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Comment by pyuser583 | Hacker News Reader

This has been considered.

You stop commerce by stopping demand, not supply.

Are you intending to speak generally, because there are almost no markets where that is the way things work. I can't think of any other market that is restricted purely on the demand side, and the few markets I can think of with demand side enforcement as a major component, they do so because they are at the limit of what is practical on the supply side, not because they choose not to enforce supply side.

It's true of illicit markets with a high ceiling for what buyers are willing to pay vs the requirements for sellers to engage in trade. People are willing to pay so much for drugs which are so cheap to produce that dealing with dealers does virtually nothing for consumption because rising prices inspire people to fill any gaps you poke in the supply chain.

I would say sex is not dissimilar.

1) Generally the way commerce is stopped is first it is moved via a regulator, then the regulator squeezes it. See the medical market for example.

2) Sometimes we must refer to King Canute and the tide. The idea of "stopping demand" for prostitution seems like a long shot.

Have you got an example of regulatory pressure working?

Drugs, alcohol, sex, abortion. You make it illegal and you get the same behaviour with a whole load of bad add-ons.

All of these things have been prohibited to varying degrees of success throughout history. Just because there are times and places where it doesn’t work doesn’t mean prohibition is a universally ineffectual measure. That’s a fairy tale.

Harm and demand reduction are great - though hard to achieve.

Have you got any examples of prohibition working?

Parts of the Islamic world today prohibit alcohol without much fuss. I’m sure there are minor bootlegging operations here and there, but nothing comparable to America during prohibition (my adoptive family’s patriarch was a bootlegger whose sons worked for him, so I’ve been interested in the subject for a long time). Abortion was successfully prohibited in America. The whole back-alley thing is heavily overblown in terms of how common it was.

There are always going to be cultural factors at play. You aren’t going to succeed in banning something if it’s popular enough, like jazz in the Third Reich, or if you just don’t have the power to enforce it.

In terms of harm reduction, a tightly controlled black market can easily be preferable to legalization. Kind of like el Paquete in Cuba.

The Islamic world just replaces alcohol with khat and opium, which aren’t much better. I wouldn’t call that an example of successful prohibition.

I don't know how well opiate use correlates to the legality of alcohol. In theory, then, you could depress opiate use by introducing alcohol, but that doesn't mesh with what's going on in America right now, where opiate use is rising without any prohibition on alcohol. Khat's an upper, not really comparable.

There are other factors that drive the demand for these drugs, and I think we're in agreement that the demand can and should be addressed in large part by dealing with root causes. But sex, drugs, guns, abortions etc. have all been successfully prohibited. There's little human behavior that hasn't.

> You stop commerce by stopping demand, not supply.

You can't stop demand. Preaching abstinence almost certainly doesn't work.

> You can't stop demand. Preaching abstinence almost certainly doesn't work.

And it fuels the Incel toxic subculture.

Abstinence would mean no sex at all, when in fact all the buyers need therapy to have enough social competence to get genuine encounters instead of using force by money and prostitutes need ways to safely leave their “job”.

Buying sex is a horrendous, (socially and often also physically) violent way of exploiting (mostly women's) bodies.

Overall, it is a societal topic. As long as commodification of everything is the norm, bodies will continue to be commodified. There is no legislation that will make prostitution ok or be safe.

> Abstinence would mean no sex at all,

No, it doesn't. If you have to change the definitions of words from what is in a dictionary to make your argument work, it's your argument that is broken, not the dictionary.

And, disregarding your attempt to shut down discussion by shaming language, the fact still remains that mandating what sex consensual adults have with each other never works.

Legislating consensual sex is a primitive and regressive opinion, mostly opined by a few close-minded but loud and vocal puritanicals.

The government should not be getting involved in consensual sex between adults.

Abstinence means what I wrote. It means to refrain (= not do) something. In the sexual context and on this topic, this would mean not buying sex.

It's cool that you have to resort to low-key ("look in the dictionary", "shaming", "primitive and regressive", "close-minded") blows to push your argument, fantastic for discussion.

Oh, and you don't have to be a puritanical to think that intimacy for sale is a bad idea and should not be encouraged.

Once again, the problem is societal. If you treat everything as a market, you will get a society where everyone is treated as a commodity.

> Oh, and you don't have to be a puritanical to think that intimacy for sale is a bad idea and should not be encouraged.

But you do have to be a puritannical to tell consenting adults what they can and cannot do to each others bodies, and for what reasons.

Anytime your argument starts with "sex between consenting adults should be regulated like this ...", step back and ask yourself "Do I really want the government in my bedroom?"

Because many the freedoms we enjoy today are because we kicked the government out of bedrooms. Now you want to invite them back in?

> It's cool that you have to resort to low-key ("look in the dictionary", "shaming", "primitive and regressive", "close-minded") blows to push your argument, fantastic for discussion.

Didn't you start off by saying all people who buy sex are mentally ill and all people who sell sex have no agency of their own?

You lead with slurs, what did you expect? You took civilised discussion off of the table, and then turn around and complain that others must expend more respect to you than you do to others.

> Do I really want the government in my bedroom

No, I want the government to regulate markets. As in, I want the government to do everything in its power to abolish the sex trade market and help people get out of the famously violent, dangerous and abusive field of prostitution.

> Didn't you start off by saying all people who buy sex are mentally ill and all people who sell sex have no agency of their own?

No, I said they need therapy (which would benefit most people, me and you included). The fact that you are misrepresenting what I said and turning it into polemics is uncalled for and unproductive.

> You lead with slurs, what did you expect?

Nowhere did I use a slur. In fact, the only slurs dropped were by you, which I pointed out to you and now you become defensive.

Moreover, based on your outrage, it appears that you think that mental illness is something people (or right now: specifically me) use to denounce or otherwise degrade others.

Please look into how you are doing the actual thing (taking civil discussion off the table) you accuse others of doing.

> Preaching abstinence almost certainly doesn't work.

Why doesn't it work? Do you think perhaps it falls on deaf ears? Could it have something to do with a sexualized culture people live in that is overwhelmingly more influential than perhaps one clergyman one hour a week? Does it have anything to do with hot blondes on Carl's Jr commercials munching burgers, or dancing e-Girls on TikTok? Have men been disempowered, emasculated, and humiliated in their rightful roles by feminism? Is it perhaps related to third graders getting sex ed, how to don a condom, and a fresh supply of hormones no matter what their parents think? Is it perhaps related to unfettered access to contraception for everyone, abortion on demand, and no-fault divorce that nobody cares about keeping a family together or staying with their wives to support them in sickness and in health?

Yeah forget preaching, that preachy stuff never works.

> Why doesn't it work?

I dunno. I don't care either. All I know is that mandating what consensual adults do to each other in terms of sex never works.

I have long advocated for this, and people always reject it out of hand!

Trying to stop demand for sex is a fool's errand.

Except nobody is stopping anything, and everybody knows it by now.

> This has been considered.

So has nuking the moon to stop communism.

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