When we scheduled the release of The Wages of Sin Taxes for 15th May, we did not guess that it would be sandwiched between the announcement of a 50p minimum price for alcohol in Scotland (Monday) and a new campaign for sin taxes on food and soft drinks (today).

Tim Worstall made himself (more) unpopular with Compass last week by pointing out that their idea of creating a form of national socialism rather resembled the sort of economy favoured by National Socialists.

Consider two propositions. Firstly, that a minimum price on a unit of alcohol will reduce alcohol consumption by making cheap booze less affordable. Secondly, that minimum wage laws increase the price of a unit of labour, but do not lead to greater unemployment. 

These two statements are logically inconsistent and yet many people are able to hold both simultaneously. Some people take the opposite view: that minimum pricing won’t work, but that the minimum wage destroys jobs. They, too, seem to believe that employers respond differently to higher costs than drinkers.

Today sees the launch of the Adam Smith Institute's latest report, Plain packaging: Commercial expression, anti-smoking extremism and the risks of hyper-regulation.

George Monbiot begins his Guardian op-ed this week with this jaw-dropping assertion:

Self-deprecating, too liberal for their own good, today's progressives stand back and watch, hands over their mouths, as the social vivisectionists of the right slice up a living society to see if its component parts can survive in isolation. Tied up in knots of reticence and self-doubt, they will not shout stop.

In their ongoing campaign for plain packaging of cigarettes, Action on Smoking and Health have dismissed fears of a slippery slope, saying:

Tobacco is not like any other product, it is the only legal product on the market which is lethal when used as intended... Plain packs for tobacco would not set a precedent for other products.

When a Guardian journalist attended an Adam Smith Institute event in October, he came away convinced that libertarians are “obsessed” with smoking. This, of course, is an outrageous slur (everybody knows libertarians are obsessed with guns and drugs), but how can freedom-minded individuals not take an interest in the naked authoritarianism of the anti-smoking lobby in 2012? Take events on US college campuses, for example: