I actually think that communism & liberalism are the secular grand-children of Catholicism. If you remove the reference to god, they advocate the same asceticism, contempt for trading and ownership, egalitarianism, a culture of self-blaming for anything going wrong in the world, etc.

Liberalism values freedom and equality above everything else, it’s even in the definition. It was founded in direct opposition to the Church during the Enlightenment. Communism is an economic system, none of these are very relevant to the discussion at hand.

That's always what taxes like this have been called, same thing goes for smoking. They know people will do it no matter what so they know they can put an obscene tax on it without impacting consumption much. Not that people will like that though.