As I skimmed through the (now 79) pages of comments on this thread, I couldn’t help but feel that the majority of posts were passionately defending or attacking something other than the core disagreement. I am pretty sure it is not Bush being a terrible president or studies that show that prostitutes often come from troubled backgrounds. I believe both of these things to be true, but neither seems central.

The core disagreement seems to be along the dimension defined by two extreme points of view:

[A] Society has no right to prevent adults from making bad decisions in their personal lives.

[B] Society has an obligation to prevent adults from making bad decisions in their personal lives.

Incidentally, a related issue is a parent’s role in controlling the lives of their adult children.

I am particularly interested in the relative roles of persuasion (providing alternatives) vs. coercion (providing penalties) and the importance of diminished capacity (are there special circumstances where [B] is more likely to apply?).

Glenn, if you are still monitoring this moribund thread, I would like to hear more about these issues in a future post. But without the sex. Throwing sex into the mix is a bit like throwing gasoline on a fire... kind of fun to watch, but not terribly illuminating in the long run.

The only way you are going to stop me is by locking me in a filthy metal cage under the total control of sadists..

Are you willing to go that far?

By the way, I applaud your fortitude in answering my question.

I'm watching media "critic" Howard Kurts (friend of the show!) on the Colbert Report. Ethan Nadelmann was the act-two guest.

This comments thread has been a real riot.

First off, WT, you nearly got it right - it's not DonJuaquin but DanJoaquin. It conveniently rhymes with San Joaquin, that unlovely valley in California.

On the second point - "....Ozzies generally refer to Brits who unaccountably find themselves Down Under as pommy bastards." - you're semi-correct, though the more usual Antipodean epithet for Brits is "whingeing Poms", in reference to their lengthy tradition of nagging complaint. Begrudging though it might frquently seem, there is a fierce, knowing affection between our 2 nations. It's enhanced by a similar unkind humour, frequent insults & a shared...er...bemusement, regarding America, particularly, as here, in matters of faith & the flesh.

Since you've flushed me out from my contented lurking, I might as well re-add my two cents worth on the vexing issue of (gasp!) commercial sex...

I note the silence regarding Mona's Question (where do male prostitutes fit in the faux-feminist-female-victim narrative?) remains curiously deafening. Similarly unanswered are the vast majority of DCLaw & Greenwald's most cogent arguments. Instead we have, on behalf of the prohibitionists, a fever-swamp of moral vapours, laughable links, straw men, "gut feelings" and howling illogic regarding consensual, commercial, sexual transactions. Conflating sex work with "intimacy" or ownership are among the most spurious assumptions, from which nothing logical can reasonably proceed.

Also, to boringly reiterate my post on the previous Spitzer thread, prostitution has been legal here in Sydney since 1979. I live firmly, and happily, among its fleshy, richly varied transactions. Along with needle-exchange & public health campaigns, the legalisation/regulation of prostitution has significantly contributed to Australia's position as the world leader in the prevention of HIV/AIDS. Legalisation here has also overwhelmingly eliminated the violence, police corruption & criminal profiteering so frequently linked to the sex industry in prohibitionist countries. Pimping, similarly, is virtually non-existent here. 70% of all prostitution occurs in brothels (or parlours, as they're quaintly known downunder) many of which are owned & operated by women. Male and transgendered prostitutes have identical rights, unionisation, taxation & regulation, but generally work at considerably lower rates. (Like modelling, prostitution is one of the very few industries in which women are consistently better paid than their male counterparts.)

In short, legalisation has worked very well in Australia. Like other industries, exploitation of sex-workers still exists, but unlike the situation in prohibitionist countries, prostitutes here are protected by law from violence, coercion, unscrupulous operators, unfair, unsafe & inequitable work practices. Foreign sex-workers who don't understand English, or their Australian rights, tend to be the most frequently exloited. Interestingly, the operators of such brothels are largely reported to police by fellow prostitutes who resent being undercut on price & competing with unsafe, unregulated practices. In my, not inconsiderable, experience, those men & women choosing sex work here, are as rational, sober & pragmatic as anyone undertaking unskilled, occaisionally unpleasant, generally well-paid jobs in any other industry. Given the choice between city sexwork & similarly lucrative outback mining, I'd be putting on the red-light every time.

Private property ensures that we all have to work for a living. It is coercive and restrictive.

Does that mean that, if only I weren't so selfish about my personal property, that some freeloaders wouldn't be "coerced" into having to work for a living?

Imagine yourself sometime living in a society of one, and ask yourself -- what would happen if you chose not to work for a living? (Hint: you would stop living.)

Whether it's gathering berries or hunting bison or farming or making tools or writing software, there's no such thing as living without someone working for it. I suppose you could say that reality is coercive and restrictive, and private property acknowledges reality.

I'm sure there must be other methods of at least discouraging this behavior. Maybe a ban on bikes with more than X CC's, stiffer penalties for those that speed, etc. We have a great number of tools at our disposal in an advanced, democratic society to regulate social behavior.

If the only way to stop you from endangering yourself was to subject you to X, X being something with worse consequences than you not committing the act, then no, I would not do it.

It's not that I am somehow fundamentally opposed to legalized prostitution. I just feel that it's ignorant to suggest that 1) legalizing prostitution would largely eliminate the "secondary" unpleasant effects of prostitution 2) most prostitutes are clear-thinking, rational agents when they choose to enter the "profession", and 3) it's a horrible violation of someone's rights to not allow them to sell their body.

1)Prostitution has for most of human history and in most areas been legal or effectively legal. Even today in the US, vice arrests are relatively uncommon relative to the incidence of prostitution. Throughout all of human history, and in the majority of the world today--pimping, substance abuse, etc. have been associated with prostitution despite its legal status. The pimp is not something created by puritanical US society.

It's hard to argue that some sort of limited market is driving up prices in the same way as the drug war is driving up prices for narcotics. There aren't bands of US soldiers hunting down "suppliers" of prostitution. In comparing the two, prostitutes should be compared to street level drug dealers--the guys slangin on the corner. I promise you, those guys are not inflating the price exponentially, but rather the million middlemen that it takes to get the stuff from the jungles of South America to the corners of U.S. inner cities. Prostitutes we "grow" right here.

2) My own experience and alecsmoms statistics show that women in prostitution are LARGELY the victims of abuse, addicts, and by and large, not fully functioning rational human beings. I do not expect these people to make rationed decisions about consent.

3) This is the real moral argument to make, but I don't feel like people have the absolute right to sell their body for sex. Just like I do not feel that people have the right to play Russian roulette for money, sell themselves into slavery, and a great many more things. The whole point, in my eyes, of a rights based system of ethics is to have nuanced understandings about the consequences of extending rights in certain ways at certain times.

Saying that "A consenting individual has the absolute right to use their body as they please at any time" absolutely justifies prostitution is as silly as saying "A person has an absolute right to free speech" absolutely justifies hate speech and yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. Glenn's attempt at argument by analogy just comes off as something below his intellectual abilities.