The phrase emptying the ocean with a bucket comes to mind when considering this story about attempts in South Korea to rid the internet in the country of online pornography. Even if it were a sensible thing to try and do you really rather know that it’s not going to be effective. Alone among the industrialised nations pornography is illegal in South Korea. And there’s a group of, well vigilantes seems the best word, hunting it down:
Moon is among the most successful members of the “Nuri Cops” (roughly “net cops”), a squad of nearly 800 volunteers who help government censors by patrolling the Internet for pornography in their spare time.
The real problem here though is that the law itself is entirely counter-productive, given the reason proffered for the illegality:
“Obscene materials and harmful information that can be easily accessed on the Internet are singled out as one cause inciting sex crimes,” President Lee Myung-bak said in a radio address in September.
Putting this into the words that economists use. What we really want to know is whether pornography and sex crimes are a complement (complement, not compliment) to each other or a substitute for each other. That is, does watching porn lead to sex crimes (the reverse, sex criminals desiring to watch porn seems a reasonably obvious conclusion really) or does watching porn replace committing a sex crime?