One of the things that has really changed my thinking about an entire cluster of related questions, and informs this one, is a Bloomberg article from a law prof

One of the things that has really changed my thinking about an entire cluster of related questions, and informs this one, is a Bloomberg article from a law professor about a year and a half ago.[1] If you followed the link, skimmed through the article, and are now back at this comment going "what the hell are you talking about," go back to it and reread the first two paragraphs. It's really short, and it packs a punch, even if you're not a libertarian (I'm certainly not). If you don't want to click through: Don't support a law unless you accept that it will kill some of the perpetrators. A law needs to survive its collateral damage. It is always a strong, non-theoretical possibility that due to some law, and whatever dynamics are available at the time, that someone will die as a result of it. It just requires a pimp or prostitute (in this case) who is being apprehended to accidentally move in just the wrong way, show just the wrong disrespect, that some police officer thinks they're in imminent danger of being attacked or shot. And, are you going to be comfortable with it? The linked article points out that this is true in the case of Eric Garner's crime of selling loose cigarettes: nobody really thinks that this is something anyone should potentially die over. Similarly, I would say, for the act of selling one's body -- perhaps it might come with fines, to discourage it, but jail time seems insane. And one of the reasons is that it puts a threat on the lives of the women who are presumably already being trafficked. (The article contains a bunch of other gems from a book it recommends: for example if you're having the "I don't need privacy; I've done nothing wrong" thing, you can be like, "statistically according to this book there's a 70% chance you have -- you probably just don't know it yet. Have you read the 3,000+ federal laws and do you know the 300,000+ federal regulations to be sure of that?") [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-12-04/law-puts-us-all-in-same-danger-as-eric-garner http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-12-04/law-puts-u...