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”?
Having spent most of my seventy years in places that suffer climate change four times a year, i.e. Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, perhaps the Climate Nazi crowd should have come up with a better name for their whackie politics!
Barbara Lee appears to have been educated enough to use polysyllabic words, but not enough to think. It is women in general who transform raw material into food. If you gave my husband flour, salt, water and yeast and a heat source at the end of the day you would have flour, salt, water and yeast.
If you gave it to me you would have bread. We would cooperate to feed our people. What kind of world does she imagine exists beyond the world of D.C.? What is wrong with these people?
I think you might have nailed it, they are getting instructions that “these are the noises we must make today” they don’t have to make sense in any context because they are looking to distort any sense of context.
So, wait, they’re saying that prostitution is bad? I thought we were supposed to be overcoming our irrational prejudice against “sex workers”.
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so……….. climate change leads to “transactional sex”… and tax havens enable sexual slavery… where do these fools come from? and how do they manage to get media attention?
and I thought libertarians were creepy…
Is this the “change” that Obama was speaking of? Actually I thinki that with “National Economic CLimate Change” that many men will wish they could turn to transactional sex as a potential source of income. Women and minorities are now the preferred job takers, and what’s left over seems to go to the cheaper illegal aliens who do those jobs Americans “just won’t do”. The list of which looks like all the jobs I used to do before I took on a profession.
Personally, I don’t condone the selling of sex for money. However, I am not in favor of using the force of law to restrict other people’s choice to pursue sex work. Do I view selling of sex for money as distasteful? On moral grounds, yes. However, as a libertarian and liberty minded individual, I am not in favor of using the force of law to dictate how other people live their lives or dictate to them what career choices they make.
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