[This article is excerpted from the first two chapters of The Enterprise of Law by Bruce Benson.]

Anyone who would even question the "fact" that law and order are necessary functions of government is likely to be considered a ridiculous, uninformed radical by most observers.

	$15
"No one would voluntarily recognize a legal system that was not expected to treat him fairly."

This study will use economic theory to compare institutions and incentives that influence public and private performance in the provision of law and its enforcement. Some critics may contend that law is not an appropriate subject for "economic analysis," because it is not produced and allocated in exchange markets. To be certain, economics has a great deal to say about market institutions, but its relevance and scope are not so narrowly limited. Economic theory requires only that scarce resources be allocated among competing uses. Clearly, the enterprise of law — the use of police services, court time, and all other inputs in the process of making law and establishing order — requires scarce resources that must be allocated. Beyond that, economic theory explains human behavior by considering how individuals react to incentives and constraints.

Using economic theory, then, it can be convincingly demonstrated that private-sector (i.e., market or voluntary) institutions are capable of establishing strong incentives that lead to effective law making and law enforcement. The resulting legal constraints facilitate interaction and support social order by inducing cooperation and reducing violent confrontation. It can also be shown that public-sector institutions create incentives that can lead to substantial inefficiencies in the provision of these same functions. In fact, our modern reliance on government to make law and establish order is not the historical norm.

FULL ARTICLE

Apropos the GI Bill post, here's Gary North on Joseph Schumpeter on universities and socialism:

In 1942, America’s most distinguished academic economist, Joseph Schumpeter, offered a theory. He argued that America’s business elite had lost its will to resist the socialists. The key to this surrender was higher education. The anti-business socialists had been hired by America’s elite universities, he said, yet the business elite continued to send their children to these universities.

[…]

It is not socialists who control America’s prestige universities. It never was, because they never did. Socialists gained secure employment in American universities, but never control. Those in control today are socialism’s illegitimate ideological offspring, born out of wedlock by way of socialism’s Darwinist soulmates. Those in control of the universities today are the post-1965 moral drifters known as the hippies. They cut their hair and bought tweed jackets, but they remain hippies.

It is not capitalism that enrages them most, although they despise it. Rather, it is middle-class morality, which gives rise to the free market because the free market rests on the concept of inescapable personal responsibility in a world governed by the inescapable fact of scarcity. The hippies have always rejected any such morality. They also resent scarcity, except insofar as it can be used to justify increased state control over other people’s lives — a state controlled at the top by the elite universities’ graduates.

On this point, the professors share a deeply religious commitment with America’s business elite.

Schumpeter was entirely wrong. He completely misunderstood what the arrangement was in 1942 … and still is. It was not that the business elite had surrendered to socialism in 1942. It was that they hired socialists and others to educate their children in the joys of regulated markets — regulated so as to hamper the social enemies of both groups: consumers, who were mostly middle class in 1942, or else the parents of those who would be by 1950, the year of Schumpeter’s death.

The business elite wanted government regulation of the free market to protect them from the shifting and ruthless authority of consumers, who have money to spend as they please. This commitment to regulated markets increased exponentially, beginning in 1942: the wartime planning boards.

The socialists and their academic colleagues also wanted protection from the free market: government-accredited colleges and academic tenure. They received both, as well as the money to fund this insulated system — insulated from the free market’s open entry and price competition.

Both sides worked out a deal. They imported the system of higher education that had been working in Prussia since about 1820. Expensive universities would train the children of the elite to administer the regulatory agencies and the corporations protected by these agencies. Low-tuition, tax-funded state universities would train future mid-level administrators and corporate employees, as well as a few bright graduates who could be recruited by the elite. The high-tuition elite private universities would train future senior officials, corporate executives, and the senior lawyers who would work out the terms of the alliance. This arrangement is still working just fine. It is business — and anti-business — as usual.

