Gawker reports that…

Sex workers in Silicon Valley have begun catering to their tech-savvy, incredibly wealthy clients by accepting payments through “Square” (those little boxes that attach to iPads that your favorite coffee shop uses).…

(Actually, CNN reported the original story, Gawker just aggregated it.)

Summers, you’ll remember, joined the board of Square last summer.

So before anyone gets upset, of course this doesn’t make Larry Summers a pimp. It’s not as if he’s pushing women to sell their bodies. Although he is getting a cut when they do. It’s an interesting question—if your legal business facilitates an illegal one, and you profit from the illegal one, and have taken no discernible steps to curtail it, are you complicit in illegality?

Here is another interesting question for some Harvard classroom: Morally speaking, is this better, worse, or no different than making money by sitting on the board of LendingClub.com, a company which issues online loans to credit-starved consumers and boasts that its interest rate is lower than credit cards’, or working as a consultant for a hedge fund, which he did before and after joining the Obama administration? (That whirring sound you hear is the noise of a door quickly revolving.)

It costs a lot to get rich…