hbd Bastiat

Happy Birthday to Frédéric Bastiat, born June 30, 1801. (And note that the Mises Store is now carrying the original British translation of Bastiat’s great libertarian masterpiece The Law for only $6.) ((Or you can read it online for free.))

Did the federal government create streetwalkers?

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.