Saturday, July 23, 2016

Government-Instituted Drinking is Part of the Problem

   Roll back the centuries, and you will find Russia has always been addicted to alcohol. I'm talking the government has been addicted, not just the people. The rulers have relied on alcohol for revenue, and this has contributed heavily to heavy drinking being heavily popular.
   The government instituted drinking at least as far back as the 1540s, when Ivan the Terrible built places where spirits were made and sold. He encouraged his subjects to spend all their money in his taverns as the money went to him.
  One wonders if government-instituted drinking goes back centuries before that, as the Russian army suffered a horrendous defeat to the Tartars and Mongols in 1223, in part because the Russians were drunk. If the army was drunk, one wonders was it was the leaders who supplied the drinks? That, too, is government-instituted drinking.
   Government encouragement of drinking? In the 1700s, Peter the Great decreed that wives should be whipped if they tried to drag their husbands out of the state-owned taverns before they were ready to leave.
   And, so it has continued through the years. The state's money has continued to come in part from the drunk's pocket. As recent as 2010, the Russian finance minister, Aleksei L. Kudrin, suggested that the best thing Russians could do to prop up a staggering economy was to drink and smoke more, thus paying more in taxes. Again, then, the state was encouraging drinking.
   I got the material fro this blog from, "How Alcohol Conquered Russia," in the Atlantic by Stan Fedun, Sept. 25, 2013, issue.
   Fedun says that so far, there have only been two big efforts to curb alcohol, one coming under Vladimir Lenin and the other under Mikhail Gorbachev. Lenin banned vodka, but after his death, Josef Stalin returned the government to relying on vodka for government revenue. Gorbachev's efforts were successful for a time, but eventually failed. The failure, at least in part, if not altogether, was due to the loss in state revenue. Gorbachev's experts had told him the loss in revenue would be offset by a 10 percent increase in productivity, but that failed to materialize.
   So, the lessons from history we learn?  If the state is profiting from liquor, there often is incentive for the government to encourage drinking. And, government's encouragement of liquor can lead a nation to becoming a nation flowing in alcohol. The government can become just as addicted as are the people. And, the addiction to the drug money can be as long-standing to the government as addiction to the drug can be to the drunk. Just as a drunk often is a drunk for life, even so, Russia's addiction flings back centuries.
   So, there is a danger in sin taxes. What we learn from Russia does not mean every sin tax rises to the level where the state becomes so reliant on it that it encourages the "sin," but when that level is achieved, the damage is done.
 
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/how-alcohol-conquered-russia/279965/

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