This is quite good, and you’re dead right on Prohibition. I read a lot of Temperance literature when doing research for the chapter in my alternate history book where Prohibition doesn’t come, and it was absolutely a women’s movement, which is why it happened around the same time as women getting the right to vote i.e. were on the political ascendency.
One tidbit about the loss of civil liberty in Prohibition times I found quite interesting: In 1925, the governor of Oregon, quite explicitly using Prohibition as his justification and motivation, declared quite openly that government agents were allowed to go into private homes to seek violators of the Volstead Act. “The laws and customs have changed vastly since first was announced the right and doctrine that every man’s home was his castle and sanctuary,” he explained. “We claim the right to go into any place in the State at any time as secret agents and to discover, if possible, law violations.”
The loss of civil liberties that accompanies each one of these Prohibitions is striking, and it takes a kind of zealotry (thinking that eliminating the thing you don't like is more important than anyone's privacy or civil liberties) to not care about that.
I don't have super-strong priors about legalizing prostitution either way, but I don't find 'prohibition doesn't work because there will always be a black market for it' to be a particularly strong argument. You could argue against making *anything* illegal this way. Criminalization doesn't stop homicide, burglaries, rape, or armed robberies either, but I'm not aware of anyone arguing that we should might as well make murder legal because black market murders will always exist.
I mean I'm just looking at your byline- 'you can't stop something that a critical mass of people want to do'. Of course you can, that's literally what civilization is. A critical mass of people want to punch each other over minor disputes, drive drunk, steal from each other, and so on. A critical mass of men would probably sexually harass or assault women if given the chance. Part of not living in literal anarchy is that we make an attempt to reduce the rates of this happening, knowing that we'll never achieve zero assaults or burglaries, but that some reduction is better than no reduction. There are certainly less homicides, burglaries etc. than if we had no law enforcement and no one was even attempting to stop these activities. Law enforcement of serious crimes is an ongoing, never-ending part of living in a civilization.
I would've been more interested in hearing an argument as to why you think prostitution is different from other major crimes that we all agree should be actively policed. But this simplistic argument comparing of everything to Prohibition I don't find to be very deep or interesting. (BTW Prohibition is hardly 'forgotten' and calling every proposed new law prohibition is a very very common ongoing trope in American society)
None of your examples involve massive numbers of otherwise law abiding people violating the law the way alcohol, marijuana, and sex work do (and the way handguns would if we banned them). Only a small percentage of the populace murders, burglarizes houses, rapes, or commits armed robbery.
And your claims in that respect about violence, theft, and sexual harassment are wrong. (I will get to DUI in a minute, because that's at least a not completely fatuous example.) In fact, for instance, take violence. In actuality there are very few prosecutions for simple assault in this country, and yet, fistfights are pretty rare things in 2025, precisely because actually Americans do not have a predilection to engage in them. Theft and rape are pretty niche activities despite what you say. And sexual harassment is a situation where we had a real change in mores-- PERSUASION absolutely can work to make things better. This happened with tobacco too-- but it hasn't happened with sex work. (Very possibly because the human drive for sexual variety is one of the strongest innate drives most of us are born with.)
As for the claim that there are less homicides and burglaries with law enforcement than without, why yes, there are. As I noted in my piece, there was also less drinking during Prohibition. That doesn't matter. I know you think it is a killer argument, but it doesn't matter. What matters is whether your proposed prohibition will end up turning a large enough segment of society into scofflaws that it produces the black market, civil liberties, and organized crime problems I identified. It is a truly bad worldview to think the only thing that matters is stamping out whatever it is you don't like, and thinking that people's liberty and freedom from the Mafia do not matter.
Now, let's talk about DUI, because it's the one example where I think you actually have a slight point. The essential problem with DUI is that it is indeed true that DUI is so commonplace that DUI laws are impossible to enforce, and the reduce but do not come close to eliminating DUI. But the difference here is-- DUI isn't a product or service. It's just something people do. We wish there could be less of it, but because laws aren't these magic things that stop people from doing stuff they want to do, it doesn't go down that way. But we aren't imposing on something people truly want to buy and consume by having DUI laws.
