It seems like most liberal bloggers on the web seem to support legalizing prostitution. I do not. The way I see it, institutions that treat people as merely a means to someone else's end--in other words, that turn people into objects--are not institutions that deserve to be venerated. And that is what prostitution is, far more so than capitalism. The current incarnation of capitalism leans toward the treating-people-like-dispensable-objects model, but that wasn't true a generation ago, and there are many exceptions. At the very least, one can say that capitalism doesn't necessarily have to involve such things.
It goes back to Kant's Categorical Imperative. Prostitution occurs largely as a result of poverty. Some people act as though it's a profession that is primarily entered into by people who really like sex, but that runs contrary to what I've read on the topic.
