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In a video debate with colleagues from the Atlantic, Matthew Yglesias restates one of the big points I keep coming back to in the prostitution/legalization debate. (It’s a transcript from… roughly halfway through, so assume any garbling is mine and not his.)

I actually think the habit of making prostitution illegal and then by and large turning a blind eye to it… is itself a large problem. I mean a lot of the problem associated with the criminalization of prostitution happened precisely because it’s expected that normally it will go on… Which leads to a lot of opportunities for, on the one hand, selective enforcement of this… A lot of coercion of prostitutes by police officers, which seems to me the worst aspect of the current legal regime.

It’s a kind of blanket license for cops to basically rape prostitutes because they know what’s going on and their business depends on the police constantly turning a blind eye to it, and then a the same time it leaves the prostitutes in a situation where they can be incredibly exploited by other kinds of criminals because you’ know we’re not normally trying to enforce the law but if you come to the police with a complaint then they’re obligated to do something.

You can watch the video here.

And that sounds about right. I’ve bragged in the past about how Seattle is on the forefront of sex-positive culture but I also have to admit Seattle has in the past benefitted tremendously from the barrel over which prostitutes can be held. After a fire destroyed much of downtown Seattle in the 1800s, funds from a so-called seamstress tax were used to rebuild it. And that’s a pattern that’s been repeated small-scale and large for generations in America.

I also ought to mention that that milk-the-cash-cow impulse feels like the biggest risk to a pathway to legalization: if resulting policies merely institutionalize victimization as in Nevada where prostitutes are effectively incarcerated at their worksites to keep them from “corrupting” the communities in their off hours, and treated them like cash cows only more pariah-like then one would have to question whether it was worth it. Actually I happen to think there’d be some benefit simply because cops and others couldn’t extort sex with impunity. But simply institutionalizing the virgin/whore dichotomy — focusing on the sex part instead of the worker part, as many countries including Holland and Sweden, and especially the state of Nevada, have done would kind of suck.