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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

Not just tax authorities, but (more importantly) police ones.

The laws around things like sex work or drug consumptions, in most countries, are full of grey areas and willfully-contradictory positions (e.g. one can buy but the other can't sell, etc). So as soon as a transaction is categorised as part of a "problematic" economy, then police can get involved. If your bank lets through "hooker money" unchallenged, the police can eventually accuse the bank of facilitating activities which might be, at some level, criminal.

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> willfully-contradictory positions (e.g. one can buy but the other can't sell, etc).

This seems weird, but is actually a perfectly reasonable legal regime that's all about power dynamics and enabling the authorities to approach people. Drug users and prostitutes are in much more vulnerable positions than drug dealers and johns respectively.

If you make selling drugs a crime, but not buying/owning those same drugs, now the police can approach addicts much more easily, and get them help (this is the much-lauded Portuguese model).

The same logic applies in reverse to prostitution: if selling sexual favours is legal, but buying is illegal, prostitutes are enabled to report abusive johns to the police, and authorities can approach them much more easily to try and get them off that life too.

This is the rationalisation of a legal kludge that is only necessary to assuage consciences that the state has not become "immoral".

The facts on the ground are that, dissuasion or not, these economies will never go away ("oldest profession", after all). Full legalisation would allow for complete oversight of such murky sectors, which would ensure everyone's safety better than the current arrangements, at all levels. For example, in many countries there is no way for prostitutes to legally ensure their own security, because any sort of professional relationship with a sex-worker is illegal (even if the business itself is not); at that point, whether they have recourse post-abuse or not, is basically irrelevant.

The legal situation around cannabis and prostitution is just a shitshow in most places, driven as it is by outdated sensibilities which have ossified through short-term political calculation. There is no point trying to find in it a logic that is simply not there.

I agree that prostitution should be legalised and regulated to make it safer for everybody involved (because I too don't think it'll ever go away). Cannabis? Probably — I don't know that it's that much worse than tobacco.

Full-on legalisation is not universally desirable, though — there's always heroine, cocaine, crack, meth... — and the asymmetric legality thing is still a very useful tool in those circumstances.

I would argue, from a pure cost-benefit perspective that full legalization of drugs is desirable unless someone has another credible plan for eliminating the black market without unacceptable consequences (e.g. a police state).

What's needed is evidence based approach, where wt draw a line at alcohol and all drugs less lethal/ addictive/ harmful (take your pick) are legalised.

There are some truly horrible substances, but with current approach heroin and weed are sold by the same guy.

The thing is that if it was really a payment for an illegal activity, who actually would write the truth in the description?

Prostitution is legal in Germany but it is regulated and money made from it is taxable income.

Also famously you do have to pay taxes on illegal income, otherwise the income is both illegal and tax fraud.

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