A rising tide of legal saber-rattling against Craigslist for its “Adult Services” listings has finally achieved something: The good people at Craigslist took down the listings. In their place, the company put up a stark, white-on-black CENSORED sign.

So I have to ask: Is making the U.S. less free (or even seem less free) a victory of some kind?

The prosecuting attorneys who pushed this — most importantly “Connecticut’s insufferably self-righteous” Richard Blumenthal — say they want to curb prostitution (and of course bring up “child prostitution”). That they’re willing to do this by attacking an online classified listing service rather than the services themselves is interesting.

But are they really getting anywhere? The offensive listings are quickly migrating to other services, many of them on the Web but hosted in other countries.

So, a Pyrrhic victory, at best.

More likely, though, it’s a definite loss, not only of the liberty of the press, but for polite society’s continual fight against crime.

You see, there are other crimes associated with prostitution, other than the proscribed contractual activity itself. Johns sometimes beat up hookers; pimps sometimes beat up johns. Such acts of extreme violence are far worse than prostitution as such, and must be fought.

By forcing the Internet listings for “Adult Services” off-shore, police and prosecutors now have less access to the means of actually fighting very violent crimes. Getting personal information (by warrant) from the ISP? Now not possible.

The ability to “drill down” through server information to get at real criminals has been undermined. By our public servants.

I fail to see the logic of this, unless all it ever really amounted to was a publicity operation for up-and-coming prosecutors.

Even at best, it’s an example of the kind of narrow-bandwidth thinking that politicians habitually apply to markets: Concentrate on one element of a problem, and forget about the more dispersed secondary and tertiary effects.

Indeed, the biggest hurdle to preventing child exploitation and slave-based  prostitution is the continued illegality of prostitution as such. The best way to protect children and weak folk is to make “capitalist acts between consenting adults” legal even in cases of sexual interaction — that is, recognize the inherent peaceful and contractual nature of prostitution — allowing police to work with prostitutes against abusive pimps and clients, enabling police to side with the adults in the sex-worker community to patrol the market for the horrendous abuses against children prosecutors say they are against.

Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.