Oooops. Well I tried to post a photo ;vP
Posted on 09/15/2002 10:28:57 AM PDT by traditionalist
Let’s talk about the facts of life. It’s a fact of life that we have lost the war to control pornography. The war was over years ago when the Supreme Court ruled that porn was legal if it met community standards. Whatever Conservatives or American society in general wished to do about this growing wave of filth has been for naught. It’s saddening to admit, but it’s true.
During the Reagan administration, I was part of a nationwide effort to try to make a dent in the pornography industry. The FBI had hard evidence that organized crime (OC) had moved into the pornography industry, just as they had into gambling, prostitution and drugs. OC thrives on the vices of humans.
After a year-long undercover case that more than proved the OC connection to porn, we brought forward our indictments. At that time, the community standard that allows federal prosecutions for obscene material gave us the hammer to put away many OC thugs – even the Liberal Miami juries agreed that some of the material being sold was a bit over the top. We fined these sleaze merchants heavily and sent them to the slammer.
You know what? We didn’t even make a dent.
Today, that same kind of material is routinely displayed on hundreds of Internet websites advertising their wares in an effort to get you to pay a fee to “peek” inside. What’s inside must really be filthy, but if it isn’t considered child porn, it won’t be prosecuted. Eight years of Bill Clinton in the White House and Janet Reno in the Department of Justice guaranteed that every community standard in the nation has been lowered. Today, both federal and local prosecutions of routine porn are a lost cause.
Whatever objections we had as a society to this porn garbage are moot at this point.
Hundreds of billions of dollars are made each year on the “sales” of horrible things, images that most of us want to keep away not only from our children, but from our communities. We want to keep this material from finding its way into the very fabric of our society. Yet, there is an enormous appetite for this stuff – so much so that it’s obvious that the flow from producer to consumer cannot be controlled. Conservatives need to understand this. We have lost this war, but is there something positive that can come from this? Do we just “give up,” or is there some way we can curtail the amount of porn being produced?
You bet there is, and here’s the answer: Tax the living daylights out of it! Tax every part of it. Tax the consumers who want to look at it. Tax the “actors” – mostly women, and some men – who are making money being “models” for these porn sites. Tax every network that allows this human sewage to flow through their switches, cables, phone lines – tax any entity that makes it easy for this material to go from camera lens to your living room where little Johnny can see it while you’re out at the grocery store.
Call it a Porn Tax.
Tax them federally, and tax them at the state level as well. Tax them county and tax them local. Tax them until it hurts, and tax them until they scream. Then, tax them right out of business.
Impossible you say? Wait a minute! Isn’t this the reasoning behind the tax on cigarettes? Cigarettes are considered to be a threat to the well being of humans. Is filthy pornography less of a threat to the minds and emotional well-being of humans?
We also tax alcohol heavily, reasoning that a heavy tax keeps the prices up, and thus, maybe out of the hands of too many drunks. As a society, we recognize that booze is not the best way to have a good time, but we acknowledge that it cannot be stopped, so we heavily regulate it, and we tax the grapes out of it!
Why does porn get a pass?
Regulating and taxing cigarettes is not a signal that society approves of the production, distribution and use of tobacco products – just the opposite is true. Our society has begun to frown on the use of cigarettes and has outlawed their use in many public places, including restaurants and bars in some states, yet we throw up our hands and claim impotence in our efforts to control porn. We can’t even keep it out of our public libraries! It seems we are unable to think of any solution, so we do nothing.
From now on, unless we have some kind of revolution or the installation of a dictator who has the power to chop off the hands of those who possess or produce porn, it’s here, and it’s widely available. Get over it! Sure you can regret that we cannot control this. Of course, you can do your best to keep it out of your life. I’m not saying we should give any indication at all that we accept this horrible environment that has been thrust upon us.
Most of us hate this deep injury to our civility. The least we can do is think of some way to lessen it.
Let’s face another fact: women are ill-served by allowing themselves to be filmed while performing the most intimate of activities, but they sure aren’t victims! There are thousands of them, maybe hundreds of thousands of women, young and old, who for some reason think it’s just fine to be a part of this scourge.
Being ill-served and engaging in harmful, risky activity has never stopped prostitutes from doing what they do. Obvious facts about the dangers are not going to stop the actors and actresses from appearing in porn flicks. But, we can lay on a heavy financial burden, just like we tax anyone else who’s engaged in a high profit enterprise. Maybe fewer will be available if we make it tough enough. Let’s take away the financial benefit.
