Philadelphia: Where women are still prostitutes and men are still innocent

It's not just the Mummers club. Apparently, it's really, really hard to get arrested for buying sex in Philadelphia—and really easy to get arrested for selling it. Our latest example is a bust at the Penthouse Club in Port Richmond, where seven dancers and one manager were arrested Friday night on prostitution charges.

And the johns? Off scot-free. Once again.

Some interesting details:

The investigation and subsequent raid by the LCE and the police Citywide Vice Unit had been prompted by community complaints, including those from the spouses of men who'd blown their family's grocery money at the club, said Sgt. Bill LaTorre of LCE. 

At the Penthouse Club, on Castor Avenue near Delaware, men would pay $300 for 30 minutes in the champagne room or $250 for a skybox, police said. There, guys could partake in any number of sexual acts with the dancers, including "the front door, the back door and the upstairs," LaTorre said. 

State Police did not immediately identify those arrested. LaTorre said the seven female dancers and one male manager were charged because they soliticted undercover officers, but he suggested more people could have been involved in prostitution.

I'm going to go ahead and say the men who blew their family's grocery money on sex at the Penthouse Club were involved in prostitution. None of them were arrested. Again.

Again, I'm not sure that prostitution should be a crime—and if it should be, the women who engage in prostitution are often its victims, not merely the perpetrators. But we should all be able to agree that you can't sell sex if nobody's buying. In case after Philadelphia case, though, the official stance is that it doesn't take two to criminally tango. It makes no sense.

I get the police perspective: It's harder to make the cases against the johns—undercover officers aren't necessarily privy to the transactions in which men buy the sex. But the pattern of enforcement in these big stings is that the men whose appetites create the crime are allowed to walk away free, while the women who are the objects of those appetites are burdened with arrests, criminal records, and social opprobrium. 

It's unfair. More than that, it's obscenely wrong.

LaTorre told the Daily News that police will probably doing a lot more of these strip club prostitution busts. If we continue to see these kinds of the stories in the news—where lots of women are arrested, but the johns never, ever are—there will be only one realistic conclusion: That Philadelphia police and prosecutors are happy to engage plainly sexist methods of enforcing the law.

Matt Yglesias on working hard for your riches

The old Calvinist idea about money, as I understood it, was that hard work, discipline, and prudence were moral virtues. They were also things that are more likely than not to lead to personal prosperity. So prosperity shouldn’t be stigmatized as ignoble, it should be rather seen as something likely to flow from virtuous behavior. But this equation assumes that morally speaking what matters is the hard work, the discipline, and the prudence. Cutting corners, lying, cheating, or stealing to make a quick buck doesn’t fit the bill. Earning a multi-million dollar salary to deliver below-average performance as the CEO of a firm and then take a multi-million dollar golden parachute when you get sacked doesn’t fit the bill. Spending your days and nights dreaming up smart regulatory arbitrage schemes doesn’t fit the bill. In terms of what it says about your personal virtue, if you’re going to earn your keep identifying and exploiting previously unknown loopholes in the legal framework, you may as well just go out and break the law.

There’s no particular honor and dignity in owning the copyright to Mickey Mouse or Batman, and then spending money lobbying congress for retroactive copyright extensions. A businessman who takes the ideas of initiative, hard work, and individual responsibility seriously would forget all about that nonsense. But the idea is aloft that business executives actually have a moral obligation to spend their days finding ways to engage in profit-maximizing rent-seeking and loophole exploiting. This kind of “you should make as much money as possible through any legal means necessary” spirit is toxic to the kind of ethos that’s made the various forms of modern industrial capitalism successful. Whether or not a person who gets in a car wreck gets free surgery (as in Canada) or merely surgery implicitly subsidized through the tax code (as in the USA) is neither here nor there. A well-designed welfare state is an excellent thing to have, but to have a culture that valorizes hard work you need to actually valorize hard work not just money-making.

via thinkprogress.org

Matthew Continetti tries to take a pass on income inequality

In the newest Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti makes the case that conservatives don't really have to care about income inequality—whether it's growing or not—because it's not government's job to address such issues. 

