Minimum pricing is wrong

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-22250584

As usual, I've been inspired by a news story. This one is a little argument over minimum pricing of alcohol. The Scottish government has apparently had inaccurate and biased submissions from the drinks industry, which opposes minimum pricing. This is hardly shocking. What is shocking is that governments continue to trust industry sources' information and opinions when looking into regulation of that industry.

That's not my subject for today. I want to express my revulsion for the concepts behind minimum pricing.
The argument is, as implied in the BBC news article, that low alcohol prices encourage drinking at home. People get hammered on their own, without the social pressure or regulation that they'd experience in a pub. Low alcohol prices supposedly also mean that people buy more alcohol (they have a set alcohol budget and buy as much as they can within that budget).
The correlation of negative effects with low alcohol prices are apparently indisputable, as is the direction of causation.

'Dr McCambridge said: "Our study showed that the alcohol industry, including both the producers and the big supermarkets, consistently oppose affective approaches to alcohol polices by misrepresenting strong evidence of what works. There is an international consensus in the research community that the approach of the Scottish government is the correct one." '

I suspect it's actually a spelling error, but the use of the word 'affective' is central to my point today. A minimum price may be effective (it has an effect), but it is also an emotional (affective) response that is incompletely thought-through.

I can't comment on the strength of the evidence over whether the harms of alcohol really are greater when it's cheaper. I do know that many alcoholics are relatively wealthy people who will continue to buy alcohol even if the minimum price is a bit higher, regulated by government. I suppose that minimum pricing is intended to hit the binge drinkers who stock up before a big night out.

However, these are not the only people who buy cheap alcohol. I know that binge-drinking is more prevalent amongst young people, but young people are also the ones who are poor and often buy cheap alcohol for moderate drinking; something to go with a meal with friends, or to have one drink whilst watching television in the evenings.
Minimum pricing will reduce these people's quality of life, not increase it. Meals with friends will cost more. Perfectly reasonable consumption will no longer be possible for their low level of income. Why should they be punished for the actions of others?

If we have a playpark that some children are drawing graffiti on, do we start charging an entrance fee? That will help keep away the poor children and the children with mean parents. No doubt children who wish to draw graffiti are mostly poorly supervised and are frequently from poorer backgrounds, and will not pay the entrance fee. So we will have protected the playpark, but at what cost? We will have rendered it a luxury for the rich and excluded legitimate use by poor or neglected children.

If a child in a class misbehaves and the teacher does not see who did it, he can hold the entire class behind. This neatly ensures that he does indeed punish the offender for the misbehaviour. But he also punishes the rest of the class for something that they did not do. This sort of injustice is called collective punishment and at an adult level is regarded as so offensive that it is banned by the Geneva Convention on Human Rights.
It is a fundamental part of law (both English and Continental, I think) that if the perpetrator of a crime cannot be identified or punished then the innocent shall not be punished as collateral damage. This I know because I recently listened to a very interesting discussion on the radio about prosecuting twins, and how they are often acquitted because of the inability to prove which of them comitted a crime.

So why, given this, do we think it perfectly acceptable to punish harmless purchasing of alcohol solely in order to make some alcohol abuse more expensive?

We should punish the offenders. When there is disorder in town centres, arrest and fine the offenders. When there is loud noise in residential areas, fine the offenders. Where a poor person is harmlessly drinking at home, fine the ... oh wait, why should this person pay more? An increase in price is collective punishment of those whose means do not stretch to casually consuming expensive products.
It's saying 'those poor people make all the trouble, so let's make them all pay for it'. It's based on grossly offensive tribal/class thinking, or possibly a simple lack of thought. Either way, it is unacceptable for researchers to recommend it, or for governments to implement it.

I do not care if utility is maximised by punishing the innocent. I do not care if the most solid economic research ever conducted shows that liver disease will be entirely eradicated by punishing the innocent. Economics and social science can show wonderful consequences for their interests (i.e the effect only on anti-social behaviour and alcoholic disease), but the consequences for others must be considered too, and must be given priority. An economist might say that this is an externality of the programme that must be internalised, but it's a specific type of externality. It does not affect just anyone else in society. This externality affects only poor drinkers. These sorts of discriminatory rules should be avoided, as it's impossible to recompense poor drinkers specifically.

This is not limited to minimum alcohol pricing. It's also relevant to the fat tax, which is even more pernicious because fat is healthy and necessary, and it's actually refined sugar that is more unhealthy. No matter which we tax, though, it's over-consumption that is the problem, not any form of consumption. Taxes punish those who do enough exercise to burn off their calories, or those who need the calories to power their exercise. By making exercising more expensive, a fat tax designed to promote health might reduce it, ensuring that the poor can only afford to be in mediocre health, not fit and active as is best.

Apart from a distinct inability to think of the wider consequences and escape the blinkers of thinking that a solution for a problem has no other effects, one cause of these ridiculous proposals is that the NHS must care for all people, but people's choices affect how much care they need. We have a destruction of accountability: we are not holding people accountable for their own health.
We need a safety net. Not all health issues are caused by the individual who suffers them, and a major function of society is to protect people from the mishaps and chance brutality of nature.

But some health problems are caused by the individual, and collective responsibility for such issues is wrong. By making the state pay for these problems, we encourage it to interfere with personal freedom in a bid to reduce its costs.
What we need is for these issues to cost a person money. We could charge people extra money for treatments of alcoholic liver disease and obesity-related heart disease. But we have made it a vital part of the NHS that it is free at the point of delivery (except dentistry, eye care, adult social care, sufficient physiotherapy and prescriptions).
There remains an alternative. We need an insurance system in which people pay for the risks they incur. Heavy drinkers would pay more as they drink, but not for the alcohol which can be consumed in moderation. They would pay for the 'heavy' part of heavy drinking. Obese people would pay for their over-consumption, rather than everyone paying for any form of consumption.
The only place where a tax works is smoking, because there is no safe limit. Smoking is always harmful, and so a tax is appropriate.

But where there are threshold effects, a blanket tax is unfair and disporportionately harms the poor. A minimum price only harms the poor. Neither is acceptable.