On The Money
STUART THEOBALD: Bootleggers and Baptists are holding up SA’s economic recovery
02 September 2019 - 05:04
SA has a “bootleggers and Baptists” problem. The term was coined by American regulatory economist Bruce Yandle. He observed that American evangelical Christians and illegal alcohol sellers often aligned in lobbying to ban alcohol sales on Sundays.
Where they succeeded, the bootleggers got much more profitable Sunday sales and the Baptists got their notion of Sunday rest. But bad public policy results: alcohol consumption could be better reduced through a Sunday surcharge, which could be directed to public benefits rather than bootleggers’ profits...
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