Inequalities of condition are a fact of life. Some people will always be poorer than others. So too, human altruism will always seek to alleviate the suffering of the destitute. There is a place for reasonable and prudent actions to improve well-being. But that does not mean the entire structure of our polity should be designed to achieve an egalitarian ideal. Such a goal is fantastic, utopian even, and one would think that the trillions of dollars the United States has spent in vain over the last 50 years to promote “equality as a fact and equality as a result” would give the egalitarians pause.

That sounds principled, and maybe even a little bit appealing if you're of the right temperament. But it fundamentally ignores one simple fact: By virtue of taxing and spending, and even of making laws, the federal and state governments have some bearing on how wealth is distributed in this country—even if they're not in redistributionist mode. 


To get a sense of how this might be the case, here is Derek Thompson's graph showing how various income groups would fare under Rick Perry's flat tax plan:

Perry's plan, in essence, would exacerbate inequality by raising taxes on the poor while giving millionaires a tax cut equal to the median income of 10 American households.

Now, I expect the conservative response to this is: "But that's their money, not the government's." Sure. But nobody except a few libertarians is advocating that we do away with taxes entirely, and that we stop paying for government at all. Until we get to that point, there will be taxes. And how taxes are structured will affect how wealth is distributed—even if affecting that distribution isn't the aim.

The laws and regulations formulated by government have a similar effect. During the pre-Reagan era, for example, the strength of unions was credited for raising income and living standards for the entire middle class—including non-union members, who enjoyed a spillover effect as non-union employers competed for workers. The decline of union strength over the last 30 years is believed to be one reason that middle class wages have stagnated during that time. Right now, though, there are efforts in several states—including my home state of Kansas—to further undermine the ability of private-sector unions to organize and advocate on behalf of their members. That, too, seems likely to affect the income inequality situation in the United States.

Now, I don't think it would be unreasonable to conclude from the above examples that many Republicans (and more than a few Democrats) tend to pursue policies that exacerbate inequality, often at the best of rich supporters. But there are clearly some conservatives—David Frum, Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam, Michael Gerson among them—who see inequality as a problem, and want the broader movement to do something to address it.

Not every conservative believes that rising income inequality exists, or that it's a problem. Continetti's point is different: That conservatives don't have to care about it, policy-wise, because such income inequality isn't the government's business. If conservatives believe that inequality is rising, and that it's a problem, then I imagine there are conservative paths to addressing the issue. It may not be the state's role to address income inequality (in the conservative vision) but that doesn't matter: The state affects the situation nonetheless. Conservatives who simply wash their hands of the situation signal where their real priorities lay.

Michael Gerson: Let's focus more on economic mobility than income inequality

Liberals are right that a combination of rising economic inequality (even if the rise is gradual) with stalled economic mobility is an invitation to destructive social resentments. Americans will accept unequal economic outcomes in a fair system. They object when the results seem rigged. That way lies the Bastille.

So the question comes to liberals and conservatives: If social mobility is the goal, what are the solutions? What can be done to improve the quality of teachers in failing schools, to confront the high school dropout crisis, to encourage college attendance and completion, to reduce teen pregnancy, to encourage stable marriages, to promote financial literacy, to spark entrepreneurship?

Both Democrats and Republicans should have something to contribute to the development of this agenda. Neither party, however, currently has much to say. And this is not likely to change until the discussion turns from equality to mobility.

via washingtonpost.com

Capitalism comes to Cuba, not with a bang but a whimper

For a half-century now, opponents of the Communist regime in Cuba have been waiting for the moment when it would all be over: Some event, probably Fidel Castro's death, would bring an end to his revolution—and suddenly Cuban exiles and American businesses would be setting up shop once again in Havana.

