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New Hampshire legislators last week debated the merits of decriminalizing prostitution, in response to a bipartisan bill filed by state Reps. Amanda Bouldin (D-Hillsborough), Carole McGuire (R-Merrimack), and Elizabeth Edwards (D-Hillsborough). 

On Thursday, January 28, the New Hampshire Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee held a hearing on House Bill 1614, which removes all criminal penalties for “consensual sex between consenting adults” whether money is exchanged or not while making “any solicitation of sexual contact involving a person under 18 years of age or through the use of force or intimidation a felony.” 

“We put forward this bill in response to Amnesty International’s August 2015 recommendation that governments across the world decriminalize prostitution,” said Edwards at a press conference before the hearing. “Amnesty International studied the issue for two years prior to the their recommendation,” and their view is in line with the World Health Organization, the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women, Human Rights Watch, the Open Society Foundations, Anti-Slavery International, and other global human-rights groups.  

The New Hampshire bill is supported by U.S sex-worker rights groups such as Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE) Rhode Island, the U.S. PROStitutes Collective, and the Erotic Service Providers Legal Education and Research Project (ESPLERP), the group behind a lawsuit seeking to decriminalize prostitution in California. “This is groundbreaking,” said ESPLERP President Maxine Doogan. “The criminalization of prostitution is a failed policy. The ‘War on Sex’ hasn’t stopped anyone from buying or selling sex, but it has caused a lot of collateral damage, to poor women, women of color, and trans women. It’s about time that the government stopped intervening in what consenting adults do in private.”

COYOTE RI Executive Director Bella Robinson, who has been a sex worker for more than 30 years, testified before the New Hampshire committee in favor of the decriminalization bill. “The main reason I want to see prostitution decriminalized is because it is the only harm reduction model proven to reduce violence and exploitation in the sex industry,” she said in a pre-testimony statement.

“It is crucial that sex workers can work together and share work space to ensure their safety,” added Robinson, and “many sex workers utilize third party support staff to help keep them safe.” But under current U.S. laws, these people “are legally classified as traffickers.” 

To back up their positions, Doogan and Robinson point to research showing positive results in New Zealand since it decriminalized the sex trade in 2003. (Robinson explains more about New Zealand in the video below.)

But at the New Hampshire bill’s initial hearing, several lawmakers were skeptical. Rep. John Martin (R-Merrimack) worried that high-school football players would move from “having a keg party after a victory to having a hooker party after a victory.”

Rep. Edwards responded by pointing out that sex between adults and minors would still be illegal, no matter the gender of the minors. 

Rep. Dick Marston (R-Hillsborough) opposes the bill and is surprised by its introduction from female legislators, demanding they answer for the fact that some married men might cheat with sex workers. “I think I have a good handle on how my wife would feel if I used the services of a sex … prostitute,” Rep. Marston said at the committee hearing, “how my wife would feel, and how many other women would feel when their husbands do that. [The bill] doesn’t say that this is only good for as long as you’re doing it with an unmarried man. I just have a problem with this bill from a woman’s point of view.” 

“You probably should not go see a prostitute, it would make your wife unhappy, I agree with that,” responded Rep. Edwards. “But people [have sex] outside of marriage right now. … It’s not like having a law that requires us to arrest sex workers means that everyone is faithful in their marriage.” 

Today’s Google doodle is an image of Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became one of the most eloquent and influential abolitionists in American history. The doodle signals the start of Black History Month, which grew out of earlier traditions such as “Negro History Week” and offers a period of intensive reflection on the contributions of blacks to the history of the United States while also reminding the country of the historical realities of slavery and other unspeakable ills pushed on African Americans due to de facto and de jure racism.

Douglass, who was believed to have been born in February, 1818 is of special interest to libertarians for many reasons. As Damon Root has written for Reason, Douglass was a true classical liberal who believed in individualism, strong property rights, and voluntary philanthropy as the best way to create a free, prosperous, and inclusive society. From a 2012 review of Nicholas Buccola’s The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass:

“Douglass’s arguments against slavery are, in a very important sense, arguments for liberalism,” writes Linfield College political scientist Nicholas Buccola in The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass, his engaging new study of the great abolitionist. Taking seriously Douglass’ dual commitment to both a “robust conception of mutual responsibility” and “the ideas of universal self-ownership, natural rights, limited government, and an ethos of self-reliance,” Buccola offers a nuanced portrait that illuminates both Douglass and his place in American intellectual history….