"What I Learned From Duke University"

North's article is about Duke University. It's a great read. I love North the most when he's writing about education. Second best: history. I used to love his stuff on gold and banking and money in general, but since I deal with Austrian economics all day every day, I don't learn as much from his economic writings as I used to. On education and history, I still learn plenty.

His slogan — "Moses and Mises" — is so good I almost wish I were religious.

Stephen Carson posts on Garrison Keilor's worship of the GI Bill. It's worth reading Carson's whole post, and following his link to Tom DiLorenzo's article on the GI Bill's role in the politicization of American higher education, but where my mind is these days has my focused on this issue:

Keilor:

The cost to taxpayers for the GI Bill was about $5.5 billion, but the result was 450,000 engineers, 240,000 accountants, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 22,000 dentists, 17,000 writers and editors, and thousands of other professionals. It helped spur one of the greatest economic booms in American history.

Carson:

He seems to implicitly assumes that because the GI Bill produced more professionals of various sorts that it was obviously a great thing. Besides the unconscious self-congratulation that one expects from the intelligentsia ("more of us is clearly what the world needs"), there is the matter of how many college degrees is optimal. Should every man, woman and child have a PhD? If not, what is the right number? How does Keillor know that 450,000 engineers was exactly what society needed at that time?

What I'll add is this: How is it, with the quality of education dropping over the course of the 20th century (grade school, high school, university, post-grad), that so few people see the connection between that decline and the subsidizing and universalizing of formal schooling?

This is a glaring example of the post-hoc fallacy: because it seems that many smart and successful people went to university, therefore we conclude that the university must have made them smart and successful. So if we just send everyone to college, the entire population will become smarter and more successful.

But again, if we're willing to entertain A-before-B-means-A-caused-B, why do so few people look at the possibility that the tax-funded tuitions have caused ever-lower standards for what counts as being educated?

My cynical hypothesis is that most people do recognize the connection between universalization and mediocritization but are so religiously devoted to the egalitarian creed that they assume the equality gains somehow outweigh the quality losses. They believe this, but only implicitly. Out loud, no one wants to talk about trade-offs. Better to list impressive numbers and titles, as Keilor does.

This is from a friend's blog, quoted in full, with permission:

Thursday, June 21, 2007 And Now ... A Geek Moment I warn you all, I am a geek. YOU ARE BEING WARNED. Yes, me ... geek. I was the guy who was teased mercilessly in middle school ... and elementary school ... and Montesori school ... and high school ... for being interested in ... well in just about anything I was interested in. All that teasing served to do was to irrevocably kill a small part in my moral center and make me vow to some day enact my revenge on all my tormentors. (You ever wonder why I'm approaching 40 and am so much poorer than my peers? The last of the hits should be going down just about ... now. No, wait ... and, now. Ahhhhhh. A dish best served cold.) But I continue to be the geek that I was though I try to be polite and sensitive about how I inflict it on people. This is why I'm warning you that this blog entry is all about geeking out. Specifically, I'm going to be the Word Geek here. So if you're not up for that you can stop reading now, move along, nothing to see, and take comfort that at least you were warned ... which is more than I can say for those assholes I knew in school. I can assure you, they never saw it coming. Fuckers. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. You remember how last year I directed the summer Shakespeare play for Four County Players? Well, this year I'm in the summer Shakespeare play for Four County Players. So the other day I'm working on my lines when I start to stumble over whether or not my character says "will" or "shall" at a particular point. And I stumble over it because sometimes Shakespeare has me saying, "will" and sometimes he has me saying, "shall". So I wondered, what the Hell was the difference between "will" and "shall"? Seeing as I try to spend as many of my waking hours as possible sitting at the end of a high-speed Internet connection, I looked it up, and the answer that I found is so rediculously arbitrary and complex that I, of course, think it's fascinating! First of all, of course, practically speaking, there isn't any difference as "shall" has pretty much fallen out of common usage. But when "shall" was used, a couple of sources suggest the following difference in usage between "will" and "shall". When used with the first person (I, We), "shall" indicates the informal future, whereas "will" indicates the emphatic future. When used with the second and third persons (Get this!) that distinction is reversed! (Isn't that just wacky!?! I love English!) So you can say, "I suppose I shall keep my appointment with Roger tomorrow. And should he show, we will have this issue out once and for all." I make a simple statement about my future appointment keeping but am emphatic about my intention to settle things between Roger and me. I could also say, "I will confront him. And when we meet, he will die." Ooo! I really being a sneaky badass here. Because I am resolved to encounter my unnamed object, but when we meet the result is a foregone conclusion. That's of course different from "I will confront him. And when we meet, he shall die!" Emphasis on both ends. Both to confront and to prevail will take an act of will (stricly speaking, of course). On the other end, I could chill things down and say, "You will find the Professor in the Study. I shall be in the Drawing Room." - matter of fact statements about future events, as opposed to, "It's too late to back out now! You shall find the Professor in the Study! You can be sure that I will be in the Drawing Room!" Here you best be finding El Professor in the Study because I'm obviously waiting on your trifling ass in the Drawing Room so I can play my part in whatever little adventure we have going. Pretty cool, huh? This, of course, is why "shall" has fallen from modern usage. B-Boys in hip hop culture are always speaking in the emphatic and always talking about themselves. Thus they never have need for "shall". "I will step up to the nigger, and when I do, I will put a cap in his punk ass!" See? Nothing informal about that future. I think that's so cool!! Now I know why Shakespeare has me saying "will" sometimes and "shall" other times. Now if I can only find a difference between "Set your legs to motion" and "Put your legs to motion." Hey, don't make that face. You were warned. You're lucky I didn't share my recent thoughts about Star Trek with you.

I've been tagged by Po Moyemu. The Rules are:

1. Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves.
2. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and
   1. posts their names,
   1. then goes to their blogs
   2. and leaves them a comment,
      1. letting them know that they have been tagged
      2. and asking them to read your blog.

My list:

1. I'm glad I grew up in New York City, but I'd never want to live there again.
2. I'm glad I didn't marry young; I don't think it would have stuck.
3. I don't believe in fate.
4. I can't believe my good luck in finding and marrying a woman who will put up with me.
5. I continue to think my son is a gift from God.
6. I don't believe in God.
7. I seem to have managed to combine my job and my calling — and to do it from home!
8. I would push the button.

I don't believe I know 8 people who would be happy to get tagged with this, so I'll just create a list below and fill it in with the first 8 people to let me know they're willing:

1. Monster Fool
2. Choicy White Boy
3. Anthony Gregory
4. Radical Liberation
5. FanQuia

"Oh no!" she protested, "John Dewey was an individualist!"

I was at a neighborhood party a few years ago, talking to a student from the local university education school. She had told me that her hero was John Dewey, and I had said I'd heard Dewey was an anti-individualist. When she contradicted me, I didn't argue the point. But although she was the graduate student and I was just a townie, I didn't really trust her to know her own subject. She didn't exactly radiate intelligence. I assume she's teaching somewhere now.

This is from John Taylor Gatto, via Po Moyemu:

In 1896 the famous John Dewey, then at the University of Chicago, said that independent, self-reliant people were a counter-productive anachronism in the collective society of the future.

It is absolutely worth reading the rest of the excerpt, if not the entire speech, but I think I'll only quote one more section:

Bertrand Russell once observed that American schooling was among the most radical experiments in human history, that America was deliberately denying its children the tools of critical thinking. When you want to teach children to think you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. You keep the games and songs and pretty colors in balance with the soberer purpose. That's if you want to teach them to think. There is no evidence that has been a State purpose since the start of compulsion schooling.

