The Mexican cartels don't only engage in drug related crime; the idea that Mexico would become a peaceful utopia overnight if only you could buy crystal meth at your local supermarket doesn't have much evidence to support it.
That's a dramatic shift of the goalposts, isn't it? His argument was that ending prohibition wouldn't immediately make Mexico a safer place. It wasn't that prohibition was itself an intrinsically good idea.
A dramatic shift of goalposts would be equating not having your head chopped off with utopia.
His argument was not that prohibition wouldn't end immediately, it's that "The Mexican cartels don't only engage in drug related crime".
This is a correct statement. Cartels also profit from sex prohibition, but I'm not sure why this justifies anything. Hence my request for a principled argument. Maybe you can help out.
That's a very uncharitable summary of the comment you replied to, and also a stretch, since you're the one introducing "utopia" in the the discussion.
I have an easier time mounting a principled argument against prostitution than for drugs. Here it is:
Adults in western societies compete with other adults in the market (in its broadest sense). You can see this, for example, in every job interview.
Usually, competition is benign.
Some forms of competition are not benign. We've decided for example that the competitive tactic of cornering a market and using that position to fix prices is malignant.
As a public policy matter, we allow the market to operate freely except in those cases where the competition becomes malignant.
As a public policy matter, we've decided that it's malignant to allow the form of competition where the winner is the person most willing to compromise their sexual integrity.
We can do that even while understanding that different people have different notions of what comprises "sexual integrity". That's because we recognize that if you allow competition based on sexual compromise, the market races to the bottom, and we operate at the lowest common denominator of "sexual integrity". The market punishes people for not compromising. That emergent property takes on the coercive force of public policy.
In the same sense as there's no intrinsic moral problem with buying a specific amount of, say, lysine, but there is with buying all the lysine and fixing prices, there's no intrinsic moral problem with exchanging money for sex, but there's an emergent problem with allowing people to compete based on their willingness to sell sex.
Put more simply: legalizing prostitution would be at least in some sense (and I think probably in a very powerful sense) coercive of poor women, and particular poor single mothers who have an extraordinarily powerful obligation to finance the upbringing of their children. Not selling your body would become a luxury. It's terrible public policy that allows that to happen.
It happens, obviously, regardless of the policy levers we pull. But society as a whole doesn't create the expectation that people can/should do that. That would stop being true if we allowed red-light districts in our cities.
Preemptively: you asked for a principled argument, by the way, not a dispositive one.
Um, I used a phrasing that was intended to be slightly more interesting and less dry than "the idea that Mexico would not have violent cartels overnight if ...." - but it should have been obvious what I meant.
You're indeed the one who shifted the goal posts there. You suggested that prohibition is the reason reporters get their heads chopped off in Mexico. I pointed out that it's not the case; cartels do more than just drugs trafficking. You then requested I provide a principled argument for prohibition, as if that's a response to me pointing out a flaw in your own argument.
I find it funny you have a problem "coercing" poor women and single mothers (by allowing them the choice to sell a product they have) but you don't have a problem coercing sex workers out of the industry they chose to work in.
> That would stop being true if we allowed red-light districts in our cities.
Except that the world has several red-light districts and what you're saying would happen never did and never will.
Look, those prostitutes in the Netherlands making pennies for sex, they still have to sit and wait for clients. During that time they can pick up a book and learn other skills. If they're not doing that it's because they don't want to do something else other than have sex for money.
You're looking at it the wrong way. You're taking away the "choice" of a small number of women who would choose to engage in sex work, in return for removing the pressure to do so from a large number of women on the margin.
Or workplace safety laws. You take away the "choice" of people to work for employers who cut-corners in terms of safety, to reduce the pressure on desperate people to take such jobs.