Buccola notes, “throughout his development as a political thinker, Douglass was presented with a series of ideological alternatives,” including the pacifist anarchism of Garrison, who said the only government he recognized was the “government of God,” and the utopian socialism of John A. Collins, general director of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, who believed “that private property was the root of all evil.” Douglass, Buccola observes, “consistently rejected these in favor of liberalism.”

Socialism was then becoming particularly attractive to many New England reformers. Yet Douglass rejected the socialist case against private land ownership, saying “it is [man’s] duty to possess it—and to possess it in that way in which its energies and properties can be made most useful to the human family.” He routinely preached the virtues of property rights. “So far from being a sin to accumulate property, it is the plain duty of every man to lay up something for the future,” he told a black crowd in Rochester, New York in 1885. “I am for making the best of both worlds and making the best of this world first, because it comes first.” As Douglass’ glowing description of his first paying job indicated, he also considered economic liberty an essential aspect of human freedom….

Read the full article here.

In my opinion, Douglass’ 1852 speech “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” is one of the greatest texts in American literature, which simultaneously enacts what is these days lazily called “American exceptionalism” while critiquing it. Douglass exemplifies the tradition of critiquing the country’s laws and customs by examining them in light of rarely attained but always articulated ideals of equality:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

More here.

The three editions of Douglass’ autobiography (most Americans know the first one) are phenomenal testaments both to the ideals of American freedom and the ways that ideal has rarely come close to being realized. Perhaps most important, he offered up a critique of the country’s history, customs, and laws but also personified and argued for a way forward in which all Americans would both be more free and able to transcend the awful indignities and crimes of the past.

For more Reason on Douglass, go here.

Iowa will caucus tonight, and Beltway reporters (myself included) are busy bringing you all the analysis you can handle. But it bears repeating—repeatedly—that actually, what happens in Iowa often stays there.

This is one of the least politically correct things a person can say. Early last year, Republican strategist Liz Mair lost her job for having tweeted, months earlier, disparaging comments about the state.

Nonetheless, it’s indisputable that Iowa’s track record of choosing the eventual winner of the GOP nomination is poor at best. Of course, the purpose of the cacuses is not to predict who will win; it’s for Iowans to make their voices heard and to contribute to the nominating process. But to the extent people try to make sweeping conclusions about who’s most likely to come out on top based on what happens today, they’re grasping at straws. Let us recap.

In 2012, this was the winner of Iowa’s Republican caucuses:

And this was the person who actually won the nomination:

In 2008, this was the winner of Iowa’s Republican caucuses:

And this was the person who actually won the nomination:

Iowa Republicans also picked the wrong victor in 1988, when Bob Dole beat the sitting vice president there, and in 1980, when George H.W. Bush defeated Ronald Reagan in the Hawkeye State.

Things are, I concede, somewhat better on the Democratic side, where Iowa voters picked Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in 2008, John Kerry in 2004, and Al Gore in 2000. But if you look back as far as 1992, you’ll find that future president Bill Clinton received less than 3 percent of the vote in the state that year. And four years before that, eventual nominee Michael Dukakis came in just third.

It’s absolutely possible that the people who win both sets of caucuses tonight will go on to be their respective parties’ nominees. But if that happens, it will be overwhelmingly a matter of chance. Iowans’ votes matter in the sense that they will determine who their state’s delegates go to. And doing poorly in an early state like Iowa is often the impetus a struggling candidate needs to to call it quits (and in some cases to throw his or her support behind a rival). But winning Iowa is far from determinative of the final nomination outcome. And that’s just a plain fact.

Recently the ridesharing company Lyft, Uber’s largest competitor, settled a pending lawsuit for $12.25 million. Lyft can continue to classify its drivers as independent contractors—a designation that is crucial to the sharing economy’s success. But the settlement may lead to additional difficulties for other sharing-economy companies.

Jared Meyer of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research explains why labor regulators should resist the urge to force 21st century sharing-economy companies to treat their employees like traditional 20th century workplaces.

View this article.