Legalizing for protection of those involved is one thing, but it is completely orthogonal to 'reducing the stigma'. Frankly this is where these movements lose people, including the abortion movement.
No woman wakes up one day and says 'I want to sell my body for sex to the highest bidder' unless forced to by circumstance.
A lot of people would be willing to become a janitor at 3 times the market wages for janitors. A lot of people who are physically able to do construction work would take the job at 3 times the market rate for construction work. Not a lot of people would be willing to become a prostitute at 3 times the market rate for prostitutes.
This means that prostitution is much farther on the scale of "forced into by circumstances" than janitors or construction workers.
Citation please. I find it very hard to believe that prostitution is immune to the same price based supply and demand forces that every other labor pool is.
Few people wake up wanting to sell their procreative parts to the highest bidder.
If that is true, then a thought experiment would be: should refusing to enter prostitution be a grounds for losing jobseekers' welfare, eg. jobseekers allowance [1]?
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/jobseekers-allowa...
I agree with the general principle that not all labour is the same, but I don't think prostitution is in a class of its own. If you paid me enough I'd probably do it for a week and then retire.
Maybe this means that you don't really like your job? If you had access to the same goods as everyone else around you, more or less, and liked what you are doing, then doing it for a week stops making sense, doesn't it?
In capitalistic society everything can be called labour, including selling people, their organs and their genitals for sex.
Sex is not just another activity. Due to its effects of potentially creating a new human being, it is a category unto itself and deserves special treatment.
For example, would you sell your pancreas? Why not? Is it because a vital organ is not in the same class of goods as say a lightbulb?
The same is true of selling sex, which is not just some social interaction, but a social interaction that can literally make a new person
Your kind of equivocation is morally lazy and conveniently abiological.
Speaking of lazy, that's a pretty ridiculous comparison. Depriving yourself of a vital organ is not the same as renting out your genitals for a limited time.
"Making a new person" is also a complete red herring. You can hire a surrogate to carry a baby to term, which is also paying to use someone else's genitals to actually make a new person. The only meaningful difference is the absence of "sex", so I think it's clear what you really have a problem with.
In the vast majority of first world countries this is illegal for precisely the reasons I described. Only extremely poor countries or barbaric jurisdictions, such as California, allow paid surrogacy.
> not the same as renting out your genitals for a limited time.
Given the genitals ability to produce life that can last many years beyond yourself, you're absolutely right. Renting out your genitals is much worse.
No it's not. The potential to make humans is not equal to the intentional act to create humans, just like the potential to commit murder is not the same as the intentional act to commit murder.
> Only extremely poor countries or barbaric jurisdictions, such as California, allow paid surrogacy.
You definitely need to update your list, because more states are surrogate friendly than aren't.
Even supposing few people want to do that, I don't see how it follows that nobody should be permitted to do it. You're missing a critical step.
For example, we regulate ivf, don't we? Why? Because the action undertaken has the ability to create new life.
The same is true of prostitution. The action undertaken is of a wholly different nature. Namely it can create people, which is different than any other labor.
Tolerating homosexual prostitution is actually more akin to your other analogies in that the action undertaken is not special. Although anal intercourse in general ought to be discouraged due to its deleterious health effects.
No, we don't regulate it because it can create new life, we regulate it because it falls under healthcare for which doctors have a certain duty of care, and if IVF is done poorly it can cause all sorts of deleterious health effects for the mother and the implanted embryo. These considerations do not apply to prostitution since we have contraception and abortion.
> These considerations do not apply to prostitution since we have contraception and abortion.
Whose burden falls solely on the women, and for which large portions of the population would object to the use of abortion as birth control. Even many pro-abortion people object to abortion's use as birth control, because they view abortion as justified murder, but murder nevertheless.
Decriminalization of marijuana in many places is getting people talking about it more openly, for example. It's not everything but it's a start.
And because a large subset of the population (which tend to be over-represented on the white collar parts of the internet who generally have the luxury of always being able to afford cost of compliance in their day to day lives) happily lets the state dictate their morals by mentally bucketing illegal things as immoral by default.
sure... and that's the best argument to recriminalize. Having yet more drugs that disrupt mental faculties is not a good thing
Do I think it's wise.... No. Our culture is too dependent on it.
