A tale of two countries: France and Denmark, an example of sin tax foolishness.
I present to you two examples from Europe that continue to demonstrate unequivocally that no matter how often fundamental economic principles are violated, the result is the same. A corollary lesson is that Governments will pursue these violations thinking naively that previous errors do not apply to them. Today's subject: sin tax. The idea of a sin tax continues to be popular on both sides of the proverbial political aisle. Even among those that generally accept that taxation deprives the private sector by transferring capital to the less efficient public sector favor the sin tax. They justify this error by suggesting that people should not be engaged in sinful practices like: smoking, drinking, gambling, prostitution or the multitude of other offensive actions and raising revenue from these sinful things is acceptable. Then there are those that are constantly harping on the "common good" and social welfare. They justify the sin tax on the grounds that regar