Legalizing prostitution in the United States

I would like to introduce my point of view by first discussing the so-called "evils" of prostitution. Prostitution now, as ever, is not an uncommon thing in the world, particularly in the poorer regions of the world. Even the United States, with its amazingly high standard of living, has its share, as by itself the number of scandals involving them and politicians (remember Elliot Spitzer?) proves. Prostitution is an ugly thing - connected to human trafficking, often dominated by tyrannical and often abusive pimps, and fostering the spread of a number of nasty venereal diseases around the world. Obviously, anything that causes that amount of grief and trouble should be illegal, right? However, my argument is not that prostitution today is unproblematic - my argument centers around the idea that legalizing it will solve many of the problems it currently poses. *1: Prostitution is not uncommon even though it is currently illegal in most of the United States. As the DC Madam scandal and the Elliot Spitzer scandal prove, even in high social levels this practice is not unknown. The conclusion we can draw is that no matter how it tries, the government can't eliminate prostitution (on its own this point wouldn't stand, but combined with my other points we have a cohesive argument). *2: The main problem caused for most of society - STD spread - can be mitigated or even eliminated by lifting anti-prostitution laws from the law books. Prostitutes are hubs of STD spread, since they have sex with many, many different people. Currently, there is no real incentive for them to get STD checks (it would cost money, draw attention to them from law authorities, and scare customers) and even less for the their pimps. There is also little incentive and no way to enforce required STD protection for seeing a prostitute. However, if the government legalized it, they could require regular STD checks and protection and inspect brothels (legalization is not giving up all oversight), and there would be an incentive for prostitutes to obey these rules since they would no longer be in danger of arrest every time they did so, and would be in far greater danger if they did NOT comply. Thus, legalizing prostitution would actually decrease the spread of STDs, if done right. *3: Prostitutes tend to live in poor conditions (high class ones don't apply to this argument) and have miserable lives These poor conditions are the result, mainly, of the dominance of the pimp. The pimp, because he/she cannot be sued (without exposing the prostitute to legal proceedings) has a degree of power comparable to tyranny, and will often use this power to force the prostitutes to keep working even when they have every intention of quitting and to siphon money for themselves, to the detriment of the prostitutes. Legalization would solve this problem by providing brothels incentives to submit to government inspection and allowing prostitutes to sue tyrannical pimps without exposing themselves to legal action - breaking the power of the pimps. *4: Legalizing prostitution would decrease human trafficking. This argument is easy to make. If human-trafficking brothels compete against legal ones, and the legal ones (as overseen by the government) are safer and cleaner and possibly cheaper since they don't have to hide from the law all the time, illegal brothels will slowly die out since it'd be stupid to traffick when there are simpler and legal ways to achieve the same end, and the price charged by a trafficker would have to be limited by the market price for legal prostitutes (nobody would go to an illegal brothel over a legal one if it was more expensive as well). Thus, the incentive for trafficking would decrease, so the incidence of trafficking would decrease too. *5: Prostitution has no victims if all decisions are made freely by all parties. The prostitutes, if completely free (not the case today, but would be the case, as argued above, if legalized), obviously want to do it (or else they wouldn't, since they have a definite choice), as do the people they see. Third parties are not harmed or helped, so, since there are no victims, there should be no crime either. The people involved should deal with whatever consequences (broken marriage, shame in the face of friends, etc) in their own private lives, since they made the stupid decision. For the same reason, the government does not protect me from making other stupid mistakes. From a completely moral standpoint, victimless crimes should not be crimes, and prostitution is a prime example of that (If the government wants to discourage it, the solution is a prostitution tax, which would have the added benefit of raising revenue, as opposed to the current system, in which the government loses money).