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Wow, the twittersphere was just all aflutter about some college student asking the President if he’d considered legalizing prostitution and/or drugs as a way to stimulate the economy. That was, what, three days ago and it’s still getting retweeted.

Anyway, I thought Matthew Yglesias put the reaction nicely in perspective (emphasis mine.)

I think it’s obvious you can’t end the recession by legalizing prostitution and drugs. But at the same time, it should also be obvious that there are real economic costs associated with the prohibition of these activities and politicians ought to actually justify asking people to bare those costs. This is particularly pressing because the laws in question are so selectively enforced. Elliot Spitzer had his political career derailed by prostitution, but he’s not in jail. Does Obama think the world would be a better place if Spitzer were serving hard time? What about Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana? For that matter, does Obama think the world would be a better place if he’d been caught using drugs back in the day and sent to jail?

Presumably not. But to have laws on the books that the national elite fully intends never to apply to themselves or their families is ridiculous. I don’t want to see hookers and blow available for sale at the corner store, but there’s enormous scope for the reform of our policy in this area.

He said it here.

That’s a classic example of what I called (beginning in the days before Twitter) a twits vs substance problem. It’s not that drugs or prostitution is right or wrong (you can still be a twit about something that’s completely legal… see Britney Spears 24-hour marriage, for instance.) It’s that generally speaking the tut-tutting is done by people who don’t think the item in question is all that serious on the nominal behalf of… other people who also don’t take it terribly seriously in their own lives.

It’s like what Paul Graham says in Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age about swearing: grownups swear around each other but pretend not to in front of children; meanwhile children swear around each other but pretend not to in front of adults.

Speaking for myself I don’t think it would be a good thing if Barack Obama had gone to jail for smoking marijuana or whatever when he was a young man. I don’t even think it would be a good thing if Sen. Vitter was jailed for paying sex workers to make him wear diapers. (I don’t think he should be a United States Senator, at all, but that’s not why.)

Meanwhile, though, as Yglesias says, the race to publicly pretend to be maximally concerned makes it very difficult to be meaningfully concerned, which in turn makes it very difficult to enact and enforce meaningful policies.