Having said that, it's worth noting that even DUI laws have enormous costs we do not come to grips with. Sobriety checkpoints, traffic stop powers, and implied consent laws are all serious impingements on civil liberties, and these powers also allow racist cops some additional excuses to pull over Black drivers and engage in discriminatory law enforcement. So even here, it may be that we aren't really weighing the costs and benefits correctly, as bad as drunk driving is.
On your last point, sex work is simply not a major crime. It may offend you a lot, but it isn't a major crime. Jackie Onassis sold her body to her second husband Aristotle. Of course we don't call it that when it's a marriage contract, but that is what happened. There's nothing intrinsically wrong about the activity.
Now there are certain TYPES of prostitution that are serious issues. I refer to that. Human trafficking and the like. But those types of sex work flourish in situations where lawful regulated sex work is not available. So if the concern is that rather than some irrational moral or religious purity about how women and men conduct their sex lives, you probably get farther along in trying to stamp that out if you legalize it.
>None of your examples involve massive numbers of otherwise law abiding people violating the law the way alcohol, marijuana, and sex work do (and the way handguns would if we banned them). Only a small percentage of the populace murders, burglarizes houses, rapes, or commits armed robbery..... In actuality there are very few prosecutions for simple assault in this country, and yet, fistfights are pretty rare things in 2025..... Theft and rape are pretty niche activities despite what you say
In 2019 there were 19,811 arrests nationally for prostitution-related crimes. There were over 274,000 arrests for assault! So, almost 14x the number of assaults. There were 118k burglary arrests and 592k larceny arrests! I don't think your assertions here are correct, to put it mildly. If anything, my takeaway from the FBI crime data is that only a small percentage of the population are visiting prostitutes, but lots & lots of Americans are either fighting someone or stealing something. The data is, like, the exact opposite of what you claimed.
>the black market, civil liberties, and organized crime problems I identified
A number of developed countries have legalized & regulated prostitution, like Germany. But they still have black market prostitution that involves organized crime. This is another libertarian fallacy, imagining that legalizing something will somehow get rid of the black market. But as soon as you have some degree of regulation, some actors will remain outside it- like all the black market weed sales in states that legalized marijuana. Sports leagues now have *way more* problems with gambling corruption than they had before it was widely legalized in the US. Getting rid of the black market here is mostly wishful thinking
Your argument proves too much and ignores the predictable consequences of legalization.
why doesn’t this apply to immigration and completely removing all restrictions on economic migrants? what would happen if we went full bryan caplan? i expect a massive revolt from the public and an election of a president who makes trump look cuddly. because that’s literally what happens in every country that has significant increases in immigration.
what about illegal drugs and homelessness? I’ve been to san francisco many times. i do not look at their open air drug markets and think “oh yes i definitely want to legalize drugs so i get that”. if legalization means open air drug markets near where i live, ill stick with the drug war thanks. oh it won’t? well how are you going to stop it? the moment a sin industry becomes legalized, it gains political and legal power. those business have rights, including first amendment rights and much easier access to capital.
why did oregon promptly repeal its de facto legalization of hard drugs shortly after legalizing them? These kinds of bans provide an easy lever for local police to manage dealing with anti social people that make everyone else’s lives miserable. how do you effectively maintain public order without them? In principle could you? sure. in practice i haven’t seen any evidence of that to be the case.
Where I fear you’re right is that even though in principle I support legalizing marijuana, in practice its legalization has made my life worse. It’s not that pot was hard to find in NYC ten years ago, or wasn’t smoked openly, but it the numbers were low enough that you were much less likely to enter a subway car and find it filled with smoke. One short subway ride to work, and you reek of pot all day. This became so much more common after legalization, and although it’s still technically illegal to smoke up on a subway train, that’s technically, and legalization made it happen.
(Please do not take this comment as an endorsement of the drug war.)
