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Both are victimless crimes, or what I call "crimes against the bureaucracy/hegemony." As such, both should be perfectly legal along with the roughly gazillion or so other immoral_yet_perfectly_legal behaviors that people engage in legally every single day.
Prostitution is about as free trade and pure liberty as it gets in the matieral world. The first, most basic, foundational individual natural right is ownership of the self. You own you, I own me, we each own our individual self. A prosititute simply makes that ownership tangible by renting the self out to a voluntary buyer for some period of time for speficied activities. Both parties participate voluntarily, both receive something their self-interests find valuable, and both feel as if they benefit from the trade. Is it morally repellent? Of course, under virtually all religious systems, most secualr humanist ideas, and just plain old "it's icky" common sense...but it's free trade, and there are no victims.
The straw man rebuttal we can expect is girls in the sex slave trade, but sex slaves are not prostitutes, they are slaves. Slavery is illegal and should always remain so as the highest form of crime and inhumanity that it is. The two things are not the same, so this is a straw man based on a false equivalency. I was very careful to say prostitute, not sex worker. A prostitute sells that which they inherently own, and a slave is a victim of force/coercion. Two very, very different things.
Drugs are similarly victimless. Is there are a societal cost? Sure, same as alcohol, tobacco, most of the rot/contagion we call TV/Internet programming, fast food, and on a larger scale....welfare itself. Everything has some societal cost, and really, drugs trail a ton of stuff in their negative costs. Hell, new age teaching has done more harm to the brains of children than drugs could ever hope, but while talking about illegal drugs, I'd love to know the downward effects of Ritalin and Aderal over the last three decades. I'd also like to know how Xanax nation is preferable, while weed nation is anathema? We're the most medicated nation on Earth, but self-medicating with street drugs is the harbinger of doom, while prescription drug dependency is kosher and quite vogue? Makes no freaking sense.
But beyond our own hypocrisy about drugs, it's still a victimless crime. the drug user seeks out the drug for their own pleasure/need, the drug dealer supplies that which the drug user demands. Once more, two voluntary parties in a voluntary trade, each benefiting from the trade according to their own self-interests.
The straw man rebuttal to this one is look what drugs do to families, neighborhoods, etc. This is a corollary equals causation based straw man. The drug does not destroy the family, the addict with all of the broken wires required for addiction is what destroys/harms the family. Someone so ignorant that they destroy a family for getting high would destroy the same family with alcohol or some other addiction feeder if drugs were not just illegal but disappeared from existence entirely. The criminal who destroys your neighborhood doesn't destroy it with drugs, they destroy it with violence that stems from being a sociopath. Drugs are an excuse, not a destructive force. It is the human nature of the criminal that harms and destroys, not some numbing agent.
Drugs have been illegal for close to a century, and we've had violent and non-violent felony crime every year since. Drugs are not the cause of crime, criminals are. So again, with all the ways one can legally shorten their lifespan, make themselves into a worse version of themselves to the point they harm their family or neighbor, and act immorally...why drugs are still illegal is a mystery to me.
If the goal is to reduce drug consumption, then the focus should be on open and honest programs to educate young people, regulation to keep drugs away from young people, and treatment programs for people with addiction problems.
Prohibition does not work. Education and treatment are better ways to address the drug problem. Legalize most drugs will also save the government a lot of money.
According to the Vera Institute of Justice, the annual average taxpayer cost per inmate is $31k. It's $47k in California, $60k in New York State, and $168k in New York City to feed, house, and guard each inmate for one year! What's most irritating is that most arrests in the US are not for murder, rape, or burglary, but for petty offenses such as possession of drugs, prostitution, ...
Yes, it's amazing how many resources are wasted trying to enforce laws that shouldn't even exist in a free society that prides itself on promoting individual liberty and religious freedom. There is simply no good justification for these laws. They fall in the same category as laws against oral sex, or masturbation, or selling cars on Sunday ("blue laws"). They have no justifiable place in a society that supposedly separates church from state.
I find it especially annoying when people support these laws on the one hand, while at the same time advocating for smaller government and lower taxes. Anyone who is opposed to bloated and inefficient government spending ought to be a champion for cutting spending on pointless efforts to intrude into people's private lives.
Concerning prostitution, I would add that not only do anti-prostitution laws make no sense in light of basic American principles, but they also belie a great deal of underlying spiritual confusion. Some people defend prostitution laws by saying that prostitutes are degraded and/or are degrading themselves (and, thus, prostitution is not truly victimless). There certainly are cases where people are degraded, and there are cases where prostitution is not truly victimless (e.g., trafficking), but there are also cases where social attitudes are, themselves, harmful. A variety of highly educated women today are pushing for a transformation of social attitudes about sex. Consider sexual surrogates, for example, or professional women who take a healing/spiritual approach to "sex work" (e.g., Veronica Monet). These efforts could turn a major proportion of "professional sex" into a category more accurately described as forms of healing, or therapy, or simply positive forms of recreation, rather than "degrading" or "seedy" activities. People can have meaningful, fulfilling lives helping other people enjoy erotic pleasure. Why should someone who enjoys giving erotic pleasure and turns this enjoyment into a career be deemed "degraded," while someone who enjoys cooking and becomes a professional cook is not degraded? Laws against prostitution not only waste money and pointlessly clog the judicial system, they also actively suppress social movements that could benefit the lives of many people.
