Booze laws a farce
Re: “New excise taxes set to rake in B12bn”, ( BP, Sept 17).
Authorities in Thailand certainly do seem to have a somewhat strange and illogical attitude to the level, and the way they in which they impose so-called “sin taxes”.
If the proposed significant rise in the levy imposed on alcoholic drinks and cigarettes is really designed to raise revenue for the government, then it would be logical for it to remove the current ridiculous and singularly ineffective practice of prohibiting the selling of alcohol at certain times of the day, as to do so would enable the government to accrue a much higher tax revenue from such sales, 24 hours a day.
In any case, this current limitation on the sale of alcohol is not universally applied. Two days ago, while visiting Bangkok, I sat in a restaurant at 2.30pm enjoying a steak lunch, but was refused a cold beer to accompany my meal. A few metres away, however, there was a pub openly selling beer to its clientele, apparently perfectly legally — or perhaps they had paid local law enforcers, or some other officials, to turn a blind eye to their illegal trade.
The very next day, I was refused a glass of wine at a restaurant owned by a chain of wine shops when having another slightly late lunch, and was told that I would also have to wait until 5pm to purchase 12 bottles of wine that I wanted to take home, upcountry. I was so irritated that I had to go all the way to another of their stores in a shopping mall, which I knew traded all day, to make my purchase mid-afternoon, without any legal obstacle being raised, let alone imposed.
Let’s be grown-up and admit that prohibition does not deter the consumption of “sinful” goods and services, it simply makes it inconvenient for the consumer and the seller, and turns legal markets into illegal ones. Similarly, excessive hikes in indirect taxation on alcohol and tobacco products have been shown to be incentives for cross-border smuggling of such merchandise. After all, if it is apparently so easy for a high-profile and officially monitored politician to leave the country without being detected, then it should not be too difficult to ship a few ciggies and a lorry load of illicit booze into Thailand through one of its porous borders with neighbouring countries, should it?
In countries where corruption among officials is endemic, one might be excused of cynically suggesting that actively creating illegal markets in these perverse ways is intentionally and simply designed to provide further lucrative avenues for graft. But, of course, that would be sinful! GMT