The Strange Left-Wing Fascination with Prostitution

I thought conservatives were the ones with an unseemly fixation on sex. They’re supposed to be the Puritans who, in the words of Mencken, have a “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

Maybe that’s true in a few cases, but it also appears that some leftists also are bizarrely focused on sex. Only instead of worrying that someone may be having fun, they concoct novel claims that a statist agenda is necessary to stop prostitution.

Just the other day, for instance, some lawmakers actually asserted that “climate change” would force more women to become prostitutes.

Several House Democrats are calling on Congress to recognize that climate change is hurting women more than men, and could even drive poor women to “transactional sex” for survival. …Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and a dozen other Democrats, says the results of climate change include drought and reduced agricultural output. It says these changes can be particularly harmful for women. “[F]ood insecure women with limited socioeconomic resources may be vulnerable to situations such as sex work, transactional sex.

Though these American politicians are behind the times. A Filipino bureaucrat at the United Nations proposed this laughable theory as early as 2009.

While the link between climate change and “transactional sex” is a bit of a stretch, to put it mildly, it’s not the only area where leftists make bizarre and unsubstantiated assertions about stopping prostitution with a statist agenda.

I thought I had dealt with every imaginable silly argument against tax havens, but I didn’t give my leftist friends enough credit. It seems that low-tax jurisdictions somehow facilitate sex slavery.

While battles over government budget deficits dominate the media coverage, tax havens pose a much bigger problem. They facilitate bribery, they enable sex slavery, and they foster terrorism. As Sachs notes, “the havens serve countless purposes, yet not one is for the social good.”

Not surprisingly, there’s not a single piece of evidence to support any of the assertions in this excerpt. We’re just supposed to believe that financial privacy laws enable bad things because of money laundering.

Yet actual real-world evidence – as opposed to ideologically motivated assertions – shows that tax havens are not money-laundering centers. Indeed, they generally have stronger laws against dirty money than “onshore” jurisdictions.

P.S. So why do leftists have this quirky fixation about prostitutes and public policy? Do they go to left-wing conferences and hear stories from Dominique Strauss-Kahn , the infamous former head of the IMF. Or do they get briefings from my one-time debating opponent Elliot Spitzer, who also was disgraced because of “transactional sex”?