Right.. It’s either illegal or its not. Plus, there are a lot more johns than there are prostitutes, so if you are going to use the gov’t to stop prostitution, you will get much better results focusing on the prostitutes since there are fewer of them and they are easy to find.
That being said, I don’t think it should be illegal at all.
The government doesn’t want to stop it, they want to tax it (through fines assessed as punishment after the men are arrested).
And it will be very easy to pass more laws to jack the fines way up to increase revenue. Who is going to care that the customers of prostitutes are getting gouged by the State? Same deal as smokers - the State is just expanding that same philosophy into another sector of the legal economy.