Drug Legalization: Neglected Aspects

So you are thinking about legalizing drugs. What would happen?

Legalization makes the prices of drugs lower. The negative legal consequences are a tax that increases the costs to users and increases the costs of suppliers. The new, lower costs means more more people use drugs, and they use more drugs.

Society saves all the money spent on drug criminalization: incarceration, law enforcement, etc.

But what new costs might legalization impose on society?

• Taking care of the drug addicts' children. The legal system would have many additional children enter the juvenile dependency system, and get placed in foster homes. Children and parents get court appointed lawyers, and the cases move through the expensive, slow, labor intensive juvenile dependency process as mandated by federal law.
• Housing values go down and slums grow, as the additional addicts stop maintaining homes and apartments and mowing their lawns, and begin to live in squalor eight to a room.
• The drug induced crime such as violence caused by meth psychosis becomes more common.
• An increase in Social Security disability payments. Addicts are covered.
• Health costs go up to pay for the medical problems associated with addiction: sores, malnutrition, overdoses.
• More drug affected babies, who will also enter the juvenile court system, and have a good chance of later entering the criminal court system.

Vaccination Obligation

This Instapundit vaccination post convinces me that we ought to do more to cut the unvaccinated out of the herd.

Most elementary schools seem to allow a moral/religious exception. Maybe they shouldn't.

Why Prostitution is Wrong - a Simple Explanation for Libertarians

Some libertarians see prostitution as a question of personal autonomy vs. an arbitrary cultural bias. Appeals to tradition and morality don't persuade them much. This is a quick and dirty evolutionary psychology based denunciation of prostitution. No need for morality, tradition, or religion.

What effect does prostitution have on the health and survival of a community? Compared to a community with low levels of prostitution, a community with high levels of prostitution will have:

1. a higher number of women with many sexual partners
2. a higher number of children without an identifiable father
3. a higher incidence of sexually transmitted diseases

The negative externalities (the costs to society) of two and three are fairly intuitive. Let me just add for the libertarians that illegitimacy increases the demand for vast social programs.

For effect one, the negative externalities are not as obvious, but they're real. Women with many sexual partners aren't as appealing to men interested in committed relationships, because there is more uncertainty as to who the father of any children is. This is not a value judgement, it as an observation. Fewer stable two parent families reduces the fitness of a community.

The advantages of stable two parent families, children who know who their father is, and reduced sexually transmitted diseases make prejudice against prostitution an adaptive meme. That is, an evolutionary advantage on for a community, not an arbitrary prejudice.

Your welfare depends in part on the health of your community, so support stigmas and laws against prostitution, for your own good.

Ludicrous Libertarians

In this clip from bloggingheads, Will Wilkinson and Kerry Howley cruise blissfully past the fundamental issues of prostitution. First mistake - Will frames the conservative position as a state interest in the prevention of vice. This is a stolen base - the conservative position would be a public or community interest in the prevention of vice. To refute the conservative position, you must engage this point rather than skip it.

Next Kerry Howley quickly jumps in over her head. First she accepts the persistent negative consequences of prostitution under a broad range of regimes, then blames these negative effects on the stigmatization of prostitution. This is a point that needs to be argued, not asserted. then she sets up a straw man, saying that the stigmatization of prostitution is the same stigma associated with female sexual activity, and opposition to prostitution comes from seeing women as sexually pure beings, and laws against prostitution exist to protect by law the sexual purity of women. Yes, it is easier to win when you address only weak arguments.

Then Will engages a weak Ross Douthat argument (is there any other kind?) against prostitution as a form of self inflicted violence. Douthat's argument is as obvious as it is inconsequential.

Back to Kerry, who wonders if the bad stuff associated with prostitution is inherent in the activity, or only there because the stigma attached allows only desperate women to to engage in prostitution. The Kerry proposes a real howler, asking if prostitution should be illegal assuming there's nothing wrong with selling sex for money.

Kerry: Let's assume we have eggs in the fridge. Let's discus how we should prepare them.
Me: First, why not check and see if we have the eggs?

Will says, "The harm from the prohibition and the stigma that goes along with the prohibition. " Will asserts that the stigma is a result of the prohibition. Asserts, not argues. The stigma is pretty obviously a result of the harm and degradation associated with prostitution.

Then both fetishize self autonomy. Self autonomy is valuable, but you have to weigh it against other interests, and defending an activity on the basis of self autonomy when the activity by definition requires more than one person is very weak.

Then Will mentions his dumb point that all forms of work require selling your body. So Will can see the insignificant commonalities prostitution has with other jobs. Can he see the important distinctions? Well, some of them. He does see the mechanism by which a part of the corrosive effect of prostitution upon the prostitute takes place, but only in the costs to the individual.

Kerry compares prostitutes to firefighters, surgeons, and soldiers in terms of the emotional hardening. Again, an enviable grasp of the meaningless commonalities. The differences are what make the other jobs worth that cost.

Women are capable of emotional control that allows prostitution to benefit them, says Kerry. Well, perhaps some are. How many? And should the law ignore the reality of prostitution and base itself on how things might work in the land of libertarians?

Howley and Wilkinson seem blind to the fact that individual actions have consequences for communities, so they address only the weakest arguments against prostitution. The ignore human nature, human biology, and human history, blithely musing about the desirability of tossing out the stigma against prostitution. Why not wish for big, fluffy wings for everyone? Or a third arm?

I'd like to hear a pro-legalization perspective that engages the arguments against it. Libertarians always seem so naive, so young. Maybe it's something most people grow out of.