Prostitutes have a union in Germany, where I used to live, and a health certificate they have to get, and all the other things people here are suggesting. But all the prostitutes are from other countries--German girls hardly go into it. They are too well off financially. This tells you what it is really like.

You would deny people the only means they have to keep themselves fed and housed?

Your story makes it clear that these women are street prostitutes out of desperation. Dire straits make for desperate measures.

And in the US we do not have the social safety net that they have in most of Europe. If you fall below a certain point financially you end up on the street and the chances of climbing back up in the employment market today are slim to none. A lot of jobs, even menial ones, require a phone, credit check and a lot of other things which a person living on the street simply does not have.

There is an old saw about men putting up with marriage to get sex while women put up with sex to get marriage. Like most cliches it certainly isn't completely true but there is an element of truth to it.

All most women have to do to get sex is just stop saying no. Men on the other hand have to go through an elaborate and often expensive ritual with no promise of the reward they seek at the end of the ritual.

The sexual playing field between men and women is not level and prostitution to some small extent helps level that field. Your position could easily be interpreted or misinterpreted as wishing to maintain the unequal sexual playing field between men and women.

Sex with a loving and enthusiast partner is far preferable to hiring a prostitute for most men but there are a large number of men for whom that simply isn't an option.

However they are not really comparable to prostitutes, who truly risk their lives every time they shut themselves--alone--into a hotel room with a possibly diseased and/or deranged john.

I'm not an illegal and it could just as easily have been me who got killed that day.

I note that you never answered my questions. Do you think construction workers are "screwed up" because they risk their life every day at work?

How about soldiers and Marines, are they "screwed up"?

I predict that you will not give a straightforward answer to these questions.

Try being a roofer for a month, it's one of the most dangerous jobs around and you risk severe injury or death every time you go to work. An instant of inattention or a twist of your ankle and you will plunge to the ground, it's that sudden stop at the bottom that hurts you.

I've seen two men climbing a ladder, the first one with a nail gun in his hand. The second man bumped his head on the nail gun while the first man had his finger on the trigger and the gun fired sending a framing nail through the hardhat into the second man's head.

I proved that already.

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/dcf/tables/drugtype.htm

In 2004 there were 771,000 arrests for marijuana, the majority of those for simple posession.

Part of the booking process is incarceration, even if only briefly. That makes around 400,000 or more people locked in a cage for simply posessing a common weed.

Is the robber ‘too’ greedy and the business man greedy at an ‘acceptable’ level? Are they both ‘too’ greedy? Neither? Your definition gets us nowhere near answering these questions.

The robber is definitely too greedy.

The businessman who does his best to act ethically probably not.

I note that you never responded to my point regarding the corollary to the golden rule.

As you do unto others so do you imply consent to have done unto you.

It removes a lot of the consent problems from some of your examples.

It was amazing to me that people who only a few years earlier were calling for Clinton to be impeached and tried for treason over using intel he knew to be bad on Sudan to drop two bombs on one factory for wag the dog purposes- were contorting themselves into the most amazing illogical pretzels to defend the mountains of lies on Iraq and this sick war that has now killed perhaps a million people. I am still amazed people can be so dishonorable- and transparently so.

I've known for nearly two decades now that the entire establishment is dishonorable to their very core.

When I first got online I chanced upon an anti drug war BBS and was amazed to find that many other people had the same experiences I had with "drugs". Through research I found out that the great majority of information being disseminated by the government and the media was incorrect and often egregiously so.

Then I started researching other things, I came upon an article by Heinlein where he had applied standard military anylysis techniqes to information on the Soviet Union and concluded that the population of the USSR was shrinking and that their industrial and military might was nowhere near what was generally accepted in the US.

After a couple of years of this I realized that virtually everything I thought I knew was wrong, that I had been lied to by people that I had trusted to tell the truth.

Erasmus thought that in the Kingdom of the Blind the one eyed man was King.

Erasmus was a flaming optimist.

Do you deny that hundreds of thousands of people every year are locked in cages for the simple posession of a common weed?