The incredible illegal distillery which made 1.3m litres of bootleg alcohol

Daily Mail ^ | Last updated at 6:58 PM on 12th July 2010 | By Daily Mail Reporter

[Vanders9]

Hold on, im not saying statism is benign. I'm just saying that taxation in and of itself doesn't destroy business IF everyone is taxed in the same way, because that way there is no competitive change. In fact, taxation like that sometimes even points up competition. If you make a product for $1 and I make one for $1.20, the difference is 20 cents. If the Government taxes us both 50%, your product costs $1.50 and mine $1.80 - a difference of 30 cents. More noticeable.

The problem is favouritsm - what usually happens is that the Government will tax you at 80% and me at 50%, so that the price of our product is the same at $1.80 - all done in the name of "fairness" of course. What they are actually doing is penalising your efficiency, or condoning my inefficiency. It seems Governments just simply cannot resist tinkering.

In the example you gave re tobacco tax in Canada - that's not an example of Governments destroying a sector of the economy, that's an example of them getting too greedy, thus leading to what amounted to a tax revolt. They were forced to recind those taxes not because it was destroying the tobacco industry in Canada, but because by taxing too heavily they were reducing their actual income!

Alternately (and I dont know enough about this incident) it could have been a general and no doubt deeply and sincerely held attempt to reduce unhealthy smoking in the Canadian population. This obviously was doomed to fail, in much the same way that prohibition was doomed to fail. If you want to reduce the smoking habit (a view I have the utmost sympathy with) you do it by persuading people that smoking is bad for them, not by trying to tax it into oblivion.

[RFEngineer]

“I’m just saying that taxation in and of itself doesn’t destroy business IF everyone is taxed in the same way, because that way there is no competitive change.”

This may be true if you have a small marginal tax. When the tax is huge as it is on alcohol and tobacco taxation does destroy business and encourages alternative methods of supplying the demand that go outside of government jurisdiction.

In fact tax breaks can make a business - as in solar energy and windmills and other “alternative energy” - there is no real business in “alternative energy” without a tax on everything else.

Back to your point - the guy broke the law - we can agree on that.

I will go further though - I’ll say the guy did not cross a moral line and government did cross that line through excessive taxation.

I think that free people around the world have an obligation to oppose, evade, and ignore laws and taxes that infringe on their God-given freedoms.

This guy will be punished for depriving the bloated beast of revenue.

alcohol and tobacco taxes should be at commensurate levels of everything else - they should not be primary revenue sources for government like they have become.

This guys only mistake was not feeding the beast - if he bribed the right folks, he’d be providing the same public service he apparently has done for years and with great success.

I wish him well, and an early release.

As for his erstwhile “competitors” - they should also do whatever they can to minimize their tax burden - legal or illegal because the tax is unreasonable in infringes on free-citizens pursuit of happiness. I hope they are more successful than this guy was in keeping the money they earn.

While maybe my views sound radical, they are the views that tyrannical over-taxing governments have always spawned throughout history. We will never shrink government by the normal means - so we shrink it by depriving it of it’s life blood - other peoples money. Once people figure out how to use the black market - they’ll not stop until oppressive taxation is removed.

We will all be tax evaders of one variety or another before it’s over.