Jonah — …I totally disagree…The impetus to legalize prostitution has always relied on the idea that it is a “victimless crime,” that violates outdated religious standards. I think these days we have a far clearer sense of the degree of victimization inherently involved in most prostitution. While the “consenting adults” standards is fine for non-commercial sexual transactions, including Rauch’s adultery, once you are talking about big time prostitution — and this service went as high as $5500 an hour — you can bet organized crime is involved. In general with prostitution, there is no way to ensure that at least some of the women aren’t coerced at least some of the time. At the street level, the average pimp is violent and manipulative. On a broader scale, all of that trafficking of women and children on the rise worldwide is to stock brothels — many in countries where they are legal. The Dutch, recently have figured out that not all of the Eastern European girls in their famously picturesque Amsterdam windows came of their own volition. Why do they have to be kidnapped, tricked and often drugged and beaten and kept against their will? Because very few women and girls really want to be prostitutes — with the violence and violation of self that prostitution involves.
A second point against legalizing it, is that it is very hard to maintain society-wide moral opprobrium against anything that the state has legalized — especially when the state benefits from it. If you make prostitution legal, the state gets to tax it — so it has an interest in promulgating it. This is especially problematic in a welfare state. There were some interesting stories out of Germany a year or two ago, noting that, since brothels were legal, young women without skills whose welfare benefits had run out, were being encouraged by their social workers to take jobs as prostitutes. In fact, they were being coerced, with the threat of cutting off any state support. Refusing to be a whore was (is?) being treated no differently than refusing to be a janitor or a maid or any other unsavory but honest labor.
I don’t want my government profiting from prostituting women. I do not, for one moment, believe that making it legal will make it cleaner. It will be the same dehumanizing transaction for the women and children who stock the brothels. It will only make it harder to make a convincing moral argument against selling one’s body or giving it away too freely.
None of this, of course, has much to do with the Spitzer case. At the rates he was paying, there will always be a competitive trade.