Lifting Prohibition made society "worse" too. Did you see all those drinking statistics I cited you? Literally tens of thousands of people die every year from alcohol, which means the death toll is several million since 1933.
And yet, everyone understands that it would be a terrible idea to restore Prohibition. This is the basic problem here, and one our brains have difficulty wrapping around-- something can be truly awful and yet still must be legal because if you try to make it illegal you just empower a ton of bad people while not actually succeeding in making consumption impossible.
I would also add 2 other points here. First, creating a ton of discretion for law enforcement is awful, not good. I mean, why don't we just criminalize breathing and then just rely on police to arrest and prosecute only the "bad" breathers? Obviously that's a silly reductio ad absurdum, but the point is, it's actually not good to give police that kind of discretion. They had that discretion during Prohibition too, and they used it to target marginalized communities. Same with gay sex when it was illegal.
If you want to have a law, it has to be because you are willing to enforce it including against rich people and people you think highly of and don't think are doing anything seriously wrong. If you aren't willing to do that, it's a very bad law and will lead to discriminatory enforcement.
Finally, on migrants, I think the difference with immigration policy is simply that a person crossing the border illegally causes a much more long term impact-- that person is now semi-permanently in the country, because interior enforcement is so ineffective and it is so easy to hide. Whereas a person smoking a joint or paying $75 for a blowjob isn't causing that sort of permanent impact to the country.
Okay, so you are making consequentialist and a utilitarian argument then, yes? You are arguing that the harms of prohibiting the activity outweigh the benefits to society. While the harms or benefits can and likely will differ on an individual level, eliminating prohibition is net beneficial for society. If i got that wrong, please let me know but I am going to assume that's where you've land.
Given that, your arguments on immigration is hand wavey. Bryan Caplan has marshaled massive empirical and theoretical evidence to demonstrate that immigration is a huge benefit to the US and thus argues for unrestricted immigration. Let's say for sake of argument that Caplan is right and that the resistance to immigration is xenophobia, racism and ignorance. Shouldn't you therefore support unrestricted immigration or at least significantly increase it? Why should we limit immigration simply because its unpopular with ignorant racists, especially since your argument about unenforceability applies in spades to economic migrants. Migrants willingly risk death just to get here!
As for prostitution and the drug war: what happens to public order if we fully legalize them? What happens to local governments ability to deal with anti-social people (drug addicts and the mentally ill) who make the lives of people in the local community a living hell? What will happen to tent encampments? My guess is that it will make these issues far far worse and as evidence I'll point you to the west coast. No one looks at portland or san francisco and thinks ah yes I would like more of that please. Even if all your arguments are correct, if the cost of removing prohibition is a degradation in public order, I am not interested. And more to the point no one who has ever lived near tent encampment or deal with the anti-social homeless is either or well anyone who votes.
So do you have a pitch about how the most likely result of this is not in fact a significant degradation in public order?
From what I've read from law enforcement, they don't spend a lot of time or money pursuing these cases, because the men they bust end up not being charged or let off with a light sentence. Now that more states are making sex buying a felony, law enforcement will be more motivated to crack down on this. I say we should double the money & effort & we'd see a big impact.
The federal government, at the very least, spends a ton-- we have their budgets. I can tell you LAPD spends a lot on it because I live here and they brag about it. None of it works.
It will work when CA makes buying sex a felony. Men will go to jail, word will spread & men will stop. I don't have the numbers on TX, but a law enforcement officer TX said that after TX made buying sex a felony, the John forums were full of men saying they were going to stop. Consequences change behavior.
The anti-sex work lobby takes this on faith that this is true, but there is in fact plenty of sex still for sale in Sweden. It doesn't work-- it just forces sex workers to jump through needless hoops to do what they should be allowed to do.
Here in Canada cannabis legalization seems to have had less of a quality of life impact (maybe just higher conscientiousness population?) but I can tell you that admissions to hospital for cannabis induced psychosis went from being extremely rare to extremely common and frequent.