At a time when government officials are pulling out all the stops to dream up taxes and penalties that honest, hardworking, decent citizens must pay, this idea seems like a no-brainer. If they can put cameras on tops of poles to catch those who run red lights, don’t tell me they can’t figure out how to tax porn and all who benefit from it.
Let’s tax porn back into the dark alley where it belongs.
FF578 writes: Prohibition would have worked if we made possession a Capital Offense. We need to do the same for Drug Possession today. Along with Homosexuality, Blasphemy, Fornication, Adultery and Pornography. 48
Zon: That's a keeper that will serve well to discredit you and further show you as a raving lunatic. Thank you. 58
I don't like Sports, Alcohol-Drinkers, People With Loud Voices, the Over-weight, or Religion. Can we Come to Some Kind of Deal?
Maybe my Executioners can Work on Sunday Through Tuesday and Yours Can work from Wednesday Through Saturday?!?
Legalizing something won't do away with organized crime (they will move onto something else) and just because organized crime is involved in pornography doesn't mean that all porn is a conduit to organized crime. They operate a number of legal enterprises to invest their capital and to operate as front organizations for money laundering.
This is why RICCO permits the seizure of businesses that were built with the profits of illegal racketeering even if they are operating above board. Seizing the assest is also an attempt to keep the defendents from paying for a costly attorney.
Oooops. Well I tried to post a photo ;vP
can you imagine the squeal from Time Warner and HBO ?
Someone estimated that it was only a few days after the movie camera was invented that someone was convinced to perform a sex act for it.
There were "French postcards", "Tijuana Bibles"/"8-pagers", white-label "party records" sold under the counter, "Adults Only" exploitation films, smokers, stag reels, "limited edition book clubs" that mailed their novels in a plain brown wrapper, etc. Prostitution is called "the world's oldest profession". What is different is that it is all out in the open now and young children are confronted with it every day.
OC's market niche is in being better able to provide products and services than independent operators. They accomplish this by infiltrating/corrupting law enforcement and intimidating community activists.
Where products and services can be offered without harrassment from law enforcement or community activists, OC has no competitive advantage. You never hear about OC involvement in the regular movie industry. Why? Because if they try to lean on a regular movie producer, the producer can complain to the FBI or police, and get protection
On the flip side, an independent strip-club operator can get lots of harrassment from community activists, and be able to do nothing about it. But the community-activist leader will stop the picketing when local OC tells him it would contribute to his long-term health (assuming he wasn't on the OC payroll all along, as part of the push to convince the independent to sell to the "family")
"No person, group of persons, or government may initiate force, threat of force, or fraud against any individual's self or property.""The Constitution of the Universe"??? Good grief man, please tell us that you don't actually subscribe to such nonsense. I don't know how people can post something like that and still keep a straight face.
How would someone violate article I by masturbating in public? How would someone violate article I by operating an open and notorious whorehouse next to an elementary school? Is that really your idea of a utopian society? Got answers?
Regards,
Boot Hill
And I'll say it again, real slow, just for you: Pass all the laws you want, but you can't legislate morality...
Keep repeating an inane and self-contradictory saying, and it remains an inane and self-contradictory saying.
For your line of reasoning to be valid, you would have to prove that the passing of a law never changed anyone's behavior, never made them reconsider their morality or their actions, and never reformed public behavior in the slightest. This is manifestly untrue.
Sure, in many cases legislating morality does not work, because the legislation itself is a bad idea, especially when overwhelming numbers of people do not agree with it. This was the case with alcohol prohibition, for example.
In other cases, legislation not merely reflects the dominant views of society, it also transforms the views of society, and educates those who might otherwise have not agreed or not have understood the need for the legislation in question.
The State is every bit as much a moral educator as the Church or any other actor in society. And when the State is corrupt, so too its laws. You cannot pretend that the laws have no effect on the moral education of the people, or that laws only reflect what people already believe without influencing their behavior. There is controversy over every law precisely because the law is an influence on society, for good or ill.
Every law is an act of legislating morality. Only in a truly corrupt, decadent, and immoral age could so many people lose all understanding of the moral import of the laws - a basic theme of all thought concerning society since before recorded history, and a major theme of Western thought going back to Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates. They for one would have laughed uproariously at the notion that "you can't legislate morality", and would have assumed, rightly, that the person making such a claim was morally and intellectually blinkered, and was trying to put beyond public debate political questions he preferred not to have debated publicly.