Kilmer Middle School in Vienna, Virginia (a Washington, D.C. suburb) has instituted a prohibition against any and all physical contact "so strict that students can be sent to the principal's office for hugging, holding hands or even high-fiving."

Book of Joe has the details.

I spent a year of my life learning Ludwig von Mises's biography by editing a 1,500-page manuscript down to a single volume. Come autumn, you should be able to cover the same material in much less time — however long it takes you to read Jörg Guido Hülsmann's Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism.

(Man oh man, isn't that a handsome book cover?)

Or you can listen to these 10 lectures in July:

1. Formative Years
2. The Austrian School Around 1900
3. Theory of Money and Credit
4. The Great War and Its Aftermath
5. A Copernican Shift
6. Mises in His Prime
7. Years in Geneva
8. Nationalökonomie
9. New Life in America
10. Birth, Decline, and Rebirth of the Second Mises Revolution

This photograph feels like a good summary of the current shape of my life:

Thomas Cahill discussing social, economic, and political class conflict in late classical antiquity:

But now I must ask a great concession of my readers: to pity the poor tax man, whose life was far more miserable than the lives of those who suffered his exactions. The tax man, or curialis, was born that way: Can you imagine the dawning of horror on realizing that you were born into a class of worms who were expected to spend their entire adult life spans collecting taxes from their immediate neighbors — and that there was no way out?

But this was only the beginning of the horror. Whatever the curiales were unable to collect they had to make good out of their own resources! Who were these wretches, and how were they assigned their doom? Since tax collection was patently beneath the dignity of the Ausonian class of great landowners, the task of collection fell to the next level down, to the small landowners, the squireens who had amassed enough land to hold their heads up in polite society. Originally viewed as the first rung on the ladder of social betterment, the office of curialis had become by the age of Ausonius a cruel trap from which there was little chance of escape.

(How the Irish Saved Civilization, p. 25)

Cross-posted to the baby blog:

Your only investment is your time. Your only requirement is an interest in learning. Welcome to the World Wide School. The best place on the Internet to learn just about anything. Just read, click and learn. We wish you the best. This site is dedicated to the collection, preservation and presentation of educational material. To participate in the World Wide School all you need to do is to invest your time. For whatever reason, many people may find it difficult to broaden their education by traditional means; attending high school or college can seem like an impossible dream. That is why we are offering an education via the Web. Enjoy. - papa

Cross-posted to blog.Mises:

Follow-up:19 June, Yancy Ward adds this comment at blog.Mises:

On MarginalRevolution, Alex Taborrok quoted the following joke that is
related to this blog entry. I thought it was extremely funny.

Paddy O'Brien died and as is the Irish custom the mourners were throwing money into his coffin. The town miser, whom everyone despised, cried out "I loved Paddy O'Brien. Whatever anyone else puts into the coffin, I will double!" Thinking the miser a little bit drunk the townspeople took this as an opportunity to teach him a lesson. Gathering all their money they showered the coffin with $3012 in bills and coins, more than had ever before been given at a funeral. The miser then gathered the money, wrote a cheque for $6024 and threw that in.

The title "who's your audience" reminded me to blog this:

I use Jott.com to send myself memos from my cellphone when I know I'm going to otherwise forget to write something down later. The reason I prefer this to using the voice memo feature of my phone (or to simply leaving myself voicemail) is that Jott.com has the voice memo transcribed and sends it to the email address of my choice. I think it's a really great service, and for now, it's gratis.

Recently, my "jotts" to myself have been things to add to a shopping list. The other day, I speed-dialed Jott.com (press 'J' and hold) and left myself the following memo:

Kosher salt and Kleenex

Here's the email I received:

This says quite a lot, I think, about whom Jott employs for transcriptions. I'm willing to believe that someone working in a cubicle farm in America's heartland doesn't know what kosher salt is, even that they might not know the word 'kosher'. I'm also willing to believe that my accent makes 'kosher' the way I say it sound like 'culture' they way they say it. But "clean X" — that's a dead giveaway that the transcriptionists aren't American. "Clean X" is a perfect phonetic representation of Kleenex® so it's not a pronunciation issue.

