TKL Saves Washington’s Upstanding Moral Reputation
The questionable massage parlor James blogged about here has been raided and shut down.
In the District, federal agents targeted five brothels that were masquerading as massage parlors or spas.
The establishments were 14K Spot, which operated in a basement in the 1400 block of K Street Northwest; Downtown Spa, in the 1000 block of Vermont Avenue Northwest; OK Spa, in the 2400 block of Wisconsin Avenue Northwest; Cleveland Park Holistic Health, on the second floor of a building in the 3500 block of Connecticut Avenue Northwest; and Royal Spa, in the 500 block of 10th Street Northwest.
Authorities said that four persons were arrested at those locations and that 23 women were taken into custody.
For our next trick, Richardson and I will drive the money changers out of an Appropriations Commitee hearing.
Oh, you beat me to it, Joshua.
I’ve been, ahem, notified of this. But I wish to make it absolutely clear that I have no knowledge that my “expose” played any role in the raid.
A colleague at Discovery (you know who you are!) told me that I should do more than just letting some folks know, but I told him that I always want to give the existing institutions of the society a chance to work out the problem before doing anything extraordinary.
I am glad to see that view is borne out by the event.
Nothing like driving a grey market economy into the black.
Whoever made the executive decision to task those federal agents with this, rather than confronting Islamism or corporate crime, has done a bang-up job.
In studying the arm trading “industry,” one thing I learned is that the tolerance for the “grey market” makes eradication of the much more dangerous “black market” much harder.
Also, ever hear of the “Broken Window” theory?
Ask someone named Rudy Giuliani.
James,
I’ve read “Fixing Broken Windows” and I admire it as an effective way to fight thuggish crime. FBW, by raising the behavioral norms of a community, seeks to reduce thuggery. This is why FBW theory and implementation focuses on mindless activity such as turnstile jumping, littering, squeegee men, panhandling, etc.
FBW works against this Vandal activity. The original study found that a car with a broken window was much more likely to be destroyed by hooligans than an unmarked car. A behavioral norm that allows the destruction of property is introduced, and is acted on. Remove that norm, and it’s not.
The same mechanism does not work for (non-street-level) drug trading and prostitution, either as a cause or an effect. Here the instigating mechanism is not merely some behavior but an economic activity. Intolerance for a grey market makes a black market more resilient, because the number of economic actors who have to rely on alternate security providers increases. (Criminilazing commercial activities rolls-back the law-courts, a sure recipe for generating internal anarchy.)
Ask someone named Kim Jung Il.
What are, exactly, “non-street level drug trading and prostitution”? Just as all politics is local, surely all drug trading and prostitution are inevitably “street.”
Indeed, there are instances where eliminating the grey market strengthens the black market, particularly in cases where the commodity in question cannot be obtained legally (in the white market). But sex is available widely in the white market (if not necessarily conveniently for some).
In many cases, tolerating the grey market actually enables the black market.
In international arms trading, for example, government tolerance (and occasional collusion) in grey market activities has enabled black market, because the same parties often supplied both markets. Thus it has become impossible for some governments to expose and prosecute the latter without exposing its involvement (or that of other “sensitive” parties) in the former.
For drug trading, look at the comparative “market” structures of Singapore and the U.S.
In Singapore, the expected cost (probability of getting caught times penalty/cost of getting caught) of drug trafficking is catastrophic. Thus there is very little grey market. To trade narcotics in Singapore, a supplier has to be extremely risk prone (but likely very “good” at what it does and thus perhaps validating some of your “entrenchment” argument) and the consumer base is rather limited as well (as average human beings tend to be fairly risk averse usually at the ratio of 3-to-1 according to economic studies). The end result is very small grey AND black markets.
In contrast, the U.S. has a rather large and tolerated grey market (especially for “pot”). This enables the suppliers of the blackmarket as well as serves as a conduit for downslide for the consumers (this also engages the phenomenon of penalty tolerance, i.e. graduated penalty systems tend to eventually inure the punished parties to even higher forms of punishment — funny enough this has been validated by testing animals as well!). Thus, there is both large grey and black market.
Now, there is a libertarian argument (to which I suspect you are very favorable) that if the society simply removes all legal barriers, the known side effects of grey and black markets disappear. This argument is at least logically coherent. It is certainly worthy of consideration in philosophical terms. But this argument only accounts for the commodity side of the problem — it does not deal with the anti-social (that is, people) side of the problem. One can, of course, surely argue that this is better than what exists today. But that’s a topic for another day, another time, I think.