The low price elasticity of demand in the short term

I am very much obliged to mummylonglegs, at And there was me thinking…, for this complete, correct and concise summary of the principle of operation of taxation:

This is how it works

1. Find something a lot of people like to do, say, breathing.

2. Fund some shister to do a serious of tests/surveys/thoughts/lies that prove how bad breathing is for your health.

3. Tax the fuck out of it.

4. Create some false statistics that back up your spurious claims that taxing the fuck out of breathing has prevented so many people from dying from it. Blah fucking blah fucking blah.

I have been raving about this for some time now and was, frankly, despairing of persuading anybody of the validity of this point of view.

One more time, then, for those at the back who are more concerned to string up tax-paid patsies than to pass the exam, no matter who is put up to say otherwise things are taxed not because they are bad for you, not because they are bad for the environment, nor yet because they are disapproved of by God; they are taxed because you will buy them anyway and can be made to pay more.

Economists call it, I believe, ‘the low price elasticity of demand in the short term’. Anyone who doesn’t believe it can go and look it up, like I had to. The only things worth taxing are those which people are not prepared to manage without. Motor fuel. Alcohol. Tobacco. Chocolate, now. Other foods soon. This is why there’s a ‘War on (untaxed) Drugs’. Nobody in business much likes competition.

No government ever bothered to make any pretence about ‘health’ or anything else when imposing a tax on windows (the bricked-up remnants of which distinguish some buildings of a certain age to this day), or bricks (double-sized, tax-beating bricks, called ‘gobs’, became briefly popular in some areas before being more heavily taxed themselves), or candles.

That government nowadays sees fit to depart from the shamelessly arbitrary taxation practices of earlier centuries in attempting to justify its measures with reference, by whatever devious means, to some supposed consequent public good is to my way of thinking indicative only of the amount of our money that they now have available to spend on so doing.