Okay. But how do you ensure that the workers are getting their fair share of income, are physically healthy, and aren’t being coerced? I have no problem with prostitution that ensures those things, but doing so can be costly. Lots of guys will go to the crack whore if the pimp passes the saving on to them.
I’m just not sure you can regulate prostitution effectively.
I don’t care if our leaders are jizzing into $5,000 hookers or $3 cantalopes, but I would be concerend about influence-peddling.
I read that the Mogul emperor of India was so tired of all the factions in his harem vying to to slip thier girl into his bed, that he re-tiled a courtyard into a giant gameboard, with his throne in the center. The women were moved toward him by throws of the dice. Whether he got the idea from parchisi, or this is how the game was invented depends on where you read this story
It’s been going on so long that you have to accept it as a natural human failing/possibility. So you either have a straight “no-nookie for $” policy, or you task the FBI with vetting every hooker for corruption the same way the Army Medical Corps used to test camp followers for clap.
Unions!
They were not after prostitution. They were after Spitzer.
If you are talking about purely a prostitution ring, I would say that no the feds probably should not be going after it. But in the respect that a high-priced international prostituion ring is moving around large sums of money illegally, then yes they should be.
Spitzer pushed through a tougher prostitution law, so it doesn’t look like the Emperors’ Club was buying influence. He also pushed through the monitoring law for NY banks and security houses. That’s what got him red-flagged for moving big chunks of money. :smack:
In this interview with Democracy Now, Wayne Barrett fills in some details you may not have seen before, including why the FBI is involved.
If prostitution were legal then they would gain all the protections every worker in the United States gets. Minimum wages, unemployment, OSHA regulations, collective bargaining and so on. It becomes a business like any other. Sure there will likely be some unscrupulous employers as you would find in many fields. But some people evading regulations is not as bad as NO regulation. Many employers of a brothel would run it well and pay fairly. What they offer will likely be more attractive (literally and figuratively) to potential customers who will pay more for it. You’d also likely see them put pressure on law enforcement to clean up the more shady operators as it would adversely impact their business.
So you may not clear up all issues surrounding prostitution but you’d clear up a lot. Hard to see how it could be worse with some regulation than when the workers have zero recourse to the government.
By the way, here’s a link to an interview with Juhu Thukral, Director of the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center, looking at the plight of sex workers.
My two pennorth is legalise it.regulate it and tax it.
You’d get rid of pimps and women being forced into the work.
You’d be able to have the working girls in a safe enviroment and their customers free from being rolled by the girls and or their pimps.
You could control STDs more.
You could save ordinary women who unfortunately live in streetwalker areas from being harassed by men looking for prostitutes.
In marriages where perhaps the wife doesn’t enjoy sex too much the husband can get his dirty water off of his chest without having to resort having a potentially marriage breaking affair.
Rapes would probably go down.
Police resources currently being used on clamping down on vice could be reallocated to serious,life affecting crimes.
I’ll make my declaration here that I dont myself use prostitutes but people have told me that anyone as ugly as me simply must do to avoid dieing a virgin.
But Mennochio makes an excellent point here. Taxes and regulation costs the (hypothetical) legal prostitution business money, so costs will go up. There will be medical costs for the testing and that will come out of the customer’s pocket.
So, lets just say that it would cost you $200 for sex in this legal brothel, and you must wear a condom, even for oral sex, no kissing allowed, 4 drink minimum and tips appreciated.
Now a setup like this will appeal to a large number of guys. But you will still have a demand for the $20 blow job on the street corner with no condom. What about strippers who don’t have to follow the regulations and tests? Can’t they undercut the competition?
It will be like gambling is today. The state will run legal casinos with all types of gambling while still having a vice squad to bust up the little guy with HIS version. The problems will still be there, and the government will have a revenue source that it can’t live without, so when prostitution destroys a community (hypothetically) years from now, we can’t outlaw it because the government needs the money for schools and police (to fight the illegal prostitution).
Well… but this is true for literally any service. Anything that’s bought or sold, if it’s unregulated and untaxed, would cost less. But it hasn’t driven the legal purveyors of any other good or service out of business.
You’re going to have to help me with imagining how a community might be destroyed by prostitution.
Sure…just about like in most any business. There are lowlifes in many, many fields who will skirt regulations from garbage disposal to financial services. That does not make regulation worthless as it does manage to protect most people.
If you visit a brothel that makes a point of adhering to regulations you can probably expect a better time with cleaner partners. Yes you will pay more but then you get what you pay for. If you want that $20 corner BJ then do not be surprised to find your pocket picked and your dick burning afterwards.