Something similar can be said for drugs. There are plenty of examples of native cultures in which psychoactive drugs are part of an overall spiritual approach toward life (e.g., shamanism). A great deal of the negative consequences of drug use could be counteracted by a better social attitude about drug use. Many of our current social attitudes actually create the types of psychological and social environments that foster overdose, addition, and crime. Getting rid of drug laws could help those segments of society that are willing and able to create more positive approaches toward drug use (and significantly decrease the social burdens of addiction and drug-related crimes.
Last edited by Gaylenwoof; 02-02-2015 at 09:58 AM..
Both are victimless crimes, or what I call "crimes against the bureaucracy/hegemony." As such, both should be perfectly legal along with the roughly gazillion or so other immoral_yet_perfectly_legal behaviors that people engage in legally every single day.
Prostitution is about as free trade and pure liberty as it gets in the matieral world. The first, most basic, foundational individual natural right is ownership of the self. You own you, I own me, we each own our individual self. A prosititute simply makes that ownership tangible by renting the self out to a voluntary buyer for some period of time for speficied activities. Both parties participate voluntarily, both receive something their self-interests find valuable, and both feel as if they benefit from the trade. Is it morally repellent? Of course, under virtually all religious systems, most secualr humanist ideas, and just plain old "it's icky" common sense...but it's free trade, and there are no victims.
The straw man rebuttal we can expect is girls in the sex slave trade, but sex slaves are not prostitutes, they are slaves. Slavery is illegal and should always remain so as the highest form of crime and inhumanity that it is. The two things are not the same, so this is a straw man based on a false equivalency. I was very careful to say prostitute, not sex worker. A prostitute sells that which they inherently own, and a slave is a victim of force/coercion. Two very, very different things.
Drugs are similarly victimless. Is there are a societal cost? Sure, same as alcohol, tobacco, most of the rot/contagion we call TV/Internet programming, fast food, and on a larger scale....welfare itself. Everything has some societal cost, and really, drugs trail a ton of stuff in their negative costs. Hell, new age teaching has done more harm to the brains of children than drugs could ever hope, but while talking about illegal drugs, I'd love to know the downward effects of Ritalin and Aderal over the last three decades. I'd also like to know how Xanax nation is preferable, while weed nation is anathema? We're the most medicated nation on Earth, but self-medicating with street drugs is the harbinger of doom, while prescription drug dependency is kosher and quite vogue? Makes no freaking sense.
But beyond our own hypocrisy about drugs, it's still a victimless crime. the drug user seeks out the drug for their own pleasure/need, the drug dealer supplies that which the drug user demands. Once more, two voluntary parties in a voluntary trade, each benefiting from the trade according to their own self-interests.
The straw man rebuttal to this one is look what drugs do to families, neighborhoods, etc. This is a corollary equals causation based straw man. The drug does not destroy the family, the addict with all of the broken wires required for addiction is what destroys/harms the family. Someone so ignorant that they destroy a family for getting high would destroy the same family with alcohol or some other addiction feeder if drugs were not just illegal but disappeared from existence entirely. The criminal who destroys your neighborhood doesn't destroy it with drugs, they destroy it with violence that stems from being a sociopath. Drugs are an excuse, not a destructive force. It is the human nature of the criminal that harms and destroys, not some numbing agent.
Drugs have been illegal for close to a century, and we've had violent and non-violent felony crime every year since. Drugs are not the cause of crime, criminals are. So again, with all the ways one can legally shorten their lifespan, make themselves into a worse version of themselves to the point they harm their family or neighbor, and act immorally...why drugs are still illegal is a mystery to me.
It has always been my opinion that prostitution was deemed 'illegal' for the simple fact that it allowed women a sense of autonomy, not having to be tied down to a man for housing, food, and clothing. Of course, women have the opportunity to have jobs NOW, but it was not like that in the distant past. Women were kept dependent on a man.
It always seemed very funny to me that MEN made prostitution illegal, yet they are (for the most part) the customers!
Both are victimless crimes, or what I call "crimes against the bureaucracy/hegemony." As such, both should be perfectly legal along with the roughly gazillion or so other immoral_yet_perfectly_legal behaviors that people engage in legally every single day.
Prostitution is about as free trade and pure liberty as it gets in the matieral world. The first, most basic, foundational individual natural right is ownership of the self. You own you, I own me, we each own our individual self. A prosititute simply makes that ownership tangible by renting the self out to a voluntary buyer for some period of time for speficied activities. Both parties participate voluntarily, both receive something their self-interests find valuable, and both feel as if they benefit from the trade. Is it morally repellent? Of course, under virtually all religious systems, most secualr humanist ideas, and just plain old "it's icky" common sense...but it's free trade, and there are no victims.
