No matter how impoverished we get in the US, we can always afford however many bullets it takes to shoot ourselves in the foot.

Throughout the country all levels of government – city, state and federal – face debts, deficits, decreased tax revenues and increased unemployment. Our infrastructure is crumbling and our social safety nets unravelling for lack of funds, yet politicos squander time and tax money to stamp out any viable taxpaying business tainted by the whiff of sexuality.

Consider this recent smattering of otherwise-unrelated stories: in Missouri, Governor Jay Nixon signed a bill imposing crippling new regulations intended to drive strip clubs out of business. The bill will face extensive legal challenges, costing more tax money to fight, and if successful will put an estimated 3,000 people out of work and cost the state $4.5m in sales tax each year.

In Charlotte/Mecklenberg County, North Carolina, officials slashed $71m from the budget by cutting funds to schools, libraries, parks and veterans' services, yet state alcohol agents could still afford a six-month investigation into allegations that dancers in a Charlotte topless club occasionally exposed their bottoms too. Agents bravely arrested six dancers and issued warrants for ten more.

Down in Texas, state Republicans put out a new party platform whose planks include re-criminalising gay sex (the US supreme court struck down the state's anti-sodomy law in 2003), and outlawing gay marriage and all sex-themed businesses.

Money troubles are forcing Duluth, Minnesota, to privatise public parkland, yet the city bought a strip club solely to shut it down.

Not far from my Connecticut home, Southington is incurring a small fortune in legal fees trying to close a new adult toy store, despite the handful of adult businesses that have peacefully operated in town for years. (Disclosure: while working as a stripper in my grad school days, I danced at a Southington club and made good money, though never succeeded in destroying the sanctity of the family or the town's collective moral fibre. Perhaps I should've tried harder.)

A common argument against sexy businesses says they violate "community standards". Whose standards, exactly? If the community truly disliked a business, it would go bankrupt for lack of customers. Those who cite community standards to ban otherwise-harmless things assume "the community" refers only to those who believe as they do.

Today's economy is the worst in three generations, so why now of all times do we focus on moral crusades we can't afford? Because of a nasty aspect of human nature: faced with problems beyond their personal control, people often respond by kicking scapegoats instead.

Howard Bloom discussed this in his 1995 book The Lucifer Principle, exploring the evolutionary origins of behaviour we call evil. The chapter titled "Scapegoats and Sexual Hysteria" reads like a blueprint of events 15 years later.

Britain went on a scapegoating kick in the 1890s, after an economic depression spanning two decades. Earlier that century, the country got rich turning itself into an industrial powerhouse capitalising on then-new steam technology. But wealthy late-Victorians grew complacent. British scientists and tinkerers made groundbreaking discoveries in electricity and chemistry; William Perkin effectively invented the modern chemical industry when he made the first artificial dye – Perkin's mauve – from coal tar. But Britain ignored these innovations, allowing upstart nations like Germany and the US to grow rich developing those technologies.

So down went the British economy and nobody knew why until 1893, when a joyless patriot named Max Nordau published his book Degeneration. Nordau claimed Britain's problem wasn't lagging exports or technological stagnation, but degenerate pop culture. Oscar Wilde's plays, Manet's paintings, Tolstoy's novels – all corrupted the British psyche, Nordau said, and if Britons would eschew them, their minds would be pure and their nation strong.

America has produced its own share of Nordaus – in the 1980s, Allan Bloom and Tipper Gore spurred quixotic crusades against popular music, and panic over TV shows and computer games has been a cultural constant ever since. But sexual panic kicked into overdrive since the economy started souring. Look at the problems we face in 2010 – the Great Recession is three years old and shows no signs of imminent improvement, an oil geyser is poisoning the Gulf of Mexico and millions of people around it – and how does our leadership class respond? With hysteria over teenage sexuality, gay sex, gay marriage, striptease dancers and sex toys. If Americans would eschew these things, our minds would be pure and our nation strong. Given how well Nordau's prescription worked to save the British Empire, it'll surely work just as well for us.