Filibuster CartoonsTitle: Perfecting prostitution (click to view)
Date: November 17, 2011
There's no real story to go along with this cartoon. I'm thinking of diversifying the content of Filibuster a bit more, and starting to do more strips like these, in which I have characters engaging in dialogue about political issues, even if those issues aren't necessarily in the headlines right at the moment.
This particular comic was inspired by a recent conversation I had with a friend about the always controversial issue of prostitution, and the larger issue of what the government's role should be in permitting the public consumption of products and lifestyles it knows to be harmful.
When my parents were young, Canada was still a very puritanical country in many ways. There were no casinos, liquor was still tightly regulated by a myriad of prohibition-era laws, and even lottery tickets were largely unknown and had to be imported from the more degenerate American states. The ruling consensus of the time held that things like gambling and free-flowing booze were undeniably dangerous and destructive social ills, linked to crime, violence, domestic abuse, poverty, and death. No civilized society should ever knowingly permit these cancers to thrive and percolate, they said, and so we didn't, for a very long time.
Flash forward a few decades, and the cancers are all entirely legal and widely available. Yet somehow, despite it all, official government disapproval remains. In 2011 Canada it's quite difficult to turn on the TV, listen to the radio, or even ride the bus without being subjected to multiple taxpayer-funded warnings to "drink responsibly," "play within your limit," and, in the case of tobacco, simply "don't smoke." It's a bizarre and hypocritical act coming from the very people that legalized these sinful things in the first place, yet also quite revealing of the difficulty that can ensue when one tries to promote a nominally libertarian social agenda under the obsessively busy-bodying apparatus of the modern nanny state.
On the one hand, post-60s, we have supposedly embraced the liberating ideal that everyone is supposed to be free to eat, drink, smoke, and screw whatever they want. My body, my choice, and all that. Yet on the other, the post-60s consensus has also been fairly down on the idea that individuals are capable of making good decisions without a lot of enlightened guidance from the all-knowing state, and is particularly concerned that bad individual decisions can lead to expensive health problems that our post-60s public health bureaucracies would rather not pay for. It seems like a state of affairs that's almost too contradictory too survive, but luckily there's a third factor to help clarify things.
The dark reality is that contemporary social liberalism — at least as our governments currently choose to practice it — is often as much about profiting off of the misery of others as anything else. You can witness this by timing how long it takes a proponent of legalizing prostitution, pot, or some hard drug or dangerous pastime, to bring up how wondrous it will be once the government can "tax and regulate" the taboo in question. For any tax or regulation to be worthwhile, after all, the product or service being taxed or regulated needs to be steadily consumed and consistently desired. This is why houses and gasoline are heavily taxed, while commemorative plates and porcelain clowns are not. Any anticipation of government gain from the legalization of a social ill therefore has to involve at least some desire to perpetuate it, or there'd be no point. This is very cynical stuff — but luckily slapping on a couple warning stickers and churning out a few PSAs can easily compensate for a guilty conscience.
I thus have a hard time believing, as some libertarians claim, that a society with legal prostitution, pot, or whatever else would somehow herald a fundamentally less puritanical, less judgemental era of big government. If anything, it would almost certainly usher in one that was even
more naggy and annoying, simply because the state has such a long and inglorious track record of spending oodles of tax money half-heartedly trying to turn us off the very things it claimed were okay in the first place.
If we truly lived in a live-and-let-die society, where we did, in fact, let people die for the poor judgements they made whilst living — and felt no guilt or remorse over it — perhaps then there'd be little lose by legalizing practices like prostitution, which we know are risky in all sorts of ways. But of course that's not how we do things anymore. We legalize to regulate, we legalize to profit, and (ironically) we legalize to stigmatize. It's been a long time since we actually legalized something to stop judging or obsessing over it, and it will probably be a very long time before we ever do so again.
CKA Super Elite 
![[B-o]](./images/smilies/drinkup.gif "Drink up")
