From the Wall Street Journal:
Cash for Kidneys: The Case for a Market for Organs
There is a clear remedy for the growing shortage of organ donors, say Gary S. Becker and Julio J. Elias
Why hasn't anyone invented an app with an ironic name for this? I've got dibs on:
Or-Gone
Have you ever wanted to wake up in a motel bathtub full of ice cubes?
I'd call the app "Stake and Kidney Pie". [Sic-- and yes, sick]
ReplyDeleteRather chilling, and more likely to become popular as the population gets older. I wouldn't sell one of my kidneys for ten million dollars, but that's because I know the value of health vs. money.
ReplyDeleteLook into the black market organ trade, and you find ignorant or desperate people selling themselves for a few thousand dollars to settle a debt, or to impulsively buy the latest iCrud. If you legalize this market, even with price controls, it will be wholesale and absolute and literal vampirism of the rich vs. the poor.
I thought per the libertoids we'd be 3D printing all the organs we can manage over net-neutral wi-fi balloons real soon now, so what's the rush to liquidate the underutilized Soylent Green?
ReplyDeleteSeems they have it all figured out, estimated cost of a kidney being fifteen thousand. The sellers would probably resemble the folks sitting around in the waiting rooms of urban blood banks, waiting to sell their blood. I wonder what the brain of an economist would be worth?
ReplyDeleteThis might be superseded by cloning and organ growing:
ReplyDelete"Quest to grow human organs inside pigs in Japan"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-25550419
"China cloning on an 'industrial scale'"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25576718
"Run by a fast-growing company called BGI, this facility has become the world's largest centre for the cloning of pigs."
So now we can eat a can of beans for dinner, moonlight as taxi drivers driving our own cars, and sell a kidney for the kids' tuition at college?
ReplyDeleteI don't know that Johnathan Swift could have written worse satire than that - and he was trying to write bad satire.
Hey - no word verification?
ReplyDeleteBOO-YAH!!!
Organ Trail
ReplyDeleteWe need to ban organ matching based on blood types, it's ethnic discrimination. You can't tell someone that the can't donate their organs just because they have the 'wrong' blood type. People will say "what about tissue rejection?" Well, we have dregs that can suppress the immune system now, so it's not a problem anymore.
ReplyDeleteIf A's second kidney is worth more to B than it is to A, then we should allow that transaction.
ReplyDeleteIf you oppose this, you should reevaluate your philosophy of life. Kidney markets would save lives through voluntary transactions between consenting parties. This is the most logical idea in the world.
They (The Cathedral), are probably going to start saying that donating a kidney is a moral imperative. Anybody who disagrees with this imperative is going to be seen as "evil" and subject to the two minutes of hate. This trend is only going to magnify because of the diabetes epidemic coming soon. Of course the elites will not be donating their kidneys much.
ReplyDeleteStake-and-Kidney Pie?
ReplyDeleteThere are long term consequences for people who donate kidneys. Our current system does not even educate donors well. Once an organ is out of someone the donor system doesn't care about them.
ReplyDeleteOf course most of the WSJ commentators are for it. There's something evil about people who read the WSJ or the Economist without a sense of detached sardonic amusement and disgust.
ReplyDeleteThe article itself is heinous, something straight out of the mind of Greenspan, Fischer, Summers, Paul Ryan, your average Bush or Prince Bandar.
But the comments are even worse: high time we did this, get the product to the consumer, and other souless justifications.
One can't help but see most commentators as vampiric upper middle-class Boomers, taking advantage of a degraded economy, caused by policies they supported, to literally feed on the young, supported in their nefarious world view by snarky, weasely up and coming brown-nosers. The combination of naked self-interest and self-righteousness is a particularly annoying Anglophone trait. The contradiction and self-deception it creates leaves our atomized societies vulnerable to manipulation by plutocratic, banking elites, external parasites and social experimenters.
Good comment, Anon. 1/18/2014 9:31 PM (pick a name, darn it).