Maybe that's a fair price to pay for greater adult autonomy (still has nothing on alcohol related healthcare costs), but Canada's use of safe supply programs and supervised consumption sites for opioids have been a much bigger argument in favour of prohibition. We get the same quality of life problems from tolerating mass open use and dealing as progressive US cities, but supercharged our organized crime involvement in the drug trade rather than displaced it. We're not quite at prohibition era Chicago territory, but we have active gun fights (which would be even worse without handgun prohibition keeping the supply of those down!) for which gangs control diversion and sale of government supplied opioids.
Prohibition is bad, just not as bad as the alternative.
So are you in favor of bringing it back for alcohol then? Because marijuana is, despite your argument, one of the most harmless of the addictive substances (note: it is not completely harmless, but it isn't very harmful overall) and alcohol is one of the most dangerous of them, with a massive death toll?
I don't think people who take the position that marijuana should be illegal really have the courage of their convictions. Honestly, I think the unpopularity of stoners and the belief that they are irresponsible is doing a ton of the work in their arguments. They'd never dare propose it for alcohol, even though alcohol kills of tens and thousands, causes tens of thousands of rapes, etc., and pot simply does not do that.
If this is in reply to my comment above; I would put my preferences as:
Prohibition of recreational opioids= strongly support
Prohibition of alcohol= low-moderate support
Prohibition of cannabis= neutral
Prohibition of caffeine= strongly against (only listed to give a baseline)
I think Canada's liberalization of cannabis consumption was done much more effectively than any US state; even if it placed additional strains on our mental healthcare system. I would not spend political capital supporting or opposing prohibition (and to be clear; I actually felt my comment above was pretty neutral on cannabis prohibition- though it was written from my phone while still waking up, so I may have been less clear than intended). If I lived in a US state where the liberalization was more poorly managed I might support both prohibition; and also support doing a better job with liberalization.
On the other hand; I much more strongly support prohibition for recreational use of opioids. I also think that we (Canada) could do a better job with our liberalization approach, even if my preference would be a return to prohibition. In my real life; one of the biggest places I spend my political resources is in advocating for safer supply services prescribing fentanyl directly rather than using mega-doses of hydromorph or dilaudid- something that arguably cuts against my support for prohibition, but would reduce some of the biggest problems we see with liberalization. But I think blanket arguments against ever using a prohibition approach because "prohibition doesn't work" are really bad; and prohibition often works better than the alternative (though I'll say your piece here wrestles with the successes of prohibition a lot more honestly than most opponents do).
I actually do have greater support for reinstating prohibition of alcohol than cannabis; or at least walking back some of the liberalization of alcohol we've had over the past ~century. For a variety of reasons I think the lift is MUCH higher here (including public opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOHn_MQcAWo), so its not an issue I devote a whole lot of time to in real life. But in a discussion, I'm happy to bite the bullet and argue for greater restrictions- up to and including prohibition- on the sale of alcohol.
And I do see that my initial comment got posted as a top-level one; rather than a reply to the comment above about walking into a subway car full of cannabis smoke. That likely contributed to the confusion; my initial post was pointing out that type of quality of life concern is not especially prevalent in Canada.
I actually see more meth and fent being smoked on transit than cannabis; despite much higher population level consumption of cannabis.
The same thing we do with tobacco, really. Licensing, channeling, taxation, regulatory requirements, zoning, etc. Make it so sex is sold in channels where we can control the abuses rather than channels where we can't.
But honestly, the highest end of sex work is deregulated already. Nobody, for instance, prosecutes women for having sex with rich men who buy them things, or the men on the other side of those transactions. You probably just want to make the highest end fully legal, as long as there's no intermediary making money on the transaction. If someone is paying a woman $3000 for a sex act, there's just no serious worry of exploitation there-- just make that legal.
Sex work doesn't sell humans either. It sells a service or if you will sells their bodies in the same way that selling a massage or selling manual labor sells their bodies, but the "sale of humans" thing is a lie.
