Colin's Journal

While it doesn’t strike me as strange that Germany bans heavy lorries from it’s roads on Sundays, it does seem strange that the government is working hard to maintain this ban. Germany is struggling economically and the government has accepted that it needs to reform labour markets. Yet when presented with a politically easy opportunity to remove an obstacle to growth such as this, it fights to keep it.

In other (rather older) news there’s tax competition at work in Denmark, where tax on alcohol has been reduced significantly. This is in an attempt to reduce the amount of booze bought in the rest of the EU and (legally) imported. We can hold out hope that similar pressure will eventually cap the tax we see on alcohol in the UK as well. (In an ideologically inconsistent fashion I don’t care how high tax on cigarettes gets!)

We could also do with some price competition here in Ontario, where the government run monopoly keeps prices significantly higher than the UK (e.g. £3 a pint!).

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