If there was a country where alcohol wee not popular, I'd think it would be a good idea to keep it illegal.
Look, drinking is fun, but it's a luxury and can be dangerous.
"Why should everything be taxed be default?"
I believe inimited government, not small government.
If you need a giant government to enforce law then you need a big government.
For example, if you have a government of say 100 people, and they decided to hire 10 people and start a fast food restaurant I would be against this new government of 110 people. On the other hand, if the same government needed to hire 5000 people to combat drugs, I'd support that.
Why? Because limited government means government should only do a limited number of things. Opening a fast food restaurant is not the proper place of a government. Enforcing drug law is. Government can be as large as necessary to accomplish that.
- The drug war is indirectly causing more illegal immigration into the US because it's destabilizing South America.
- The drug war is shifting large profits away from US pharma and into foreign narco gangs, which is bad for GDP growth and therefore the strength of the nation.
- The drug war means taxation needs to be higher because it's expensive.
- The drug war creates more street crime, which ranks highly in what right-leaning people care about.
So I just don't understand why right-leaning people (not just libertarians) are so actively voting against almost all of their stated interests. Add to this a number of other reasons (how bad it is for the black community, how poor whites are being literally killed by fentanyl, how it pushes people into more dangerous and cheaper drugs such as ice and crack, how hypocritical it is for alcohol and cigarettes to be legal, how morally questionable it is to punish a victimless crime), and the case is clear cut to me.
I'm not a libertarian, but libertarians -- unless they're of the high school variety -- are not carte blanche small government. They are certainly limited government. Perhaps you should begin by not arguing against high-school-level strawmen.
> The drug war is indirectly causing more illegal immigration into the US because it's destabilizing South America.
Almost certainly, but what happens in South America is not america's problem. America can build a wall and deport the illegal aliens back, as any sovereign country would.
> The drug war is shifting large profits away from US pharma and into foreign narco gangs, which is bad for GDP growth and therefore the strength of the nation.
Yes, unfortunately, we do not imprison enough whites for their drug habits, and instead jail mostly non-whites. The solution is to put more white drug users in jail for a very long time or institute pretty harsh rehabilitation programs (i.e., not released until you're sober for X amount of time, and then close follow-up monitoring).
> The drug war means taxation needs to be higher because it's expensive.
That's fine. I'm not against taxation, as long as the taxes are being spent on worthwhile things that are the purview of government. For example, if you told me taxes had to be raised 1% for 'diversity training' I'd say no, because diversity training is not the purview of government. If you told me taxes had to be raised 20% due to an increase in crime and the need to imprison and incarcerate more criminals, that would be okay. WE all have to share society's burdens, I just don't want to share the burden of things I don't want.
> The drug war creates more street crime, which ranks highly in what right-leaning people care about.
Indeed. So we should institute harsher criminal sentencing.
> So I just don't understand why right-leaning people (not just libertarians) are so actively voting against almost all of their stated interests.
Dude... you live in a bubble. There is no group of 'right-leaning' people who 'state' their interests in some centralized publication.
The only people who 'state' right-leaning people's interests are left-wing publications trying to create strawmen. Perhaps listen to others instead of imagining their interests?
> how bad it is for the black community,
The black community was the initial force behind the drug war
> how poor whites are being literally killed by fentanyl
More doctors and pharmacists should frankly be in jail.
> how it pushes people into more dangerous and cheaper drugs such as ice and crack
Great, those dealers should be imprisoned too. We have too few prisons in this country, given the level of crime and drugs.
> how hypocritical it is for alcohol and cigarettes to be legal
Alcohol and cigarettes have a long cultural history. They are luxuries tolerated for the culture. Not something innate.
> how morally questionable it is to punish a victimless crime
The victim is the person doing the drugs. It is well within the purview of government to punish people for victimizing themselves, to discourage the behavior. For example, many countries used to criminalize attempted suicide. I'm not going to turn this into an argument on that... but that is well within the government's purview.
"The only people who 'state' right-leaning people's interests are left-wing publications trying to create strawmen. Perhaps listen to others instead of imagining their interests?"
I vote conservative for the most part. I'm just not one of those authoritarian dick head conservatives that try to control other people's lives over victimless crimes. And no, the person who smokes pot isn't a victim. Tobacco and alcohol are worse for the body than the occasional vape, so I completely reject your premise.