This is quite good, and you’re dead right on Prohibition. I read a lot of Temperance literature when doing research for the chapter in my alternate history book where Prohibition doesn’t come, and it was absolutely a women’s movement, which is why it happened around the same time as women getting the right to vote i.e. were on the political ascendency.
One tidbit about the loss of civil liberty in Prohibition times I found quite interesting: In 1925, the governor of Oregon, quite explicitly using Prohibition as his justification and motivation, declared quite openly that government agents were allowed to go into private homes to seek violators of the Volstead Act. “The laws and customs have changed vastly since first was announced the right and doctrine that every man’s home was his castle and sanctuary,” he explained. “We claim the right to go into any place in the State at any time as secret agents and to discover, if possible, law violations.”
The loss of civil liberties that accompanies each one of these Prohibitions is striking, and it takes a kind of zealotry (thinking that eliminating the thing you don't like is more important than anyone's privacy or civil liberties) to not care about that.
I don't have super-strong priors about legalizing prostitution either way, but I don't find 'prohibition doesn't work because there will always be a black market for it' to be a particularly strong argument. You could argue against making *anything* illegal this way. Criminalization doesn't stop homicide, burglaries, rape, or armed robberies either, but I'm not aware of anyone arguing that we should might as well make murder legal because black market murders will always exist.
I mean I'm just looking at your byline- 'you can't stop something that a critical mass of people want to do'. Of course you can, that's literally what civilization is. A critical mass of people want to punch each other over minor disputes, drive drunk, steal from each other, and so on. A critical mass of men would probably sexually harass or assault women if given the chance. Part of not living in literal anarchy is that we make an attempt to reduce the rates of this happening, knowing that we'll never achieve zero assaults or burglaries, but that some reduction is better than no reduction. There are certainly less homicides, burglaries etc. than if we had no law enforcement and no one was even attempting to stop these activities. Law enforcement of serious crimes is an ongoing, never-ending part of living in a civilization.
I would've been more interested in hearing an argument as to why you think prostitution is different from other major crimes that we all agree should be actively policed. But this simplistic argument comparing of everything to Prohibition I don't find to be very deep or interesting. (BTW Prohibition is hardly 'forgotten' and calling every proposed new law prohibition is a very very common ongoing trope in American society)
None of your examples involve massive numbers of otherwise law abiding people violating the law the way alcohol, marijuana, and sex work do (and the way handguns would if we banned them). Only a small percentage of the populace murders, burglarizes houses, rapes, or commits armed robbery.
And your claims in that respect about violence, theft, and sexual harassment are wrong. (I will get to DUI in a minute, because that's at least a not completely fatuous example.) In fact, for instance, take violence. In actuality there are very few prosecutions for simple assault in this country, and yet, fistfights are pretty rare things in 2025, precisely because actually Americans do not have a predilection to engage in them. Theft and rape are pretty niche activities despite what you say. And sexual harassment is a situation where we had a real change in mores-- PERSUASION absolutely can work to make things better. This happened with tobacco too-- but it hasn't happened with sex work. (Very possibly because the human drive for sexual variety is one of the strongest innate drives most of us are born with.)
As for the claim that there are less homicides and burglaries with law enforcement than without, why yes, there are. As I noted in my piece, there was also less drinking during Prohibition. That doesn't matter. I know you think it is a killer argument, but it doesn't matter. What matters is whether your proposed prohibition will end up turning a large enough segment of society into scofflaws that it produces the black market, civil liberties, and organized crime problems I identified. It is a truly bad worldview to think the only thing that matters is stamping out whatever it is you don't like, and thinking that people's liberty and freedom from the Mafia do not matter.
Now, let's talk about DUI, because it's the one example where I think you actually have a slight point. The essential problem with DUI is that it is indeed true that DUI is so commonplace that DUI laws are impossible to enforce, and the reduce but do not come close to eliminating DUI. But the difference here is-- DUI isn't a product or service. It's just something people do. We wish there could be less of it, but because laws aren't these magic things that stop people from doing stuff they want to do, it doesn't go down that way. But we aren't imposing on something people truly want to buy and consume by having DUI laws.
