The Government wants to increase the excise on spirit liquors. I’ll drink to that.

I should take my share of the blame. A week ago, in an editorial in The Sofia Echo, after the Government announced its intention to sharply increase excises on tobacco, I noted that such "sin taxes" generally included both cigarettes and liquor.

Not long after that comment went live on the internet, we started hearing mutterings from unofficial official quarters about making drinkers pay more for their tipples. Cause and effect, it seems, the same principle as a foreigner learning about rakiya and the morning after, learning the Bulgarian word for "painkiller".

Much as the state has peculiar ideas about how to keep its police officers from taking bribes (this column suggested a few weeks ago that soon uniforms would be issued without pockets), a few outlandish ideas have been floated about how to collect liquor excises effectively. One that has made it into print is that stills will be sealed, and when the time is due to draw the benefits of distillation, an official should come round to unseal the vat and record proceedings.

Another was to require all producers of spirits to install gauges on their stills. Skeptic that I am, I suspect that at least some of these gauges may be made to work the way that some taxi meters do, albeit erring on the side of under-counting.

Still, it will be a noble thing to think that as each rakiya makes its golden way down the gullet, one is doing something for Bulgaria’s coffers, provided that the Government remains on the straight and narrow and does not, unlike its predecessor, spend the proceeds on things in which prosecutors may be made to take a professional interest.

All of this recalls to mind the time, just more than two years back, when the then powers-that-were announced plans for collecting excises on homemade rakiya. This led to protests, including a hardy few who gathered in the winter light outside Parliament to spew rakiya on to the pavement. They would have been better advised to pour it into the MPs, at least the better to improve the quality of debate.

Most of us simply have a difficult time imagining that there would have been any compliance with this hilarious law, in particular difficulty in picturing Dyado Ivan in some village up in the hills somewhere faithfully reporting to the Revenue how much was owed to the state from his latest batch of domashna.

Of course, especially after Boiko Borissov became Prime Minister, we have heard of a number of excise chaps behaving with new enthusiasm in seizing rakiya lacking excise labels.

But then, after the conference in Sofia these past days on the future – or lack of it – in employment in Bulgaria, the reason for this enthusiasm in seizing rakiya has become clear, clear as a good grozdova or splendid slivova. Going by what doomsayers have to say, Bulgaria as a functioning entity is set to shut down. The people in uniform so eager to seize batches of rakiya are simply stocking up for the closing-down party.

Nazdrave.