Comments on ReasonPharm: Want universal health care? Get ready to quit drin...

I am frequently appalled by the frequency with whi...

2008-03-14T15:31:00.000-04:00

I am frequently appalled by the frequency with which my (American) medical school classmates think in terms of people and behaviors as "burdens on the system." Few, if any, actually consider that it is individuals, not "society," who should be paying medical bills. With that in mind, they think in terms of society-level "fixes" such as taxing and banning "unhealthy" choices. No surprise, then, the idea of banning alcohol.

As part of the move to discourage drinking, the go...

2008-03-10T15:54:00.000-04:00

As part of the move to discourage drinking, the government wants supermarkets to raise the price of the alcohol they sell - ie to end the heavy discounting they operate now. Britain's biggest supermarket, Tesco, opposes this - but not for the reasons you might hope. Their argument is that if any one supermarket ends the discounts, that business will thereby give all the others an advantage. The only way to avoid that is for all the big supermarkets to agree on the price at which they will sell alcohol. If they do that, however, they will fall foul of anti-competition laws... Tesco's proposed solution is that the governmen enact a bill allowing supermarkets to collude on the price of alcohol.

Yes. And in the US, the MADD police have gone from...

2008-03-01T15:46:00.000-05:00

Yes. And in the US, the MADD police have gone from opposing drunk driving to opposing alcohol period. Now people who have a glass of wine at a restaurant can and are prosecuted for driving under the influence when they are under the legal limit for intoxication. Even though they have done no harm to anybody.
Of course this takes police time and money away from catching and prosecuting the real problem for most drunken driving fatalities--the serious alcoholic. This is how we can tell that it has less to do with drunken driving fatalities than it does with state control on individuals. Chalk another one up for the Nanny State.