Resolved: Prostitution should be legalized

Apologies for the delay - I have been busy with other stuff. Thanks for an interesting debate so far.A quick note on the resolutionMy opponent seems to assume that since I'm defending prostitution being legalised, I can't be defending that it should be regulated. This is a non-sequiter. In fact I'm defending the legalisation of prostitution in order that it might be regulated. If my opponent agrees a regulated industry is better than an unregulated one, he must also agree that this industry should be legal. Regulation is a positive outcome of following my model, which is both to legalise and to regulate, even though I need to defend only one of those two things in the debate. You need to legalise prostitution in order to regulate it. In fact, every single country in the world with legal prostitution also has regulations for prostitution as well as more general labor protections that are extended to prostitutes.Prostitution will still happenFor the first time in this debate, we've just heard my opponent contest that making prostitution legal does not mean more people do it. His argument is essentially that we can't all be as good as New Zealand. While I'm going to have to admit New Zealand is pretty damn awesome, I can assure you that our awesomeness derives from things other than prostitution. Our experiences with prostitution can therefore be said to be quite representative. To prove this point, my opponent needed to identify how we are (or were) different with respect to prostitution to other countries around the world.I think my opponent might still be confused about how this argument fits into my case. To ensure safety and the role of state being fulfilled, we could either stop prostitution or legalise it. My argument here is only that you can't stop prostitution - it will still happen.SafetyIf never being safe due to the nature of work was a justifiable reason for banning anything, we should ban everything. Every profession carries some degree of risk, be it mining, fishing, agriculture, banking, truck driving, serving in the army, or anything else. Governments have a certain obligation to help people minimise the risk where this is possible. They do so in every legal industry.Moving on to the argument that prostitution cannot be distinguished from crime. My opponent reasons that in prostitution one party may be dissatisfied. This is true, but it is not inherent to prostitution. The difference is that with prostitution, as with any willing transaction, you can generally assume that both parties were happy, whilst with crime you can generally assume the opposite.My opponent argues that nobody is safe. While this is true, prostitutes are particularly vulnerable because unlike everyone else, they can't go to the police if something bad happens to them. The law is there to protect everyone - except, apparently, prostitutes. There are a number of other reasons why prostitutes are particularly vulnerable, which I have already described.Finally my opponent says there is no evidence that legalising soft crimes can prevent harder crimes. First, to make this point you need to engage with my evidence from round two, which was a fair amount of causal links. Second, there is empirical evidence for this as well. There is indirect evidence from alcohol prohibition (http://www.liberator.net...) and statistically based on prostitution data (http://www.kuro5hin.org...).Role of StateI am well aware pornography is linked to human trafficking. I chose it quite deliberately. Loads of industries are linked to trafficking. Even having a non-open border is strongly linked to human trafficking. My point is that a vague link to human trafficking is not sufficient to make prostitution illegal any more than pornography is illegal or all borders should be open. The point is that the government can't say sex and money are allowed to mix in one industry and not in another, because that's inconsistent.The point about money wasn't to say money is good and everything involving it should be legalised. It was to establish that both pornography and prostitution share the same basic elements, with the sole exception of physical contact (which ought really to increase, not reduce, the state's obligation if anything).I know that your government thinks pornography is OK. Perhaps there might be an argument for those countries where it is illegal, such as those with Sharia law, but for countries where the government has already accepted pornography is moral (which is almost all of them), they also need to accept prostitution is moral. People can, for instance, choose to disagree with the state about when they're ready to go into the pornography business. Such people are thrown in jail for good reason.If you steal from a bank - even if you do it in secret - it's the bank's business. Therefore it's not a privacy issue. The difference between a bank and a prostitute is that the bank is a public institution. Others are affected if that money is lost. If I'd stolen a trade secret from a bank told to me in private, then that might be a privacy issue in that privacy has been breached - competitors can come into the private space of the firm. Getting others out is different from getting the government out. The government needs to control others to prevent them from interfering with our private affairs - and prevent us from interfering with others - if we are all willing. This is the principle on which privacy law is founded.Human TraffickingMy opponent thinks you can make money through human trafficking. This can only possibly be economically true if there is excess demand for prostitutes. You can't reduce demand in the local economy, nor can you change supply overall, as proved by my first point. What you can do is increase local supply to meet local demand and therefore make trafficking more expensive. So the reason why you can make money off trafficking is that prostitution is illegal, not that it's legal. Either way trafficking should be kept illegal.If prostitution is illegal, police need to find and discover underground networks to trace back who did the smuggling. Traffickers themselves are caught much more rarely than people who are trafficked, and it's because they're able to keep their identity a secret as the prostitutes (who are usually more than willing to identify them) are all thrown into jail and not listened to. Once again, prostitutes are the victims here! They're not the criminals we should be catching. They should be testifying against these awful people instead. If a prostitute comes up to the police and says "I think trafficking is going on here", then the police has the co-operation of that prostitute, rather than the prostitute deliberately working against the police to escape conviction. As con has already proved, prostitutes don't like being trafficked, so they'll always help the police out. I should add, though, that police can already question anybody about their work if they think a crime is going on.My opponent admits the problem is much wider than prostitution. The obvious solution is to stop blaming the prostitutes and keeping their profession illegal, but instead tackling the bigger issue.The solution is absolutely to legalise something if keeping it illegal is causing a massive harm, which it is. With stealing we accept that being a Robin Hood is something that makes you an outlaw, although there are situations in which it is actually legal to steal (taxes, for instance). We just ban it when it creates big harms. Prostitution can be good - and why make a good thing illegal when you can make just the bad part illegal?I look forward to our final round.