Put me in the Legalize Everything camp…
Brian Moore over at Angry Blog lays down a textbook debunking of Noah Millman’s familiar argument against legalizing “sin idustries”:
The trick Noah is pulling here is assuming that “sin industries” themselves are bad, and have victims that suffer. He lumps together the abuse and the industry — which is like saying that convenient stores are bad because people can rob them. The key to preventing the abuse is to recognize that they are already crimes — but the only way to use the appropriate methods (police, courts) against those crimes is for the victims to believe they not be treated like accomplices.
If prostitution is illegal, then those “weak, dumb and vulnerable” people have no recourse — they must accept the abuse or be arrested themselves. If rape, physical abuse and intimidation are still widespread in the sex-work industry, then isn’t it better to enable the victims to use the same tools everyone else in society uses to prevent rape, physical abuse and intimidation?
For once, Spitzer’s words and actions have led to productive dialog and scrutiny of the state of the law and the law of the state. Probably not what he intended, but thanks anyway, Eliot…
UPDATE: Also via Brian Moore, the one sentence that says it all:
Given Spitzer’s unfathomable stupidity — and in light of the fact that he is now the victim of the kinds of overreaching police state tactics that he himself has endlessly championed and utilized — this can only be regarded as an instance of an especially objectionable, arrogant, overweening, power-mad, vicious son of a bitch himself getting exactly what he has been delightedly happy to dish out to others.