I've seen few more idiotic posts than this.
I am not sure why you think that is an idiotic post? Is it because of the use of the word "us" - that is, "us" as in freepers posters? Or "us" as the conservative community"? Or "us" as Americans? Personally I doubt it is a hundred billion dollar industry - but it is an industry that makes money from lots and lots and lots of people, not lots of money from a few people.
Obviously the existence of utilitarianism and pragmatism, as well as the individual "pursuit of happiness" so long as you do not materially harm anyone else has never crossed your radar.
Oh but it has, many times. I used to think that way myself.
But it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to believe that there is some kind of hermetic seal between a mythical "self-sufficient individual" and the rest of society. And it is becoming increasingly clear to me that lines of thinking which declare "society does not exist" are a kind of cultural Bolshevism that are every bit as destructive of society as the Marxist variety. If the libertine line of reasoning were truly valid, we should not have seen so many disasterous results from the destruction of traditional Western values and norms.
Of course I am sympathetic to small, limited government. But small, limited governments work best with a moral society of individuals who do not think of themselves as social atoms who can do whatever they want with impunity because they do not believe their actions have any effect on others. Small government works best with a moral society which is not afraid to enforce its values, with laws as well as with customs.
It is no accident that moral corruption and Big Government go hand-in-hand; the two feed off each other. This is the one fact the libertines fail to grasp. They also fail to demonstrate how a society is supposed to reform itself without resort to the State or its laws.
The best mere "voluntary action" can hope for in a libertine notion of politics is to create pockets of resistance, powerless to affect or reform an increasingly corrupt State, and thus ultimately doomed to be swept aside by those who are not afraid to use the State for their own purposes. This is an inevitable result of the rejection of politics, and is indicative of why conservatives and libertarians so consistently lose ground politically, in spite of many aparent political victories (that ultimately prove to be illusory).
Unfortunately the social and political thinking and writings that are at the core of Western values and traditions are a closed book to most who take the libertine line of reasoning at face value. They simply are not aware that these things exist. And thus Western Civilization passes away, for wont of enough people who are consciously aware of the need to perpetuate it, and who are aware of the means of doing so.
Sadly, I think the Russians would just step in to fill the gap. They take Amex, Visa, MC, etc. now. Just all happy capitalists. The only way to shut it down would be to try to do what the Chinese govenment does. And that really would be the only way to do it.
What I think most people are upset about and which is very destructive of our culture is acts relating to sex which have traditionally been defined as "obscene."
I don't have any problem with making depictions of these acts illegal using a national, rather than community, standards.
And obscenity is not, nor has it ever been, protected by the First Amendment.
For example, I believe that our current "war on drugs" is insane, and certain parts of it (asset seizure, for instance) are invitations to corruption and abuse of power. I also would not reject all calls for legalization of some drugs, or for legalization of prostitution or pornography, in certain circumstances.
What I object to is the absolutist notion that what an individual does to himself has no effect on others, and therefore should not be subject to legislation, and that the State and the laws have no role in the moral education of the people
Such a line of reasoning leads to where we are today, and where we are going tomorrow, if it is not reversed.
This absolutist thinking is derived from a desire by libertarians to put certain political questions "beyond the bounds of acceptable political debate" - in other words, to trump and to silence those who do not agree with them.
Libertarians and conservatives would get along together if we could get over this tendency to try to avoid politics by "trumping" the opposition with absolutist stances on what are in fact political questions validly open to public debate.
The founding fathers never imagined that their attempts to place rational limits on the powers of government would be taken to an extreme whereby the moral and social efficacy of the State would be rejected out of hand.
I believe that questions of personal morality - drugs, abortion, prostitution, pornography, etc - are genuine political questions that need to be addressed, not mere personal matters which are beyond the bounds of politics. I think that we may very well find in some cases that a libertarian solution to a particular political question might be the best solution - but only if this is decided in a genuine political process, whereby the libertarians convince a majority that they are right.
Doing an end-run around politics by declaring certain issues to be "personal" and therefore off limits, is no different from the way that liberals have misused the Supreme Court to do an end-run around legitimate democratic politics, to get what they wanted but were not willing to defend in public debate.
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