Paul Cantor closes his defense of The Simpsons with the following metaintellectual metajoke:

Few people have found the Critique of Pure Reason funny, but in The Gay Science, Nietzsche felt that he had put his finger on Kant's joke:

"Kant wanted to prove in a way that would puzzle all the world that all the world was right — that was the private joke.… He wrote against the learned on behalf of the prejudice of the common people, but for the learned and not for the common people."

In Nietzsche's terms, The Simpsons goes one better than the Critique of Pure Reason: it defends the common man against the intellectual, but in a way that both the common man and the intellectual can understand and enjoy.

Having listened to 80% of David Gordon's recent seminar on the history of political philosophy, I have Plato and Aristotle on the brain, so I immediately notice a similarly ironic contrast between the two:

• Plato wrote in a popular form — dramatic dialog — saying that only intellectuals should have political power and that common perceptions were false;
• Aristotle said that common understanding was, at base, correct, but he said it in such a way that only the most devoted intellectuals can manage to follow.

Oxford English Dictionary:

3. the very spit of, the exact image, likeness, or counterpart of (a person, etc.). Also, the (dead) spit of. colloq.

1825 KNAPP & BALDWIN Newgate Cal. III. 497/2 A daughter,..the very spit of the old captain. 1836 T. HOOK G. Gurney I. 202 You are a queer fellow — the very spit of your father. 1885 HALL CAINE Shadow of Crime II. xxvi. 129 A brother..the spit of hissel'. 1886 MACQUOID Sir J. Appleby III. x. 143 This young chap has got his dear grandmother's eyes, why, he's the very spit of her. 1901 E. W. HORNUNG Black Mask 37 I'll chance you having another ring..the dead spit of mine. 1921 'K. MANSFIELD' Let. Sept. (1977) 232 One of his [sc. Cézanne's] men gave me quite a shock. He's the spit of a man I've just written about, one Jonathan Trout. 1936 M. DE LA ROCHE Whiteoak Harvest v. 98 Easy for a boy to look like his grandmother. There was Renny — the spit of old Gran! 1953 A. UPFIELD Murder must Wait xvii. 154 The son's the dead spit of the old man. 1966 [see GRAMP].

TakeOurWord.com:

Spitting image, yet another term for "lookalike", was originally spit and image. Spit meant "likeness", so the term uses redundancy to bring home its meaning. It is first recorded in the late 19th century as spit and image, and by 1925 it had taken the current form. The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, however, notes the saying "as like one as if he had been spit out of his mouth" as having been recorded in 1400, so the notion behind spit and image was already alive in the late Middle Ages. An apparently spurious etymology of spitting image has the term coming from spirit and image, and another from splitting image.

The Columbia Guide to Standard American English:

The key to this puzzling cliché is the word spit, which seems to have been an early-nineteenth-century dialectal noun meaning “an exact likeness or counterpart of a person or thing,” as in He’s the very spit of his father. The question is, how did spit develop that sense, dialectal or not? The Oxford English Dictionary concludes that it developed somehow from the noun spit, meaning “expectorated saliva,” but no really satisfactory explanation of the semantic change involved has thus far turned up. In the late nineteenth century the full cliché developed: He’s the very spit and image of his father, followed by the folk etymology that replaced spit and with spitting (or spittin’ or spitten) image. The phrase has a rather countrified air about it, and it is not likely to be found today in either Formal writing or at the higher levels of speech.

My only elaboration is to say that "the term uses redundancy to bring home its meaning" does not tell the whole story. After the Norman conquest of England in 1066, legal writing developed the custom of indicating the significant nouns first in their shorter, Anglo-Saxon form, then in their longer French/Latinate form, e.g., "last will and testament" where "will" and "testament" mean the same thing, but one was the term understood by the locals while the other was in the language of the conquerers. (I can't find the passage where I first read this, but I believe it was in Bruce Benson's Enterprise of Law.)

