"I Don't Care That What You Do Is Legal, I'm Ordering You To Change Jobs"

Some members of the Amsterdam city council, inspired by — get this — Rudy Giuliani, want to forcibly reduce the number of sex workers in the Dutch capital's prostitution quarter known as the red light district. Says one of the local politicians, Lodewijk Asscher:

"The real soul of Amsterdam is freedom and tolerance. And in the last few years, the Red Light District has not been about freedom and tolerance. It's been about crime and the abuse of women."

It's just Bushian in its blithe insistence that black is white and up is down. To champion freedom, apparently you have to make a mockery of the free market and crack down on the private transactions of consenting adults. To promote tolerance, you have to tell legal prostitutes that they're intolerable.

The new careers that await these women, who can make thousands a week by voluntarily selling their sexual services, will most likely be something along the lines of cleaning lady or checkout cashier — if they can find regular jobs at all. That's helping them how, exactly?

If some of them are being kept as veritable sex slaves, or physically abused, or both, the police should certainly step in, and there are plenty of laws on the books for that already. Fighting human trafficking and blatant sex abuse ought to be a top law-enforcement priority, as far as I'm concerned. But that's very different from telling grown women which perfectly legal profession they will be barred from continuing to practice.

The city council should keep its grubby little hands off the prostitutes — unless they're willing to pay for the privilege, like this former city alderman who clearly had quite an appetite for paid nookie.

Seriously: When Amsterdam, of all places, begins taking its policy cues from a liberty-wrecking proto-fascist like Benito Giuliani — "a small man in search of a balcony," in Jimmy Breslin's immortal words — you know that freedom is truly in trouble, and not just at home.