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Comment by aurea | Hacker News Reader

> Why does the state have a role to play in a transaction between two consenting adults?

What are you advocating here? There are many transactions in which modern states interfere that are between consenting adults. In countries with minimal wage you could consent to being paid below it, but it would remain illegal. You can consent to being scammed in a transaction, but it remains illegal. Etc. These interference are meant to protect citizens. Just because the transaction would involve a sexual exchange doesn’t mean it’s any different.

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I believe the difference is in both of your examples, the “victim” wouldn’t be committing a crime. Imagine if employees were jailed for accepting sub minimum wage, rather than just the employer.

That's just an historical artifact, and in some countries it's changing - now the clients get arrested instead of sex workers.

What are they being protected from? Immorality?

A lot of the dangers to sex workers is because of these protections forcing them to go underground and work with shady exploitative dealers and trafficking.

> A lot of the dangers to sex workers is because of these protections forcing them to go underground and work with shady exploitative dealers and trafficking.

This is the older viewpoint. The newer one is that no one would consensually agree to sex work unless they were coerced. I am not in a position to opine on that viewpoint, but if it's true, then every sex worker is being exploited regardless of any laws or regulations.

If you asked most people they'd rather be able to live without having to do their primary employment, even if they don't mind their job. I'd say that's being coerced too, and sex work just sounds like any other job by that definition.

"No one would consensually agree to [insert other menial job here] unless they were coerced."

It can be a relatively well paid job too.

I can't speak for everyone or everywhere, but we definitely have documentries in the UK where women claim to do sex work because it afford them a specific lifestyle and they'd rather be there than a supermarket.

In fact, I've met such woman and the suger baby approach is fairly popular with students nowadays. They're not doing it for basic food and warth, they're doing it for chanel and gucci.

I'm not sure that moralising their ability to consent away from them is the right thing to do, but it's also probably true that cost of living rises and advertising budgets have contributed to this.

> If you asked most people they'd rather be able to live without having to do their primary employment, even if they don't mind their job. I'd say that's being coerced too, and sex work just sounds like any other job by that definition.

Making children work in a factory, forcing slaves to work under threat of violence, or even paying consenting adults to work grueling hours in dangerous jobs without medical recourse is bad. Paying employees to do something that's menial or boring is not.

The standards of what is acceptable or not certainly change over time, but conflating coercion and acceptable remuneration is a silly equivocation.

Good point, but I would guess sex work is not a menial job by a long shot. Being good at it probably requires more social skills than most jobs. If you meant lacking prestige, then yes, in some peoples eyes.

Well, same can be said about practically any job. Or do people clean and fry burgers just out of pleasure?

The newer newer viewpoint is to support sex workers in self-determination and labor organizing.

Edited to add that this is discussed explicitly in the article, as it mentions for instance the migrant sex worker collective Red Canary Song.

I don’t know much about this topic, but I would guess that it’s the structure of society doing most of the coercing in most cases. Which the government has at least some power to fix via improved social safety net programs.

Trafficking increases rather than decreases in jurisdictions with legalized prostitution.

How is that measured? I would think it would be rather hard to measure an activity that is illegal and clandestine.

Also 'trafficking' is a term that needs a precise definition as it means different things to different people.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1986065

Isn't an increase in the reported amount of trafficking to be expected in legalization? Legalization means that they have to worry less about being criminalized while reporting being a victim of crime.

If it wasn't clear from my initial argument, I am very strongly opposed to the minimum wage (with an important caveat). I also stated that I believe there is a role for the state in ensuring a reasonable standard of consent. So in regards to being scammed, I think it's entirely reasonable for the state to impose hurdles to ensure that individuals transacting are made fully aware of the terms and consequences. Likewise, with minimum wage, there is a point of desperation where a person's back is up against a wall, where they have no options and can be essentially coerced into exploitative rates for their services. Here, too, I believe that there is a role for the state in ensuring that consent is practically employed. I generally favor some level of UBI, rather than minimum wage laws, in terms of giving people the level of stability necessary to start acting outside of immediate survival pressures.

When you have minimum wage, the person being paid sub-minimum wage is no longer paid at all.

That is hardly an improvement.

The available evidence suggests that that's much less true than the obvious Economics 101 arguments would suggest. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Empirical_studies for some pointers.

Obviously if you raise the minimum wage high enough then it's going to hurt employment. But it seems like it has to be quite high before it hurts employment much, and in particular it seems that "everyone who would otherwise have been paid less than the minimum wage just loses their job" is a really inaccurate model.

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