I understand your point, but the original claim was that spirits and cola could be the same price. My argument was that spirits have a much more involved manufacturing process which raises the price. In my opinion, watered down cleaning alcohol has a different manufacturing process and wouldn’t count - whether government prohibits it or not. It’s a different product, made a different way, so of course it’s going to have a different cost.

Thinking of it another way, and trying to play devil’s advocate against myself to think this through, what if government said that cola needed to come with a side of premium caviar? It would raise the cost, and government would have caused it, but it would also be a different product. That doesn’t mean that if you got rid of government regulation, cola with a side of caviar would cost the same as cola without caviar, spirits, or diluted cleaning alcohol. It just means that the regulation alone wasn’t what made it expensive, because there are intrinsic manufacturing costs regardless.