Having said that, it's worth noting that even DUI laws have enormous costs we do not come to grips with. Sobriety checkpoints, traffic stop powers, and implied consent laws are all serious impingements on civil liberties, and these powers also allow racist cops some additional excuses to pull over Black drivers and engage in discriminatory law enforcement. So even here, it may be that we aren't really weighing the costs and benefits correctly, as bad as drunk driving is.
On your last point, sex work is simply not a major crime. It may offend you a lot, but it isn't a major crime. Jackie Onassis sold her body to her second husband Aristotle. Of course we don't call it that when it's a marriage contract, but that is what happened. There's nothing intrinsically wrong about the activity.
Now there are certain TYPES of prostitution that are serious issues. I refer to that. Human trafficking and the like. But those types of sex work flourish in situations where lawful regulated sex work is not available. So if the concern is that rather than some irrational moral or religious purity about how women and men conduct their sex lives, you probably get farther along in trying to stamp that out if you legalize it.
>None of your examples involve massive numbers of otherwise law abiding people violating the law the way alcohol, marijuana, and sex work do (and the way handguns would if we banned them). Only a small percentage of the populace murders, burglarizes houses, rapes, or commits armed robbery..... In actuality there are very few prosecutions for simple assault in this country, and yet, fistfights are pretty rare things in 2025..... Theft and rape are pretty niche activities despite what you say
In 2019 there were 19,811 arrests nationally for prostitution-related crimes. There were over 274,000 arrests for assault! So, almost 14x the number of assaults. There were 118k burglary arrests and 592k larceny arrests! I don't think your assertions here are correct, to put it mildly. If anything, my takeaway from the FBI crime data is that only a small percentage of the population are visiting prostitutes, but lots & lots of Americans are either fighting someone or stealing something. The data is, like, the exact opposite of what you claimed.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/table-43
>the black market, civil liberties, and organized crime problems I identified
A number of developed countries have legalized & regulated prostitution, like Germany. But they still have black market prostitution that involves organized crime. This is another libertarian fallacy, imagining that legalizing something will somehow get rid of the black market. But as soon as you have some degree of regulation, some actors will remain outside it- like all the black market weed sales in states that legalized marijuana. Sports leagues now have *way more* problems with gambling corruption than they had before it was widely legalized in the US. Getting rid of the black market here is mostly wishful thinking
Your argument proves too much and ignores the predictable consequences of legalization.
why doesn’t this apply to immigration and completely removing all restrictions on economic migrants? what would happen if we went full bryan caplan? i expect a massive revolt from the public and an election of a president who makes trump look cuddly. because that’s literally what happens in every country that has significant increases in immigration.
what about illegal drugs and homelessness? I’ve been to san francisco many times. i do not look at their open air drug markets and think “oh yes i definitely want to legalize drugs so i get that”. if legalization means open air drug markets near where i live, ill stick with the drug war thanks. oh it won’t? well how are you going to stop it? the moment a sin industry becomes legalized, it gains political and legal power. those business have rights, including first amendment rights and much easier access to capital.
why did oregon promptly repeal its de facto legalization of hard drugs shortly after legalizing them? These kinds of bans provide an easy lever for local police to manage dealing with anti social people that make everyone else’s lives miserable. how do you effectively maintain public order without them? In principle could you? sure. in practice i haven’t seen any evidence of that to be the case.
Where I fear you’re right is that even though in principle I support legalizing marijuana, in practice its legalization has made my life worse. It’s not that pot was hard to find in NYC ten years ago, or wasn’t smoked openly, but it the numbers were low enough that you were much less likely to enter a subway car and find it filled with smoke. One short subway ride to work, and you reek of pot all day. This became so much more common after legalization, and although it’s still technically illegal to smoke up on a subway train, that’s technically, and legalization made it happen.
(Please do not take this comment as an endorsement of the drug war.)
Lifting Prohibition made society "worse" too. Did you see all those drinking statistics I cited you? Literally tens of thousands of people die every year from alcohol, which means the death toll is several million since 1933.
