The State Has Its Head (by Megan McArdle - The Atlantic Monthly)

This actually makes me feel physically sick. The DC Madam has killed herself.

Pardon me while I rant a bit.

First, I will just outsource the invidious comparisons to Ezra Klein:

DC Madam who ran a prostitution ring? Shamed, sentence to decades in prison, and now dead by apparent suicide.
David Vitter, Republican Senator who used said prostitution ring? Still a US Senator.

Now onto the fact that this woman was hounded into prison, broken, and driven to take her own life by a state intent upon ruining this woman for . . . arranging a sexual transaction between two consenting adults.

For this, we have law enforcement? Are there no more rapists roaming our streets? Have murders ceased to be a problem in this fair land, this shining city on a hill? Did all the burglars join Criminals Anonymous? Have the drunk drivers decided to binge only in the comfort of their own living room? Has embezzling stopped? Are the human filth who mug old ladies all safely behind bars? Do no boiler room scams still lurk in the nation's seedier industrial parks? Because, you know, even if I thought prostitution should be illegal . . . well, chaps, I'd put it on the goddamn back burner until all the crimes involving thugs attacking, defrauding, or stealing from innocent, non-consenting citizens had been solved.

To be fair, no one's tried to mug me for several months. But I hear that there are still a few small matters right here in our nation's capital that should be cleared up before we can, in good conscience, turn to the important task of preventing women from demanding cash for something other women only do for fun. Love the Madonna, hate the Whore?

Was "saving" women from prostitution so important that we needed to make a woman's life no longer worth living? Do we really need to kill the women in order to save them? Because last time I heard, we thought it was kind of awful when the Taliban did those things