simply legalizing prostitution and shrugging it off is not a policy, it's a non-policy that will lead to immense amounts of human suffering.

and, this is a good demonstration of the difference between a socialist and a liberal, which is actually my point: a liberal may be content to leave it up to the coercive effects of the market and allow for the reduction of the prostitute to salaried wage work, whereas a socialist wants to eliminate the coercive root causes of most prostitution, thereby reducing it strictly to the realm of enthusiastic consent.