For comparison, a biz I am intimately familiar with…computer repair. There are tons of unlicenced, ininsured, independent techs with questionable ethics getting thousands of dollars a day in work in my area.
A legit shop has facilities costs, workers comp, state and local licencing, any of the miryad costs of running a small biz.
A highly skilled and high priced independent computer consultant/prostitute can be a very expensive and worthwhile experience, but can provide services few others are willing or able to. The less “formal” techs/protitutes may try but you may not get everything you were hoping and may end up with a bigger problem if they overreach.
Surely with illegal prostitution the majority of the money goes to the pimp and to feed the prostitutes drug habits,then theres kickbacks,court fines and loss of business due to being encarceated.
With normal competitive economics and stability and without any of the above, regulated prostitution could function without pricing its self out of the market AND pay taxes.
Definitely!
I’m not saying prostitution is immoral, mind you.
But charging four grand for two hours, that’s immoral! It’s freakin’ obscene! I don’t know any lawyers who bill at that rate, and we’re much better whores than the whores are!
I agree completely. After the end of alcohol Prohibition in the US, (I’m told) booze prices went down, and the average product got better. The system no longer had to give organized crime a cut, and low quality fake whiskeys were driven out.
Oh, sure, there will still be status seekers wanting to pay big bucks for a callgirl, and there will always be well-dressed young women willing to accept too much money for a bounce. However, Aunt Sally’s blue collar bordello will probably have apprentices doing $20 BJs indoors. If you still want the thrill of the back alley, maybe Aunt Sally will have a shadowy back yard with fake dumpsters and wind-up rats for guys like that.
I’m not so sure of that. Prices came down after prohibition because supply was plentiful. The supply of low cost hookers is kept up by…artificial…methods. If that illegal supply can be shut down, I would imagine that the price might be affected by the laws of supply and demand.
Or, the illegal practices which keeps prices artificially low will continue.
Or, I could be totally wrong and there is enough of a supply of women willing to sell themselves that cheaply of their own free will.
Uh-huh, unless he had been a Republican Governor, then the whole situation would be entirely different in your world.
Actually I have some experience with this sort of thing. I’ve very regularly moved $10,000+ overseas when on vacation. I’ve been told by my bank on many occasions, “We’re letting you know that because of blah blah bank secrecy act of blah blah we have to inform the IRS about your transaction since it exceeds $10,000.” Since I’m not engaged in illegal activity I never run into any trouble.
Due to U.S. law, when you transfer $10,000 cash or more, your bank has to inform the U.S. Government (I believe the first agency informed is the IRS, though I could be wrong on that.)
Note that this is only if it’s $10,000 in one day so for a lot of people this sort of thing never comes up.
Now, obviously the “duh” way to get around having your cash transaction flagged is to do multiple smaller transactions, better still multiple smaller transactions directed at several different entities.
This is what Spitzer did, it’s a common ploy, and one that isn’t terribly hard for the IRS/Banking Institutions to detect. Also due to U.S. law, if a bank has reason to suspect you are breaking up transactions in order to do just this very thing that Spitzer was doing, they have to inform the IRS.
This is how the IRS became aware of Spitzer. At first the IRS investigated it just like they would any citizen who was doing this. This is done regularly there was no witch hunt, as much as the Democrats on this forum who are shamelessly partisan and always trying to find an excuse for “their boys” would lead you to believe.
When the IRS found that these transactions were in fact suspicious, they at first proceeded with the fear that Spitzer was being black mailed (that’s actually not an unlikely outcome when you have a major government figure engaged in an illegal activity–one big reason we don’t want governors engaged in illegal activities like this whether we agree with them being illegal or not.) Eventually they came to believe it was simply an illegal act on Spitzer’s behalf and informed the FBI–they took it from there and that is how this happened.
The idea that this was a Spitzer-centric witchhunt is ridiculous. The legislation that lead to Spitzer getting caught was in place some 38 years before this happened.
Well, the Dutch, Germans and a bunch of others seem to manage it just fine. And I though it was legal in some states in the US? It’s not as though there is a shortage of places to do comparisons with.
Granted, there will always be problems with people trying to dodge the rules, but if you’re going to use that as a criterion you may as well ban fast food. After all, there are bound to be places that have a 16 year old working the deep fryer and which skimp on the cleaning…
I’m all for legalization and regulation. I am NOT for selectively decriminalizing high-end prostitution. Regardless of the intent, this would effectively say it’s OK to pay for sex, but only if you’re rich.