And yet, everyone understands that it would be a terrible idea to restore Prohibition. This is the basic problem here, and one our brains have difficulty wrapping around-- something can be truly awful and yet still must be legal because if you try to make it illegal you just empower a ton of bad people while not actually succeeding in making consumption impossible.
I would also add 2 other points here. First, creating a ton of discretion for law enforcement is awful, not good. I mean, why don't we just criminalize breathing and then just rely on police to arrest and prosecute only the "bad" breathers? Obviously that's a silly reductio ad absurdum, but the point is, it's actually not good to give police that kind of discretion. They had that discretion during Prohibition too, and they used it to target marginalized communities. Same with gay sex when it was illegal.
If you want to have a law, it has to be because you are willing to enforce it including against rich people and people you think highly of and don't think are doing anything seriously wrong. If you aren't willing to do that, it's a very bad law and will lead to discriminatory enforcement.
Finally, on migrants, I think the difference with immigration policy is simply that a person crossing the border illegally causes a much more long term impact-- that person is now semi-permanently in the country, because interior enforcement is so ineffective and it is so easy to hide. Whereas a person smoking a joint or paying $75 for a blowjob isn't causing that sort of permanent impact to the country.
Okay, so you are making consequentialist and a utilitarian argument then, yes? You are arguing that the harms of prohibiting the activity outweigh the benefits to society. While the harms or benefits can and likely will differ on an individual level, eliminating prohibition is net beneficial for society. If i got that wrong, please let me know but I am going to assume that's where you've land.
Given that, your arguments on immigration is hand wavey. Bryan Caplan has marshaled massive empirical and theoretical evidence to demonstrate that immigration is a huge benefit to the US and thus argues for unrestricted immigration. Let's say for sake of argument that Caplan is right and that the resistance to immigration is xenophobia, racism and ignorance. Shouldn't you therefore support unrestricted immigration or at least significantly increase it? Why should we limit immigration simply because its unpopular with ignorant racists, especially since your argument about unenforceability applies in spades to economic migrants. Migrants willingly risk death just to get here!
As for prostitution and the drug war: what happens to public order if we fully legalize them? What happens to local governments ability to deal with anti-social people (drug addicts and the mentally ill) who make the lives of people in the local community a living hell? What will happen to tent encampments? My guess is that it will make these issues far far worse and as evidence I'll point you to the west coast. No one looks at portland or san francisco and thinks ah yes I would like more of that please. Even if all your arguments are correct, if the cost of removing prohibition is a degradation in public order, I am not interested. And more to the point no one who has ever lived near tent encampment or deal with the anti-social homeless is either or well anyone who votes.
So do you have a pitch about how the most likely result of this is not in fact a significant degradation in public order?
From what I've read from law enforcement, they don't spend a lot of time or money pursuing these cases, because the men they bust end up not being charged or let off with a light sentence. Now that more states are making sex buying a felony, law enforcement will be more motivated to crack down on this. I say we should double the money & effort & we'd see a big impact.
The federal government, at the very least, spends a ton-- we have their budgets. I can tell you LAPD spends a lot on it because I live here and they brag about it. None of it works.
It will work when CA makes buying sex a felony. Men will go to jail, word will spread & men will stop. I don't have the numbers on TX, but a law enforcement officer TX said that after TX made buying sex a felony, the John forums were full of men saying they were going to stop. Consequences change behavior.
The anti-sex work lobby takes this on faith that this is true, but there is in fact plenty of sex still for sale in Sweden. It doesn't work-- it just forces sex workers to jump through needless hoops to do what they should be allowed to do.
Here in Canada cannabis legalization seems to have had less of a quality of life impact (maybe just higher conscientiousness population?) but I can tell you that admissions to hospital for cannabis induced psychosis went from being extremely rare to extremely common and frequent.
