This week’s column at Rare:
Sin taxes
Many states institute sin taxes—special levies on “bad” products like beer—as a way to manipulate public behavior and fill government coffers. In practice, however, these taxes do little to limit drinking, can be used to conceal serious long-term budget problems from the public, and (like any sales tax) disproportionately affect those with lower incomes.
Plus, as we saw with the tragic death of Eric Garner last fall, sin taxes promote petty tax evasion, which in turn creates situations practically designed for disproportionate police response.
Drinking age
The United States is one of only four nations with a drinking age older than 18, and we also have an unusually toxic culture of teen binge drinking. In fact, evidence suggests that raising the drinking age to 21—far from making people wait until they’re old enough to handle their liquor—actually promotes unsafe drinking habits at a young age.
As Reason notes, “if drinking any amount of alcohol is illegal for 18-year-olds, those who want to drink anyway have every incentive to down as much booze as quickly as possible, thus minimizing the amount of time they could be caught by the cops holding a beer in their hands.” Rather than allowing young people to learn to drink safely and responsibly with parental supervision throughout their teen years—as people have been doing for centuries—America’s drinking age encouraged teens to drink in secret and makes them scared to seek help when they need it.
Loss of tradition
My favorite cocktail is probably a tossup between the sloe gin fizz and the French 75, both of which date from at least a century ago. Fortunately, I came of drinking age during an ongoing reclamation of classic American cocktail making, and there are plenty of joints today which will whip me up either drink.
But if I’d been born a couple years earlier, I wouldn’t be so lucky. In fact, “Prohibition drove away the professional bartending class” and cut off access to “a host of classic, European-style liqueurs and flavorings based on fruits, flowers and bitter herbs, many of which had been key cocktail components since before the turn of the 20th century.” This resulted in decades of boring, sugar-heavy cocktails which are only now being replaced by more complex drinks our pre-Prohibition forefathers would recognize and appreciate.
Read the whole thing here.