The straw man rebuttal we can expect is girls in the sex slave trade, but sex slaves are not prostitutes, they are slaves. Slavery is illegal and should always remain so as the highest form of crime and inhumanity that it is. The two things are not the same, so this is a straw man based on a false equivalency. I was very careful to say prostitute, not sex worker. A prostitute sells that which they inherently own, and a slave is a victim of force/coercion. Two very, very different things.
Drugs are similarly victimless. Is there are a societal cost? Sure, same as alcohol, tobacco, most of the rot/contagion we call TV/Internet programming, fast food, and on a larger scale....welfare itself. Everything has some societal cost, and really, drugs trail a ton of stuff in their negative costs. Hell, new age teaching has done more harm to the brains of children than drugs could ever hope, but while talking about illegal drugs, I'd love to know the downward effects of Ritalin and Aderal over the last three decades. I'd also like to know how Xanax nation is preferable, while weed nation is anathema? We're the most medicated nation on Earth, but self-medicating with street drugs is the harbinger of doom, while prescription drug dependency is kosher and quite vogue? Makes no freaking sense.
But beyond our own hypocrisy about drugs, it's still a victimless crime. the drug user seeks out the drug for their own pleasure/need, the drug dealer supplies that which the drug user demands. Once more, two voluntary parties in a voluntary trade, each benefiting from the trade according to their own self-interests.
The straw man rebuttal to this one is look what drugs do to families, neighborhoods, etc. This is a corollary equals causation based straw man. The drug does not destroy the family, the addict with all of the broken wires required for addiction is what destroys/harms the family. Someone so ignorant that they destroy a family for getting high would destroy the same family with alcohol or some other addiction feeder if drugs were not just illegal but disappeared from existence entirely. The criminal who destroys your neighborhood doesn't destroy it with drugs, they destroy it with violence that stems from being a sociopath. Drugs are an excuse, not a destructive force. It is the human nature of the criminal that harms and destroys, not some numbing agent.
Drugs have been illegal for close to a century, and we've had violent and non-violent felony crime every year since. Drugs are not the cause of crime, criminals are. So again, with all the ways one can legally shorten their lifespan, make themselves into a worse version of themselves to the point they harm their family or neighbor, and act immorally...why drugs are still illegal is a mystery to me.
Much like the military/industrial complex controls a large portion of the economy so does the narco/law inforcement complex control drug legalization. To much money rides on keeping drugs illegal. The prison system almost collapse should this happen
Well sometimes yes, sometimes no. Life long friend of mine a musician I am again writing songs with has battled addiction forever. It mainly started with a motorcycle accident and a really messed up leg. He became addicted to prescribed opiates then dabbed in other drugs like heroin when the prescriptions were not enough.
He comes from a loving family and he is lucky they are there to help him. He is off these opiates now but battles the continued pain and addiction that calls him.
Others never had a choice, some come from bad families who took them into the path of drugs, who may have sold them to feed addiction or purposely got their kid addicted, or were abusers , these people have nowhere to turn for help as far as family. The criminal system arrests them, puts them back out and in part sets them up to fail again.Or they may have mental issues. Once they have a felony for drug possession the odds of them getting a real job are limited.
With no family for support, with no decent job the only place to live is the bad side of town surrounded by other drug users and back into the life style they go. The lucky ones have some sort of family who may take them, help them, get them away from the areas and life....but most don't.
So you can continue paying your taxes to jail and release them which changes nothing or use that money for rehabilitation which won't save them all but will hopefully some.
I don't necessarily think any of these behaviors are good ideas. Even if legal, I wouldn't choose to participate in any of them. It is also true that circumstances may conspire to make some individuals more vulnerable than others to excessive and abusive personal behaviors. However, It's important to make a distinction between not having a choice, and making a poor choice. Being free, means being free to make a choice we may later regret--it's part of the package.
I am in total agreement with you about involving those with substance addictions in the criminal justice system. There should be no "drug war", and those who have become addicted should receive medical treatment rather than prison terms.
It's against Forum Rules for me to verbalize what I think about your Immoral, Sinful proposal.
It's easy to see why this nation has sunk SO LOW, Tho....with some people wanting this kind of garbage becoming legalized. - But, NO Big surprise, most of it already is. How SICK and degrading.
Look, your church can still do a guilt job all it wants on its members, hell and all of that. Our country is not a church and laws should be based on liberty not theocracy. People would still be free to not partake in any activity that goes against their conscience. However, you cannot legislate morality.
Much like the military/industrial complex controls a large portion of the economy so does the narco/law inforcement complex control drug legalization. To much money rides on keeping drugs illegal. The prison system almost collapse should this happen
When you look at it like that it is terrible. There is now a drugs business run by governments. The taxpayer is funding this business. It pays the wages of drugs enforcement officers, lawyers defending drug users, private prison builders, and their employees. Police officers arresting drug users. Probably many others I can't think of.
How did it come to this? It is like the Emperor with no clothes. Government officials all over the world say "drugs are bad. We will arrest you, and jail you if you use them. Get your legal drugs from bars and doctors. This we allow." No Government official seriously questions this. Nobody running for a Government position question this. This 'war' just staggers on in the same old way, costing billions. Our money, taken from us, is used to fund this war. Why when it can't be won? Follow the money............
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