But with news that the regime is about to allow the buying and selling of real estate, it's worth asking the question: What if "the moment" never comes? Oh, Castro will die all right. But his brother is running the nation now, and he seems to be managing a careful—slow—movement away from socialism. What if the country simply evolves, instead of making a clean break?

It's been a long, long time since the U.S. embargo against Cuba—and our refusal to have diplomatic relations with the government—made sense. Those efforts didn't bring down the regime. (And our relationship with China pretty much undermines any philosophical reason we have for continuing the policy; it's simple geographic spite, aided by politician fears of the exile community.) At this point, the stiff-arm may be costing the United States both the political and economic opportunity to assist that country's evolution. And maybe Cuba is happy to proceed without perceived interference from the yanquis. But we may someday regret the lost opportunity, waiting for a moment that might never come.

What will the new poverty measures mean?

According to the New York Times, the poverty rate in America is about to fall—not because anybody's material circumstances have changed, but because the Census Bureau is adopting a "fuller" accounting of citizen well-being that looks beyond their cash income to also measure the government assistance they receive, as well as account for differences in costs-of-living for local areas. Here's the Times' chart giving an overview of the likely numerical changes:

I'm not sure how detailed the Census numbers will actually end up being: It would be nice if we could determine what percentage of the people who remain in poverty are employed, so that we have a sense of how many of these folks are "working poor"—that is, trying to provide for themselves, but unable to completely do so in the jobs they're able to obtain.

And as the Times notes: "Monday’s release are likely to offer fodder both to defenders of safety-net programs and fiscal conservatives who say the government already does much to temper hardship and needs to do no more." True. But more information will help—the debate should be based on detailed honest data, and not our worst ideological fears. (And that goes for both liberals and conservatives: If things are more hunky dory than we thought, we should focus our priorities and solutions accordingly.) On the surface, though, it looks like the liberals have something to crow about: The safety net really does save lots of people from poverty—which means our Great Recession hasn't been as devastatingly painful as it might otherwise have been.

That said, I'm not sure the Times frames the debate quite accurately: Conservatives aren't just arguing the government "needs to do no more"—many are arguing that government should do less, which seems to me like a recipe for disaster in this economy. Loosening the safety net probably won't grow the economy in any appreciable way, but it might devastate many lives. Republicans would help all of us if they focused less on contempt for the poor and a bit more on measures to give folks the way to earn their way up out of poverty—reducing the need for and strain on the safety net.

One more Max Boot comment today

Yes, it was the Bush Administration that signed the Status of Forces Agreement that is resulting in the United States pullout of Iraq. But Max Boot has a handy Obama-blaming response to that fact: Bush didn't really mean it:

As Condoleezza Rice notes, “when the Bush administration signed the agreement, it was understood by both the U.S. and Iraqi governments that there would be follow-up negotiations aimed at extending the deadline — a step that would be in both the U.S. and Iraqi interest.” 

Perhaps it really was impossible to reach an agreement on any extension, although I’m skeptical of that argument. But don’t cast the blame on Bush who’s been out of office for almost three years. The failure to renew the troop-basing agreement occurred on Obama’s watch and he will get the blame if Iraq falls apart (as well as the credit if it does not).

If the Bush Administration really thought the United States should stay in Iraq past 2011, one thing it might've done is negotiate a SOFA with a later deadline. It didn't. Once it put that deadline in place, the exiting of U.S. troops was always a possibility. Especially given that Iraq has a supposedly sovereign government that has increasingly itched to demonstrate its independence from the occupiers. Boot keeps acting as though the United States could've kept troops longer in Iraq if only Obama wanted it hard enough, but the legal and political boundaries—and I'm talking about the politics in both Iraq and the United States—are trickier than he suggests.

But I'm not sure why I bother to argue against Boot. He's fairly predictable at this point: Always for more, bigger, and longer war, and always dead-set on portraying the Obama Administration as weak and spineless.