Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Makes sense when you think about it?

Bastiat - can you explain your boys plan here for me?

4 comments:

Diatribe said...

No moral compass - that hurts.

Anyway - we barter goods and services all the time in this country. Why cant men and women under their own free choosing be able to sell their body for money. Should we get rid of Hooters, strip clubs, any form of porn?
What is the difference? Hell if it became legal they could be unionized and they could receive health benefits. You could then tax that crap all day long and be able to provide money for the always underfunded field of education.
Prostitutes can save the children when you think about it.

Anonymous said...

I agree, prohibition is always the very best way to prevent a society from embacing any given vice. Nothing makes people reject somehting that doesn't hurt anyone more than the government telling them they're not allowed to do it.
Do you really think that if prostitution were made legal, then fine, upstanding young Christians would suddenly decide it wasn't such a big deal? If so, then those people didn't really believe in their morals to begin with, so screw it. Federally imposed penalties for hurting others are neccessary for the maintenance of our society, but externally imposed morality is always weak and shallow.
Just as a side note to diatribe - phrasing this debate in terms of people 'sellingtheir bodies' is a bad way to talk about this- it is admitting your opponent's point when you do not need to. In what way are prostitutes selling their bodies any more than a construction worker or a massage therapist? All are performing a service which, yes, involves their bodies performing certain functions; none actually lose the deed to ownership of their bodies in the process, so none are 'selling their bodies' in any sense except the blindly rhetorical.

Anonymous said...

Let me take up the moral compass argument. You state:

I guess we have to start with the understanding that people of your ilk wouldn’t disapprove of the “sex industry” for consenting adults. For those of us with a functioning moral compass, degrading sex and women (and the men) probably shouldn’t be permissible in our civilized society.

The implication is that those permissive of the sex industry are the kind of ilk that lack a moral compass. Presumably my assent to the sex industry puts me in the no moral compass category. Yet I agree with you that the degradation of woman and men should be limited if not explicitly forbidden. This causes a contradiction in the application of your expression since it seems I simultaneously have and lack a moral compass. Your problem is that you’re using the phrase consenting adult which protects me from the degradation argument. Those that consent are not degraded since they have a choice.

Ultimately this is why the libertarian argument will always be superior to any other argument. For the small price of assuming that adults are adults, you grant the maximum amount of freedom for each adult.

Anonymous said...

You're right, externally enforced morality is the best way to ensure that everyone leads wholesome, healthy lives. That's why Baptists, who are told that divorce is a sin and have a community which shuns and stigmatizes it, have the lowest divorce rates in the country; while atheists and agnostics, without the guiding hand of society to show them the light, have the highest divorce rates.
Oh wait:
http://www.valleyskeptic.com/christdivorce.html