>No dude... reddit comments are not designed to explain the first fundamental theorem of economics in...
My point is that if you can't articulate your point in a plain manner and can only use technical terms and fail to explain how they are connected to your point, you probably don't have much of a point. Writing something that other people don't understand and then refusing to elaborate, doesn't make you smart, it makes you a poor communicator.
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It's like I said "no, you are wrong, look up the theory of relativity dude, it's not my job to educate you". All that says to me is that you don't feel confident in backing up what you are saying; you have also failed to clearly articulate what you mean, so I (conveniently for you) am unable to refute what you said (which was basically nothing).
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>Here's the proof: https://www.edx.org/course/principles-of-economics-with-calculus
Here's something to get you in the ballpark: https://www.coursera.org/learn/microeconomics
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Just started studying economics in Uni I see? I guess you know it all now.
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>But ask an economist... tobacco taxes are not pigovian, they do not correct for an externality or other distortion, and therefore must give rise to deadweight loss... and deadweight loss can more or less be measured in lives lost...
You can ramble as much as you want, the simple fact is that the tobacco excise has be shown to be closely correlated with decreasing rates of smoking.
https://www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-13-taxation/13-5-impact-of-price-increases-on-tobacco-consumpt
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>Smoking taxes kill.
The thing is, I did give you at least one way that they cause problems...
I buy my tobacco from a mate of John Kizon... I know they murder people in order to bring me that tobacco... how else could it possibly work... but you think this is a good thing?
I'm going to say the amount of murders caused by the smoking tax are significantly less than the number of people who would have died from smoking.
Each year in Australia there are just over 200 cases of murder; now most of these are cases of intimate violence. The most common murder is between male acquaintances who get into an argument and someone looses their temper. There's also domestic incidents among other reasons.
Money/drugs only account for 15% of male victim and 7% of female victim murders. Considering that roughly 2/3rds of homicides are male victims, we can say roughly 12% of homicides are due to money/drugs.
https://www.aic.gov.au/publications/cfi/cfi110
Now, amongst these murders, surely some of them are purely financial disputes, so lets cut it in half and say 6% of murders are over drugs; we're talking about 12 plus murders a year due to drug disputes. Now let's compare this for the number of deaths due to smoking:
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https://www.cancer.org.au/about-us/policy-and-advocacy/position-statements/smoking-and-tobacco-control
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Woopdee doo! Twenty four thousand. Quite close, only two thousand times more than the murders caused by drug disputes.
Also, out of these illegal drug disputes, how many are caused by disputes over illegal tobacco? Let's be (very) generous, and say half. 6 murders per year caused by tobacco excise. Therefore, smoking rates would only need to decrease by more than 0.025% for it to save more lives than it supposedly cost, based on your unsubstantiated claim that the tobacco excise is causing underworld murders.
It's pretty well established that the tobacco excise has drastically cut smoking, maybe you can argue the figures (based on stuff you pulled out of thin air); but you'd be pretty hard to convince someone that it didn't at least persuade on in every four thousand people to give up smoking.