This is important and most people don't realize this. This is the sex work equivalent of banning drug reagent kits.
The sad fact is, the vast majority of people are far more interested in how policies look, what they signal, and how voicing support for them makes them look. The actual effects the policy may have is way, way down the list of motivating factors, if it even enters their mind at all.
Consider, for example, the science on minimum wage experiments performed in different cities and at different time intervals. The outcomes are conflicting in some cases and, perhaps, are not reproducible elsewhere.
How can we expect a layman to really understand the effect a policy may have, especially 20 years down the line? That's something even experts struggle with.
> Recent research shows conflicting evidence on both sides of the issue. In general, the evidence suggests that it is appropriate to weigh the cost of potential job losses from a higher minimum wage against the benefits of wage increases for other workers.
1. https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economi...
I'm not talking about competence. I'm talking about people not leaving or even attempting to leave the state of willful ignorance.
> How can we expect a layman to really understand the effect a policy may have, especially 20 years down the line? That's something even experts struggle with.
It's obvious that my comment wasn't a plea for universal omniscience. None of this is relevant to my complaint about people deprioritizing the effects of a policy, as if it's not close to the _only_ thing that's important.
> Consider, for example, the science on minimum wage experiments performed in different cities and at different time intervals. The outcomes are conflicting in some cases and, perhaps, are not reproducible elsewhere.
This is a perfect example, thank you. Do you know what I would say if asked what I thought the effect of min wage changes are? _I would say I have no idea_, and anyone who tells you they do for sure is lying to you. Accepting that doesn't mean throwing up your hands in hopelessness, but it does suggest a different understanding of the effects of each policy than simply what feeling you get from hearing the one-line description.
Policy, and the world in general, generally isn't as simple as people would like it to be. In democracies, one's insistence on pretending that things work the oversimplified way you want them to has concrete costs to those affected by those policies and is more than a little despicable.
People who dedicate their lives to researching proposed policies still don't agree about their effects.
A quick search will find the leading arguments pro and con, but no way to know which arguments are right.
> A quick search will find the leading arguments pro and con, but no way to know which arguments are right.
This is an incredibly significant milestone in understanding an issue though. There are many many many people who entirely lack exposure to one half of the discourse on an issue; this is exacerbated by the fact that it's increasingly en vogue to consider it a moral failing to even consider the other side's arguments (even for the purposes of rebuttal).
"What kind of persimmon faced killjoy is against a little adult fun?" is a more effective line to use than a dissertation on all the benefits of legal sex work?
Less pithily, I have no idea what you're trying to say and how it relates to my comment.
I'm not trying to claim any kind of parity between the two.
I am saying, it's another form of persecuting the supply -- and putting it at increased risk -- in lieu of dealing with the demand or even being honest about it.
It's also another excuse -- vehicle -- for the prescriptive moralists. Who, the more they complain about something, seemingly inevitably turn out to be engaged in it themselves.
"I can't control myself. But, by God, I can control you!"
Sex trafficking is a horrendous circumstance. Unfortunately, I'm left with no trust in our politicians being honest brokers with respect to the laws they introduce. Even if they honestly want to address the problem, they will -- heh -- not be able to "control themselves" with respect to how they use the expanded powers, going forward.
It is pretty easy to find the meat processing plants, agribusinesses, construction companies, etc who demand labor at prices not possible on the legal market.
Likewise, it is very easy to find the johns soliciting prostitutes, even high end ones. (Recall former governor Eliot Spitzer)
Hiring illegal immigrants harms low-skilled domestic workers and taxpayers. Prostitution is essentially a victimless crime.
Where did taxpayers come into it?
People (women or otherwise) who are trading sex for goods and services in the market are prostitutes.
Not to mention that there are acceptable places to do (small counties in Nevada) and unacceptable places to do so (everywhere else in the US). I won't even get into the number of countries that have either legalized or decriminalized this practice.
Finally, the best way to find sex trafficking victims seems to be decriminalization which removes the stigma of speaking out. What's really broken here is that the foot soldiers of sex trafficking seem to be against all this pending legislation, fearing it will drive the practice further underground, rather than assist with battling it.
Honest trade reduces opportunity for dishonest exploitation? Sure, I'll agree that's the case, but...
That's pretty much all women; what defines a prostitute is the transparent price schedule and lack of exclusivity.
Taxpayers might be harmed, but I suspect they'd be harmed much more severely by food prices skyrocketing because farms don't have sufficient labor to keep up with the demand from a growing national population (let alone global; California is the leading - and in some cases the only significant - exporter of a staggeringly-large number of fruits and vegetables).
Meanwhile, cracking down on illegal immigrants' ability to work and live in the US gives employers of said immigrants more leverage ("work these long hours for chump change or we'll report you and your whole family to the authorities"). Amnesty programs and other means to convert illegal immigrants into legal immigrants shifts at least some leverage back to the illegal worker, which then allows better negotiating power for higher wages and thus addresses the supposed problem that illegal workers are undercutting legal workers.
These jobs used to pay a man enough to support a family. Where has the money gone? What happens if an illegal gets hurt? Do they get workmen's compensation? I'm sure they get a small settlement, the cut fixed, and sent home. All the people are complicit. It is all about growth and more profit. You can have a sustainable business and employees that get decent pay with benefits.
$20/hour is enough to do exactly that in most places that don't start with "San" and end with "Francisco". I know full well that not every illegal-immigrant-hiring industry pays that well, but it's my understanding that agriculture does, and that's one industry that seems to be disproportionately affected by the lack of undocumented workers.
> What happens if an illegal gets hurt? Do they get workmen's compensation?
In California at least, as far as workmen's compensation is concerned, illegal immigrants qualify as "employees"[1], so if a legal immigrant (or natural citizen) is entitled to it, then so is an illegal immigrant.
Of course, this varies from state to state.
I always found them courteous and well mannered. But there was this hardness in them that I could only attribute to the business they were involved in. Almost a kind of lifelessness in them. It is not a victimless crime, it is full of victims - a profound disruption of humanity.
Prostitution has had various levels of acceptability in many societies over the millenia. In some it was a highly regarded position, in others completely unacceptable and everything in between in others.
There are those who choose it as a way of life, there are many others who are forced into it. When we are unwillingly or unable to help these as a society then we, as a society, are failing these vulnerable people as we fail all those who are vulnerable.
The big danger in America is the equality between prostitute and sex trafficking. They are not the same thing, and yet we're being fed the line that they are (except in some counties in Nevada).
TLDR: the criminal lifestyle one must pursue to obtain illegal supercharged versions of the drugs is vastly more harmful than the drugs themselves when legalized. I see a lot of parallels here in equating all sex work to sex trafficking. Both sides have their points, but what is the most effective strategy to minimize sex trafficking?