As I was writing the essay on Law Enforcement a few chapters back, I realized that there was a topic that didn’t quite fit into that essay, but that needed to be covered: social vices with an economic component. Specifically, the drug trade and prostitution. They make up a large part of any black market, and if not properly dealt with would be one of the primary incentives for a black market to form in a technosocialist society. While the two fall into the same category and have a number of things in common, they are quite different in their impact on society and I’m going to be looking at them separately.
First: prostitution. Let’s start with a definition. Prostitution is the provision of sexual services in exchange for money. It has exisited in every culture throughout history, and condemned in most of them. There are a number of serious social problems connected with prostitution in our current culture, which have led many groups, particularly feminist organizations, to lead campaigns against prostitution in general. These problems include human trafficking, exploitation of children, and the forcing of women into prostitution through drug addictions or poverty. The key point that all of these problems have in common is not prostitution per se: it is sexual exploitation for the financial gain of others. What needs to be eliminated is not in fact the prostitution. It is the ability for others to make money from the prostitute’s work. Although they are likely a minority of sex workers, there are some people who simply enjoy sex and enjoy the fact that they can make quite a lot of money through sex. For these sex workers, it is a job that pays better than others and one they don’t mind doing.
This is where technosocialism has a definite advantage: it is not possible in a technosocialist economy for one person to earn Contribution credit for someone else’s work. There can be no incentive for human trafficking and similar exploitation when the pimp can earn nothing for the work of his prostitutes. And so long as sex work is limited to “individual contractors” as it were, working through the Skills Needed/Available system, and working solely for their own benefit, there is no reason that people should not be free to spend and earn their money in this way. Sex workers would be responsible for preventing the spread of disease and there would need to be measures in place to ensure the safety of all involved, but these measures would be far easier to enact with prostitution legal and open.
Now on to the issue of drugs. In this context, a drug is defined as any intoxicant or addictive substance used for recreational purposes. I am very deliberately not drawing a line between alcohol and the “hard” drugs. And while it’s going to seem strange to most people that someone who just condoned prostitution is going to condemn beer, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. And I’m going to start with a brief thought experiment: imagine two people. They both go out to a bar, and they both get drunk. They both decide to drive themselves home. One the way home, they both lose control of their cars in residential neighborhoods. But the street on which the first driver loses control is empty, while a small child happens to be crossing the street where the second driver loses control. The second driver strikes the child with his car and kills her.
Nearly every jurisdiction in the country would define what the second driver did as vehicular manslaughter, if not vehicular homicide. And most people would agree that the second driver is morally responsible for the death of the child. But as far as the choices made are concerned, the second driver did nothing that the first driver did not also do. Which one of them ended up guilty of killing a child was simply a matter of chance. Now, most people and most juristictions would agree that the first driver was guilty of Driving Under the Influence, and should be punished for that. But I would go one step further. I believe that the first driver was just as guilty of murder as the second driver.
By definition, intoxicants impair the user’s judgement. And I would argue that deliberate impairement of one’s own judgement is one of the least defensible actions there could be, because it contains within it the potential for all of the actions one might take while impaired that one would not otherwise take. In driving drunk, both drivers in the earlier example created the potential for a fatality. The fact that it actually happened in one circumstance and not the other should not matter in terms of the morality of their actions. Once they were impaired, they lost their ability to make good moral judgements, but that does not free them from the moral consequences of their actions. It simply means that that responsibility attaches not at the point where the car hit the child, but at the point when they impaired their judgement.
So what does this mean in terms of society’s treatment of intoxicants under technosocialism? History has shown us that simply making them illegal does not work. It instead creates a black market where gangsters get rich and innocent people often pay the price. What I propose instead is more or less the only tax to be found in a technosocialist society. Let’s take alcohol as an example. The negative impact of alcohol is calculated. This takes into acount every accident, every addict who requires rehabilitation, every medical bill caused, every tiny incident where alcohol damages society. This number is then divided up among all of the alcohol consumed in that society, and an appropriate tax per ounce of alcohol is applied. This means that in addition to the value that the Market sets for alcohol, purchasers will have an additional surcharge in the amount of the tax added to their Consumption scores. In this way, everyone who participates in the harm that alcohol causes to society has to pay for it equally, not merely those who are genetically or circumstantially unlikely.
This same model would apply to all intoxicants. The tax on methamphetamine would probably be much higher than the one on alcohol, because it is far more addictive and far more immediately detrimental to those who partake of it, and hopefully this much higher tax would proportionately disincentivise people from trying it. By keeping everything within the Market, a technosocialist society can prevent the unethical practices many modern drug dealers practice such as offering new customers a free dose in order to get them addicted or otherwise coercing them into becoming addicts. Those who do become addicted can enter treatment programs at any time without further cost to themselves, because there should never be barriers put in the way of those who wish to become sober.
The modern prohibition on many illegal drugs has served to make them extremely profitable for those willing to take the risk. The tax on intoxicants in a technosocialist society would apply to the producers of such intoxicants as well as to the consumers, hopefully keeping the profitability of such production fairly low. Meanwhile, keeping everything out in the open helps to ensure that the violent underworld of the current drug trade does not form. Depending on the amount of the tax, there may be those who attempt to take the drug trade back to the black market, but as covered in the chapter on crime in general this will be fairly difficult from a practical perspective. And while there is a legal option available, there will always be a price cap on black market drugs, because very few people would be willing to take the risk of illegal trading if they could get the same thing legally for anything close to the same price.
So there we have it: two fairly destructive social elements and how they might be better dealt with in a technosocialist society. I suspect that this might be one of the more controversial essays in this collection, and I encourage those who disagree with me not to hold this essay against my body of work as a whole. If this is not the way you would go about solving the problems presented by drugs and prostitution, what is? This, as all of these essays, is meant to be a conversation, and I encourage anyone with competing ideas to write them out and join in that conversation.