My guess is that this habit of short+long or local+Norman seeped out into the non-legal phrases of the language.

For Your Listening Pleasure

Wresting Land from the Sea: An Argument Against Public Goods Theory

The assertion that the state must provide "public goods" seems so obvious to the economic mainstream that it is not even debated.

In the United States, we are offered the examples of roads, bridges, and recently, the levees of New Orleans. In Germany, the textbook example of the public-goods argument is, as in New Orleans, the system of dikes and levees.

Philipp Bagus examines the theoretical aspects, as well as the historical evidence from the Frisia region in Germany for this government-legitimizing argument, showing that private dikes were the historical norm before the centuries-long infiltration of the state. FULL ARTICLE

(via Lew Rockwell)

Smart music at no cost. Hard to beat.

On LRB yesterday, Wendy McElroy wrote,

Capitalism v. the free market

Posted by Wendy McElroy at 02:13 PM

I had occasion to explain myself yesterday. Specifically, I explained why I do not argue wholesale for capitalism but I argue, instead, for adopting the free market system. Where do I draw the line between the two concepts?

[read the rest]

I agree with everything she says, which shouldn't be too surprising, since my libertarian education started with Wendy McElroy and, through her (and Robert Anton Wilson and Ken MacLeod), Benjamin Tucker.

(And I especially appreciate that she doesn't pull the semantic legerdemain of conflating capitalism and corporatism.)

But while I distinguish between the formally negative category of the free market and the positive economic program of capitalism, I no longer share McElroy's emphasis: she writes, "My choice is laissez-faire capitalism. … But I don't feel even an impulse to convince those who embrace other systems of their error."

I very much do feel that impulse.

No, it's not part of a libertarian agenda, per se. That agenda is only about freedom from the institutions of coercion, and whatever economic arrangements people want to make voluntarily is, strictly speaking, none of my business.

But recognition of people's fundamental right to choose does not require us to forgo efforts to dissuade people from bad thinking, neither does it obviate the the practically minded promotion of prosperity.

To quote McElroy's intellectual hero, and mine:

[…] libertarianism per se has no general or personal moral theory. Libertarianism does not offer a way of life; it offers liberty, so that each person is free to adopt and act upon his own values and moral principles. Libertarians agree with Lord Acton that "liberty is the highest political end" — not necessarily the highest end on everyone's personal scale of values.

There is no question about the fact, however, that the subset of libertarians who are free-market economists tends to be delighted when the free market leads to a wider range of choices for consumers, and thereby raises their standard of living. Unquestionably, the idea that prosperity is better than grinding poverty is a moral proposition, and it ventures into the realm of general moral theory, but it is still not a proposition for which I should wish to apologize.

Murray Rothbard, "Myth and Truth About Libertarianism"

From Po Meyemu:

Grab the nearest book.

1. Open it to page 161.
2. Find the fifth full sentence.
3. Post the text of the sentence along with these instructions.

Don't search around looking for the coolest book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.

OK.

"But Shamshi-Adad drafted enough of his subjects to man his garrisons and assemble an impressive defensive force, and the Elamite attack held off a little longer."

The History of the Ancient World by Susan Wise Bauer

In "Shaming the Official Antiwar Movement," John Walsh writes,

The libertarian view of the state is strikingly similar to Marx's — a coercive apparatus in the hands of an economic, exploitive elite. I made that point to Higgs and was surprised that he agreed. His contention is that Marxists have a pretty sound view of the state but a lousy outlook on economics. Libertarian and Marxist thought appear to have some common ground running all the way back to the 16th century writings of La Boetie.

