Quote:
Originally Posted by Hecate
Yup a black market that really didn’t exist in Canada until… ridiculously excessive oppressive taxation. Our government literally created a more profitable black market for organized crime with less severe punishments than the drug trade. Recent stats suggest over 60 percent of tobacco sales in Ontario are illegal. Our government is corrupt.
https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6973677
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The government is corrupt because
other people are breaking laws? I don't think you know what the term corruption means. It does not just mean that a government has a policy you don't like or don't feel is effective.
Something being either more expensive or illegal does act as a disincentive. But disincentives just discourage people from doing things rather than totally stop them. Every law has people doing different things to get around it and therefore there's more criminal activity than if the law didn't exist. That in itself doesn't make the law a failure.
The success of a policy like a tax meant to discourage something isn't based on the percentage of people illegally contravening it, but rather the overall percentage of people doing the harmful activity. And the rates of smoking in Canada have never been lower since its peak popularity decades ago. In fact, the rate of smoking in Canada is one of the lowest in the world, and lower than the US, Aus, NZ, and all countries in Europe except Iceland. So the various things we're doing to discourage it seem to be working.
https://ourworldindata.org/smoking
You can see a list in that link by scrolling down to the "Share of adults who smoke, 2000 to 2020" section, selecting the table format, and sorting in order for the 2020 column.