cost (smoking, drinking, drugs, driving gas guzzlers, eating pastry etc) all things that are not necessary for life pay a little extra for the fun?
>
>
> a.
>

OK - I'm glad you asked that question. Why am I against sin taxes?

I'll address it in two parts, what is sin - and even if something is sin
that taxing it isn't a good idea.

At issue is the .xxx TLD. As we know .xxx is something like porn or
adult themed information dealing with sex. Is sex sin?

With the exception of certain high tech solution we all exist because of
sex. Without sex there would be no human race. Some might argue that
.xxx type sex (porn) is different that virgin marriage monogamy sex but
it's the same principle. Some people just get turned on by different
things. If humanity had limited itself to virgin marriage monogamy
reproduction then humanity would have gone extinct and none of us would
be here having this discussion. I think it could probably be proved
mathematically that every one of us has an ancestor born out of wedlock.

So - I'm going to make a universal moral assumption:

To exist is better than to be extinct. That's what I'm asking you to
accept on faith.

Thus since sex and .xxx activity is necessary for humanity to exist then
it cannot be immoral - or sin.

Now for the second part of my argument. Suppose we all agree that
smoking cigarettes is a sin. There may be some smokers in the group who
don't agree but we'll ignore it for now. Should it be subject to sin taxes?

Increasing the price of cigarettes might marginally reduce the number of
smokers but smoking is addictive and the addicts just have to pay more.
This makes them poorer and more desperate, increases stress, might
deprive them of money they might otherwise feed their children with, go
to the doctor, or some other productive activity. It also increases
crime as more people need to steal to get cigarette money.

Then you get government getting hooked on cigarette income. So when
society evolves away from cigarettes governments start noticing a
shortfall in revenue which creates an incentive against anti-smoking
legislation that works. Tobacco money is more addictive than tobacco. A
real solution to smoking would be for the DEA to declare cigarettes a
Schedule II drug, remove it completely from retail sales, and only allow
smokers to get cigarettes from a pharmacy with a doctor's prescription.
Then you'll see a serious reduction in smoking.

I'll throw in a third example. San Francisco's sin of driving a car. The
environmentalist sins. This too is an artificial sin because 99% of
everything coming into San Fran comes in on a car or a truck. So those
who walk get all their stuff from those who drive.

If you really want to address the energy/carbon/resources/destroying the
eerth problem then you have to focus on population control. There are
too many people on the planet so even if you cut everyone's footprint in
half, if the population doubles you gain nothing. OTOH, if I buy a poor
pregnant teenager an abortion, I should get to drive a Hummer because
that abortion saved more carbon than the Hummer would ever produce.
Maybe we should rethink cannibalism as a way to fight global warming?
Hmmmm ....

Anyhow - my point - embrace reality - not fake solutions that sound
politically correct but stuff that actually works. If we embrace fake
solution that .xxx is immoral and we're going to alter the morality of
it by taxing it and using it to prevent child porn on a TLD that
wouldn't have child porn. Logically if you were going to do that then
tax .com because that's where the porn is now. If we start down that
path then when law enforcement wants a back door into my spam filtering
server so that they can catch criminals the precedent for ICANN becoming
the moral police has already been set.

I'm making the slippery slope argument here.