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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024
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Sorry, how do you figure? Cola is basically water, sugar, and flavorings/colorings. Mix it together, carbonate it, put it in a bottle, and ship it out. Super easy to scale up. Whiskey (for example) involves mashing grain, fermenting it to get alcohol, distilling that alcohol to get it more concentrated and less watery, aging it in a barrel for a number of years, and then bottling it and shipping it out. Each step involves big, specialized equipment (harder to scale up) and many involve losing product along the way. And yet, it's because of government? Sure, there are higher taxes on alcohol and that contributes to the difference, but to blame it entirely on government is ridiculous.
I could give a long description about the process to make the sugar needed to make cola, and then describe whiskey as essentially just water and alcohol, and some flavors. Then there is that other kind of alcohol, methanol, for cleaning windows etc, usually sold in percentages over 80%. How much does that cost per liter? I stand my ground that spirits could be sold for about the same price as soda, if it would not be taxed with special exise, duty, tax, or whatever the special "alcohol tax" is called in your country. Which is exactly the reason that in practically every country alcoholic drinks are made artificially more expensive.
So it's actually a lot more involved to make spirits when you don't want to go blind over it, especially if you want it to taste good as well.
US taxes spirits at $13.50 per proof gallon at most (like income taxes, there are different margins). That means a gallon of 100 proof (50% alcohol by volume) alcohol spirits has a tax rate of $13.50. A 750ml bottle is .198 gallons, and .198*$13.50 is $2.67.
So... You sure about that?
If the government would not interfere, most companies would just label watered down cleaning alcohol as whiskey and sell you that. Point is that there are cost-increasing measures on alcoholic drink production from the govt beyond taxes.
I understand your point, but the original claim was that spirits and cola could be the same price. My argument was that spirits have a much more involved manufacturing process which raises the price. In my opinion, watered down cleaning alcohol has a different manufacturing process and wouldn't count - whether government prohibits it or not. It's a different product, made a different way, so of course it's going to have a different cost.
Thinking of it another way, and trying to play devil's advocate against myself to think this through, what if government said that cola needed to come with a side of premium caviar? It would raise the cost, and government would have caused it, but it would also be a different product. That doesn't mean that if you got rid of government regulation, cola with a side of caviar would cost the same as cola without caviar, spirits, or diluted cleaning alcohol. It just means that the regulation alone wasn't what made it expensive, because there are intrinsic manufacturing costs regardless.
Yeah, and I'm not disputing your point beyond that "no regulations" would be weirdly bad, not just normally bad.