Cook also claims — and this is the free lunch part — that the moderate drinkers are actually made better off by the tax, since the revenue the tax generates could be used to lower other taxes or provide additional valuable government services that the moderate drinkers would value. Of course, readers of this blog are well aware that, empirically, the former never happens (hasn’t Peter blogged about this?), and increased taxes always lead to increased spending, arguably on less-than-obviously beneficial things. Cook also seem to believe that most of us are “under the influence [sic] of false lessons from national Prohibition.” By this he means that Public Health types believe that Prohibition did reduce alcohol consumption and related health and safety internalities and externalities, and thus was a good thing. In fact, of course, we believers in the “conventional wisdom” are well aware that Prohibition reduced overall alcohol consumption; it’s just that we also believe that the externalities Prohibition created (cf. every period gangster movie ever made) far outweighed any benefits, even as calculated in narrow Public Health terms.

An alcoholic content tax, with increasing rate by alcoholic ratio might do that, say:
- ¢20/g for a light beer (0-5%) would make a small can (.33L, 3%, 1g) 20 cents more expensive;
- ¢30/g for wine (5-18%) would make a bottle (.75L, 12%, 9g) $2.7 more expensive;
- ¢50/g for liquor (18%-45%) would make a whisky bottle (1L, 40%, 40g) $20 more expensive.

But maybe this will encourage students to get drunk with beer, gulping gallons at once and inducing kidney failure. . . MADD won’t like that either.