The advantage of a ban is that you can also eliminate production and importation. If you have a legal path, that path will be diverted into the black market.

> If a small number of rich people are willing to pay $100 in extra taxes to smoke a cigarette, is that really so bad?

What is the rational to "letting" the rich smoke (replace with activity "X" if desired), but not everyone else?

For the most part, that is what the policy effectively ends up doing, and so enacting it becomes to an implicit approval of that result.

It's obviously not the only way of looking at the situation, but I think it has some merit. Interesting to think about, at least.

> equally

Implies everyone is in the same situation. This is never true. For example, in WW2 we had gas rationing. You got a fixed amount of gas, regardless of how much driving you needed to do. The result was a black market in gas, where those who didn't need all their alotment sold it to those who did (at black market prices, of course, since this was illegal).

This is a good moral question. My impression is that some people today, especially here on HN, feel very uncomfortable taking any moral stance and instead have a worldview that says what is right is determined entirely by what the market produces. Basically capitalism is God.

I like capitalism, but I view it as a means to an end, not an end in itself. Instead of evaluating our moral against what capitalism produces, we should evaluate capitalism by how well it supports our morals.

From that perspective, yeah, I think it is kind of bad. If we are placing a high tax on cigarettes because our society has made a moral choice that cigarettes are bad and people who smoke are bad, then I think that moral choice should apply equally to all people regardless of wealth. My moral code states that power does not excuse sins.

On the other hand, if the tax is a pragmatic one to, say, help pay for universal healthcare and offset the higher medical costs incurred by smokers, then the tax is a reasonable approach.

In reality, the tax/law is probably a combination of the two goals, which is why I think a tax is kind of bad but kind of OK.

This can also be a strong dis-advantage because they incentivize abuse.

Look, for example, at civil seizure in the US. Police agencies are highly incentivized to do it since they get to keep the money, even when doing so is unjust.

In practice, tax-based solutions have pros and cons and you need to think about the incentives and unintended consequences that they lead to on both the enforcement and citizen sides. Law-based solutions do too, of course.