(via Ender)

I'm sure I should be more supportive of the kind of outreach that Higgs and others were doing at the FFF conference, but I find this idea that Marxists might just be economically illiterate would-be libertarians troublesome, to say the least. My problem with Marxism isn't economic; it's ethical.

The other problem, which irritates the heck out of me, is the suggestion that libertarians and Marxists have "common ground" in our intellectual roots. That is only true to the extent that Karl Marx took radical liberal class-conflict theory and perverted it into his doctrine of economic exploitation. It is the height of perversity to claim that the twisting of individualist theory into something collectivist and coercive gives the twisted result "common ground" with the source.

Here's a typical irony. Defenders of current anti-prostitution laws often make 2 claims: one is absurd on its face; the other is often more compelling to anyone who isn't a principled libertarian.

The first claim is that anti-prostitution laws are meant to help the prostitutes themselves — protect them from their terrible lives, protect them from their terrible pimps, protect them from their terrible customers, etc.

But anyone can think beyond two steps of cause and effect can tell you that it is the criminal status of their trade that makes these women so vulnerable to less-than-ethical pimps and johns. Recognize self-ownership and contract rights, and they are no more vulnerable than any other private service worker. (OK, maybe they'd still be more vulnerable than a telecommuter, but no more so than, say, a massage therapist or a chiropractor.)

The second claim — the one that many otherwise liberally inclined people are often sympathetic to — is that prostitution ruins neighborhoods. Here the prostitution prohibitionists are appealing to our images of streetwalkers. The irony is that streetwalkers may also be a creation of the prohibitionists.

From the most recent Weekend Edition at Mises.org:

IV. Saving Our Boys from Alcohol and Vice

One of organized womanhood's major contributions to the war effort was to collaborate in an attempt to save American soldiers from vice and Demon Rum. In addition to establishing rigorous dry zones around every military camp in the United States, the Selective Service Act of May 1917 also outlawed prostitution in wide zones around the military camps.

[…]

At that point, the new Secretary of War, the progressive former mayor of Cleveland Newton D. Baker, became disturbed at reports that areas near the army camps in Texas on the Mexican border, where troops were mobilized to combat the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, were honeycombed with saloons and prostitution. Sent by Baker on a fact-finding tour in the summer of 1916, scoffed at by tough army officers as the "Reverend," Fosdick was horrified to find saloons and brothels seemingly everywhere in the vicinity of the military camps. He reported his consternation to Baker, and, at Fosdick's suggestion, Baker cracked down on the army commanders and their lax attitude toward alcohol and vice.

[…]

Employing the argument of health and military necessity, Fosdick set up a Social Hygiene Division of his commission, which promulgated the slogan "Fit to Fight." Using a mixture of force and threats to remove federal troops from the bases if recalcitrant cities did not comply, Fosdick managed to bludgeon his way into suppressing, if not prostitution in general, then at least every major red light district in the country. In doing so, Fosdick and Baker, employing local police and the federal Military Police, far exceeded their legal authority. The law authorized the president to shut down every red light district in a five-mile zone around each military camp or base. Of the 110 red light districts shut down by military force, however, only 35 were included in the prohibited zone. Suppression of the other 75 was an illegal extension of the law. Nevertheless, Fosdick was triumphant: "Through the efforts of this Commission [on Training Camp Activities] the red light district has practically ceased to be a feature of American city life."[35] The result of this permanent destruction of the red light district, of course, was to drive prostitution onto the streets, where consumers would be deprived of the protection of either an open market or of regulation.

Murray N. Rothbard, "World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals"

(emphasis added, of course)

Well, you might say, the federal government of the United States can't possibly be to blame for streetwalkers, since they could be found in London in the 19th century, and probably elsewhere throughout the history of cities.

My guess is that brothel-based prostitution is the norm wherever it is legal (and call girls, after the invention of the telephone), and that streetwalking is a black-market phenomenon … throughout the history of cities.

We've covered teleportation and warp drive. Here's how a cloaking device might work: