demoman_chaos said:
I have never fully understood this. As the late (and great) George Carlin said, "Selling is legal, fucking is legal. Why is it illegal to sell fucking?" "Why is it illegal to sell what is perfectly legal to give away?"
Sex is legal when its free, but illegal when you pay for it. It doesn't make sense to me.
Here is my proposed solution. You have to have a license to be a prostitute, which requires a weekly STD test. Fail the test, lose your license.
Any ideas why prostitution is illegal and any idea ideas on how it would work if it was legal (like the above mention license)?
There are social concerns to think of. There is more to it than disease, crime, and other things. To put it bluntly, do you want a cathouse in your neighborhood? Do you want hookers walking down your sidewalks selling their "wares"?
The point being that you don't want your kids exposed to it, and chances are even if your not opposed to the idea you really don't want to be exposed to it constantly either.
Then of course there is the whole issue of when prostitution is public you've all of a sudden got the issue of johns congregating in the places where the hookers do. People who are buying sex are in a general sense going to be among society's lower demographics. In simple terms this means your dealing with a scum magnet. If you have a cathouse in your region you also have the people that frequent such establishments flocking to your region.
Then there are of course legal issues involved in what amounts to selling humans as a service based commodity. Oh sure, you might not have a situation where you have pimps beating up hookers for holding out on them, but it's going to be replaced by this kind of thing mucking up the legal system. What's more when dealing with something private like this, how does one go about proving whether or not services were rendered, or if the service was satisfactory? Especially when you get into people who are paying for sex because of various kinks.
The bottom line is that it's a giant burden on society, and will involve the goverment being forced to make rulings on things that the goverment should be staying away from on general principle. You can't regulate hookers without regulating sex, laws have to be general and apply equally to everyone. This can amount to a lot of stuff intended to govern the sex trade inevitably coming up in other aspects of law, especially if say your dealing with a divorce case based on infidelity or whatever.
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Right now I think the US has a good compromise. That is that we have a national red light district called "Nevada" where prostitution is legal, with it being banned everywhere else. One of the reasons why I am a big supporter of states rights is that it allows things like this to occur where one state can pass laws to be an exception, without having to bring the issues up before the whole.
I worked for two of the three biggest casinos in the world (Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun) at various times. A lot of personell were hired from Vegas, and I got to talk to a number of them. To say that some of the laws involved in Las Vegas are dubious due to gambling and prostitution would be an understatement. I'm no expert, but going by some of the stories
I've heard I would not want to see some of that enforcement where I live. The way we have things set up is we have one special area put aside for this with special state laws and rules. Greyhound advertises (or used to) that they can get you anyplace in the US for $70
or less. IMO if you *really* want to pay for sex it's not all that difficult for people to head down to Vegas for a weekend specifically for that.
George Carlin is a comedian, you have to take his comments with a grain of salt. To my knowlege he has never engaged in a serious analysis of the subject.
Oh yes and one other thing, most people talking about legalizing prostitution, oftentimes try and justify doing it by talking about requiring periodic liscencing for health and such. Setting up any kind of administration to do that is going to take a lot of money, and that is going to mean higher taxes just to process all that paperwork, especially if your going to require hookers to get re-examined and liscenced often enough for it to be a factor. A lot of people seem to think that the goverment is monolithic and can simply decide to do anything, and make it happen. While there is some truth to that, the general populance has to burden the cost.
If your a young, single guy, I can see the appeal of being able to pay for instant gratification, especially if your not socially apt to begin with. However as you get older, the urgency goes out of a lot of it, and your perspective actually does change. The idea becomes substantially less appealing because you neither want to pay more taxes out of your paycheck, or want to deal with the other associated crud that goes with it. Heck, simply hiring more police to deal with the resulting increase in crime (due to arguements about payment and the like) is going to be a big bill for the goverment to pay. Consider that with legal prostitution the police effectively become pimps... or at least enforcers, since now the guys running prostitution can't just have Mongo bust legs if there is a problem, they have to handle things legally which is time consuming, and expensive for society.
