In short, the sex tax does not work as a marginal disincentive, and one should be able to calculate the "crime tax" that results from this failure. That is, on average, what is the cost in crime?
End the Sex Tax, Stirling Newberry
What is wrong about this last paragraph is precisely what is wrong with conventional Catholic sexual morality: it pretends that the morality of an act can be evaluated separately from its actual earthly consequences.
Cheap Sex, The Raving Atheist
These two interesting articles take different approaches to seeing sex in economic terms. Not the in sense of "why buy the cow when she gives the milk away for free?" That degrading old metaphor just suggests that somehow the cost of marriage is related to the market forces which price prostitution. No, these are rather more serious investigations of the morality of social policy.
Newberry observes that the various legislative measures that anti-sex conservatives support act as a kind of tax on sex, at least to the extent that they are meant to deter people from what comes naturally. Criminalization of abortion, restricted access to contraception, and less-than-useless abstinence-only health education programs are all geared solely to increase the "cost" of sex. Ironically we may be paying a higher price not only in the penalty that is also "the payoff that hundreds of millions of years of sexual reproductive biology aims at," but also in crime. Unwanted pregnancies for some equals higher crime for all. Go figure.
Raving Atheist tackles the root issue headfirst. If in fact the normal "cost" of sex has been dropping -- in terms of health, lifestyle and emotional dangers -- what exactly is it that makes it "bad?" Right wingers know that condemning something as evil require evidence; why else would they tout risible fringe studies showing all the various bad effects of promiscuity and especially (gasp) homosexuality? And yet we allow the conservatives to win elections hyping sexual issues.
We are all descended from a long line of ancestors with well-developed sex drives. Sex is not only safe if practiced carefully, but it's a vitally important part of the psychological well being of adult human beings. It's time to tell the conservative sex police what they can do to themselves.
- jack*
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