We know from Senator Rand Paul's words yesterday that he believes New York's high cigarette tax directly led to Eric Garner's homicide. Paul took the GOP high-taxes-are-deadly meme right down to its most concrete meaning yesterday on CNN. Yet, join me below for a question that Paul must now answer.
Bootlegging booze is not uncommon today (so much so that there is at least one reality TV show about it) and it is fairly common, not because of Prohibition (that's dead), but in large part because people can and do make money without paying taxes on the moonshine they sell. Like cigarette taxes, alcohol taxes are high enough for a black market to thrive. As a senator from Kentucky Rand Paul must know all about today's bootlegging moonshiners and the efforts the ATF makes to catch these people.
So, Senator Paul, if it's not racist police brutality that killed Eric Garner, but the high taxes of a legal substance, then how many white moonshine bootleggers have been killed by law enforcement in, oh say, the past few years? As a special gift to you, Senator Paul, you can go ahead and include homicides of white Canadian bootleggers in your answer.