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Kirk - Contributor
Richard Kirk
is a freelance writer who lives in Oceanside, California. E-mail
him at kirkrg@peoplepc.com
[go to Kirk index]
 Progress,
Prostitution And Unemployment Benefits
Germany’s progressive labor laws…
[Richard
Kirk] 2/14/05
"No matter how bad you think things are, when you really look
into them, they’re always a lot worse." So goes M.
Stanton Evans’ Law of Inadequate Paranoia. It’s a
dour principle that clearly applies to the following news item:
In
the enlightened and peaceful land of Germany unemployed
workers who refuse
jobs in the "sexual services" industry now
face the prospect of having their benefits cut by the government. (This isn’t Sally Bowles’ Weimar Republic we’re
talking about. It’s Gerhard Schroeder’s Bundesrepublik.)
Two years ago Deutschland "reformers" legalized prostitution,
thus bringing a once-shady part of the nation’s leisure
industry into the bright light of employment law. The other side
of this progressive coin was that taxpaying brothel owners officially
became part of the benefits system. Combine these facts with
a law requiring persons unemployed for more than a year to take
any legitimate job offered to them, and you get the potential
dilemma that faces minimally attractive out-of-work Berliners:
your benefits or your integrity.
As luck would have it, many Europeans no longer know the meaning
of the latter term--a stroke of linguistic and historical fortune
they share with growing numbers of Americans. For sophisticates
on the continent and Hollywood types, morality can almost always
be reduced to euros or dollar signs. I offer two cases in point.
Some time ago I was told by a not-so-young woman that America
ought to legalize prostitution--then tax the heck out of it.
Students in my ethics classes regularly offered similar proposals
for drugs. In their presentations they touted the industrial
versatility of hemp and waxed eloquent over revenues derived
from governmentalizing the distribution of Acapulco Gold. Only
fiscal and societal boons were envisioned from these imaginary
adventures in legalization.
Negative implications
of a world where government puts a regulatory stamp of approval
on cannabis use and erotic body rentals was
beyond their imaginative kin. Ignored was the obvious fact that
legal products can be advertised and must be supported by extensive
distribution networks--or that pimps unwilling to share their
income with the IRS would continue to ply their trade beyond
the scrutiny of tax accountants. Never in a million years would
these advocates of regulated rutting have supposed that this
newly sanctioned libidinal service could become entangled in
a "social safety net." After all, it takes both imaginative
talent and moral incentive to divine the cumulative impact of
policies for which there are almost no precedents.
The 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke, pondering the French
Revolution even before the Reign of Terror, noted that radical
changes almost always produce unanticipated negative results.
Individual reason, it turns out, is not as perceptive as reformers
like to think--nor traditional ways as stupid. Social arrangements
prove more complex and subtle than urban renovators can decipher--as
the crime-ridden housing complexes of the sixties bear dilapidated
witness.
Burke’s observations don’t
mean that everything is etched in stone or that change is always
for the worse. But
they do suggest that innovations which spring full-blown from
the head of a few academicians should be viewed with extreme
skepticism.
George Will once mentioned
the moral dilemma faced by a young woman who was shacking up
with a guy but wasn’t yet ready
for the intimacy involved in sharing the same bank account. At
least that was the thought she related to an advice columnist
more than a decade ago. The anecdote illustrates how "money-uber-alles" thought
can infect popular habits--just as the aforementioned German
news-clip shows why many cultures in the Middle East are loath
to join the parade of modernity that touts "reason" as
its patron saint.
Reason, it turns out, is often a fancy rationalization for decadence. tOR
copyright
2005 Richard Kirk
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