The Koreans have been cracking down on prostitution recntly with what I would consider to be predictable results so far.
Tourism is down as Japanese and Chinese tour parties don't want to visit Korea for other reasons
Koreans are now keen to sign up on trips to other places where prostitution is common
Associated businesses such as the suppliers of booze are seeing big falls in consumption
Free-lance hookers are using the internet to locate clients anyway
Some prostitutes are protesting that they can't feed their starving children and/or are emigrating to Canada to do the same thing.
This brief summary is extracted from posts at the Marmot's Hole where there is considerably more detail as well as links to other places. If anyone wanted a classic modern example of why "the war on drugs" is doomed this would be it. There is a significant demand for prostittion and therefore no matter what happens suppliers will emerge to meet that demand, thus attacking the supply merely drives up the price and potentially makes it even more lucrative.
Sort of coincidentally John Kerry, in an interview with the NY Times last weekend managed to make this much clear:
"As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life."
As usual Kerry was half right and half wrong in that interview and demonstrated a classic September 10th mindset in that he seemed to be saying that terrorism was primarily a law-enforcment issue. There is a big difference between terrorism and prostitution which seems to escape the Senator, namely that there is limited consumer demand for terrorism. As noted above there is considerable consumer demand for drugs, gambling and sex and thus all a crack down on the suppliers does is drive up the price and move the whole thing further into a criminal space where everyone gets ripped off and no one has any recourse to any law other than that of the gun. Of course harsher crackdowns result in less drugs or prostitution because the number of consumers willing to pay the price decreses as the price (in terms of reputation and other intangibles as well as the monetary price) increases but it doesn't dwindle to nothing and there is considerable incentive for entrepreneurs to find ways to provide the service at a lower price to increase the addressable market.
Terrorism on the other hand has extremely limited demand. Very few, if any, communities or members of a community wish to see themselves be victims of terrorism and therefore, unlike fighting gambling, drugs and prostitution, it is possible attack the supply of terrorists without seeing the same side-effects as consumers try to get their fix. Kerry seems to have utterly misunderstood this.