Das BERL report ist Krap

Eric Crampton and Matt Burgess have performed an in-depth defrag of BERL's harms of alcohol and drugs bullshit report, concluding that the logic is about as over-leveraged as a sub-prime lender:

“What we found shocked us. BERL exaggerated costs by 30 times using a bizarre methodology that you won’t find in any economics textbook,” Dr Crampton said.

As Blaise Drinkwater informs us, BERL founded their facts on more esoteric polemics, namely Karl Marx's Das Kapital:

UPDATE: You know it's gotta be good when one of the footnotes is this:

Marx, Karl H. (1867), Capital: Volume One: A Critique of Political Economy

Evidently, they've picked up on something amazing: BERL uses the Labour Theory of Value. That's +5 ouch-points.

The Law Commission's got a bit of work ahead of it, what with wide-ranging reports on Drugs and Alcohol due to be released any day now. It seems much of the rationale behind Sir Geoffrey Palmer's speeches on these matters is discredited. Indeed, Crampton and Burgess have not only undone BERL's harms index credibility, they have proved what everyone already knows but lacked the numbers; the government makes a very tidy profit off alcohol and tobacco.

Here's hoping Graeme Edgeler's Legal Beagle blog on Public Address gets picked up by the Law Commission in their revamp of online participation. That's the sort of informed public debate the Law Commission needs more of. Daggs knows, the Law Commission could get better advice than at present.