Pubdate: Wed, 16 Jul 2014
Source: Victoria Times-Colonist (CN BC)
Copyright: 2014 Times Colonist
Contact: http://www2.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/letters.html
Website: http://www.timescolonist.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/481
Author: William Watson
Note: William Watson teaches economics at McGill University in Montreal.

LEGALIZE AND TAX PROSTITUTION AND MARIJUANA

What do we make of products that are legal to sell but not to buy? Or
the reverse: legal to buy but not to sell. If you can sell it, why
can't you buy it? And vice versa? An economist, trained to think that
both parties to any transaction gain, is mystified.

As you probably guessed, we're talking sex and drugs. By far the
strangest fact about Canada's prostitution laws is that selling your
body for sex, or at least renting it, has seldom been illegal. What
has been illegal is indicating you're willing to rent, renting in
certain places, or, as proposed in the Conservatives' latest attempt
to solve the world's oldest labour-practices debate, being the renter.
Why not cut through the hypocrisy and just outlaw prostitution, plain
and simple?

Similar hypocrisy is on display in our current debate about marijuana.
It's beginning to look as if we'll get defacto full legalization
through the back door of medical marijuana - shades of the granny's
rheumatism "medicine" exception during Prohibition.

Marijuana has been proved medically useful for some conditions, such
as glaucoma, but in those jurisdictions that do allow medical use,
prescriptions are running far out of proportion to plausible clinical
need (as our own military is finding with its supply of the stuff to
veterans).

Not policing phoney prescribing for recreational use is hypocritical
enough.

But, assuming we don't get full legalization, several popular
decriminalization proposals would have us, in the mirror image of the
prostitution proposals, allow buying and possession of small amounts
of marijuana but forbid sale of larger amounts. You can buy but you
can't deal.

The reasoning behind these asymmetries likely involves traditional
assumptions about moral culpability. With prostitution, it's the johns
who corrupt and exploit innocent women (mainly) so let's go after the
johns.

With drugs, it's the dealers who corrupt innocent users, so let's hunt
down and punish pushers. Hobby suppliers we'll leave alone since they
can't do great damage. But anyone who wants to get into the business
in a serious way: Forget it.

The evidence suggests, however, that many prostitutes are reasonably
happy in their work - the three complainants in last year's Bedford
case, which ultimately forced the government to remake the laws,
certainly seemed that way - while many marijuana users are also
perfectly content. (In fact, maybe too perfectly content.)

When I was 20, I thought hypocrisy the worst sin of all. Four decades
later, I understand it does have its social uses. But really: If we
can't muster a political coalition to flat-out ban prostitution, and
if we wouldn't want to spend police resources enforcing such a ban
anyway, why not just regulate it to minimize the harms it produces?

"Out of sight, out of mind" is probably most people's view of an
enterprise that both predates and will outlive us all. On the other
hand, though the state might have no business in the bedrooms of the
nation, it clearly does have business on the sidewalks and in the
public parks of the nation.

We should ban prostitution by minors, zone it as we do other
industries, and make it pay its taxes: A century of rising taxation
teaches that if you really want to discourage something, 15 per cent
HST and 50 per cent marginal income tax rates are just the thing. And
we could hobble it with red tape by appointing a minister of
prostitution and imposing a full set of industrial policies.

We should have much the same policy for marijuana: ban its use by
minors and drivers, police those bans seriously, zone its production
and sale, tax it, but then let buyers and sellers be.

What we shouldn't do is legalize and nag, to the tune of hundreds of
millions of dollars, the way we do with tobacco. If adults aren't
capable of deciding which legal activities to pursue, maybe they
aren't capable of self-government, either.  
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D