Maybe that's a fair price to pay for greater adult autonomy (still has nothing on alcohol related healthcare costs), but Canada's use of safe supply programs and supervised consumption sites for opioids have been a much bigger argument in favour of prohibition. We get the same quality of life problems from tolerating mass open use and dealing as progressive US cities, but supercharged our organized crime involvement in the drug trade rather than displaced it. We're not quite at prohibition era Chicago territory, but we have active gun fights (which would be even worse without handgun prohibition keeping the supply of those down!) for which gangs control diversion and sale of government supplied opioids.
Prohibition is bad, just not as bad as the alternative.
So are you in favor of bringing it back for alcohol then? Because marijuana is, despite your argument, one of the most harmless of the addictive substances (note: it is not completely harmless, but it isn't very harmful overall) and alcohol is one of the most dangerous of them, with a massive death toll?
I don't think people who take the position that marijuana should be illegal really have the courage of their convictions. Honestly, I think the unpopularity of stoners and the belief that they are irresponsible is doing a ton of the work in their arguments. They'd never dare propose it for alcohol, even though alcohol kills of tens and thousands, causes tens of thousands of rapes, etc., and pot simply does not do that.
If this is in reply to my comment above; I would put my preferences as:
Prohibition of recreational opioids= strongly support
Prohibition of alcohol= low-moderate support
Prohibition of cannabis= neutral
Prohibition of caffeine= strongly against (only listed to give a baseline)
I think Canada's liberalization of cannabis consumption was done much more effectively than any US state; even if it placed additional strains on our mental healthcare system. I would not spend political capital supporting or opposing prohibition (and to be clear; I actually felt my comment above was pretty neutral on cannabis prohibition- though it was written from my phone while still waking up, so I may have been less clear than intended). If I lived in a US state where the liberalization was more poorly managed I might support both prohibition; and also support doing a better job with liberalization.
On the other hand; I much more strongly support prohibition for recreational use of opioids. I also think that we (Canada) could do a better job with our liberalization approach, even if my preference would be a return to prohibition. In my real life; one of the biggest places I spend my political resources is in advocating for safer supply services prescribing fentanyl directly rather than using mega-doses of hydromorph or dilaudid- something that arguably cuts against my support for prohibition, but would reduce some of the biggest problems we see with liberalization. But I think blanket arguments against ever using a prohibition approach because "prohibition doesn't work" are really bad; and prohibition often works better than the alternative (though I'll say your piece here wrestles with the successes of prohibition a lot more honestly than most opponents do).
I actually do have greater support for reinstating prohibition of alcohol than cannabis; or at least walking back some of the liberalization of alcohol we've had over the past ~century. For a variety of reasons I think the lift is MUCH higher here (including public opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOHn_MQcAWo), so its not an issue I devote a whole lot of time to in real life. But in a discussion, I'm happy to bite the bullet and argue for greater restrictions- up to and including prohibition- on the sale of alcohol.
And I do see that my initial comment got posted as a top-level one; rather than a reply to the comment above about walking into a subway car full of cannabis smoke. That likely contributed to the confusion; my initial post was pointing out that type of quality of life concern is not especially prevalent in Canada.
I actually see more meth and fent being smoked on transit than cannabis; despite much higher population level consumption of cannabis.
So what do we do instead of prohibition?
The same thing we do with tobacco, really. Licensing, channeling, taxation, regulatory requirements, zoning, etc. Make it so sex is sold in channels where we can control the abuses rather than channels where we can't.
But honestly, the highest end of sex work is deregulated already. Nobody, for instance, prosecutes women for having sex with rich men who buy them things, or the men on the other side of those transactions. You probably just want to make the highest end fully legal, as long as there's no intermediary making money on the transaction. If someone is paying a woman $3000 for a sex act, there's just no serious worry of exploitation there-- just make that legal.
Do you ever think about why your examples are all objects? Tobacco, guns, drugs and alcohol.
Most things people want to ban the sale of are objects?
Are there any involving the sale of humans?
Sex work doesn't sell humans either. It sells a service or if you will sells their bodies in the same way that selling a massage or selling manual labor sells their bodies, but the "sale of humans" thing is a lie.