Charles replied to the original post, and ka1igu1a has replied to Charles’ reply to his post.

Do you think that the sex workers ever experience their “sexual contractions” as pleasurable, or does that question simply not enter into your analysis?

There may be some legitimate criticism to be made of Johnson’s views on pornography, but I don’t think one can just summarily dismiss them as “social conservative garbage.”

There may be a wide array of incentives that compel women to go into the sex trade that make a mockery of the idea that they do so voluntarily, such as a combination of economic and cultural pressures. I think you should perhaps investigate Johnson’s views further before you issue such a sweeping judgment.

There is no libertarian obligation, by the way, to defend, condone or simply ignore libertinism in any form, just so you know. (Judging by your use of a screen name that is some variant of the name Caligula, however, it remains to be seen if you can fully appreciate that.) To my knowledge, Johnson has never proposed government laws to regulate or ban pornography and sees his campaign against it as cultural and educational, not a legislative one.

Further, as Brainpolice mentioned, there is no logical link between a libertarian objection to pornography and the Austrian school of economics. You’re right that many Austrian school economists do tend to express socially conservative views when they do speak out on cultural issues. But there are some who don’t; there is no relational link between any particular view of pornography and, say, the subjective theory of value, or between any position on abortion and the theory of marginal utility. (You may be interested to know that Johnson is actually somewhat critical of some dominant strands of Austrian thought, at any rate.)

Finally, can you really vouch for the claim that sex workers experience any real pleasure in each and every “sexual contraction”?

As a libertarian, I agree, the classical precepts of libertarianism are a bit thin, but I’m also coming to the conclusion that you Austrians are fundamentally social conservative, anti-libertine to the core, whether from the right or the left. On the right we have the likes of Ron Paul giving us the libertarian case for the death penalty for abortion, or the libertarian case against IV fertilization, and on the left, we apparently now have the libertarian case against porn.

What is with this tendency of Austrian Praxis to view pleasurable sexual contraction as some exogenous variable to be explained away?

My answer: in the case of conjunction thickness, the independent values aren’t being used to determine whether something should count as aggression or not; in specification thickness they are..