DeleteAlso never forget what Bob Wallace (who was erased by Lew Rockwell for crimethink) said about top libertoonians. Link here ("Right" means realist, "Left" means blank-slater):
http://uncabob.blogspot.com/2008/04/dilemma-of-libertarian-homosexual.html?m=1
Privileged Aspie Greedy Gays. PAGGs.
And the rest of us are their meat.
More immigrants = more cheap kidneys. Beckers and Cowens of the world wholeheartedly approve.
ReplyDeleteShouldn't illegal aliens who rack up large medical bills be required to "donate" a kidney or part of their liver to pay back part of the medical bills?
ReplyDeleteThis would fix a couple of problems at once.
More immigrants = more cheap kidneys. Beckers and Cowens of the world wholeheartedly approve.
ReplyDeleteBryan Caplan is tone-deaf enough to argue for immigration on these grounds. In fact, we should try to get Caplan to promote the immigration-for-cheaper-kidneys idea so that more normal people will be repelled by open borders.
I wonder what the brain of an economist would be worth?
ReplyDeleteHA HA still laughing
Now you see why I despise economists - the more they poke their noses into things that don't really concern them - stating the obvious with the backup of bullshit theories - the more hateful they make themselves.
ReplyDeleteTo state the obvious, if ever a 'free market in human flesh' was ever given legal blessing, then, of course, there will be a masive one-way traffic from the third world to the developed world. Simple market forces dictate that. So intead of sending us whole Mexicans, Pakistanis, Nigerians,Somalis, they can send us the the 'useful' bit, the part that actually does some work, and leave the diminished meat-puppet at home. So here we have both maxims of the Friemanites satisfied at the same time, free trade in both goods *and* people, what's not to like?
Perhaps we should just go a tad further and make cash bargains with the war-destroyed and starving Congolese to sell their children to western traders. Those that cannot be used as walking organ banks could be used as 'indentured labor' - what a great idea, why hasn't anyone thought of that before!
I have the strong suspicion that the damned fool economists who wrote this 'report' wrote it with implicit assumption that somehow whites would be selling organs to whites - it doesn't seem to register in their tiny minds that if a real free market in human flesh was actualized it will, without a shadow of doubt, be blacks and browns selling organs to whites and Arabs. It will be absolutely and entirely racialized just as 18th century chattel slavery was.
Just wait how fast that these tomfools will drop the whole subjec once that happens to register in their tiny brains.
They could live with poor whites seling their organs, but poor balcks, Oh! no way!
It all reminds me of the 18th century Irish satirist Jonathan Swift seriously advocating that the way to solve the Irish hunger problem was to allow the poor of Dublin to eat their own children.
Buying or selling parts of the human body (including blood) is illegal in France, and I guess in all the Roman Law (jus romanum) countries. I'm glad that it is so.
ReplyDeleteThe kidney trade is, in my humble opinion, one of those American ideas which sound great but which have tragic or at least very negative consequences in the real world. Among those bad ideas, there's borrowing on equity, affirmative action, strict ballot access laws, etc. Buying and selling human body parts is illegal in many countries for very good reasons.
It reminds me of the silly 18 year old Chinese boy who sold a kidney for an iPad.
Absolutely right! We can't have individuals allocating scarce organs via a market based on their own decisions and mutual consent! No, no, no!
ReplyDeleteMuch better to turn the whole process over to disinterested government bureaucrats. Use the tried and true approach that has worked so well for e.g. public education and health insurance in the U.S. and for most activities in the former Soviet Union.
Government bureaucrats will make sure only the "right people" get transplants.
There was a science-fiction story about that decades ago, called The Organ Draft or something.
ReplyDeleteAll coming true.
Time to crash the system.
Gordo
Organ donation is one of the remaining fields where being really rich doesn't give you much advantage over everybody else. This aggression cannot stand, man.
ReplyDeleteA long time ago I worked at a certain libertarian policy wonk outfit as a research assistant to the "bioethics" department. The big issue was how unethical it was that people were denied their right to sell their own bodies aand worse! The market was being denied efficiency! At the time I thought it was weird that anyone would pick this issue as their crusade but now I am more cynical I realize how lucrative this industry will be for the usual suspects.
ReplyDeleteFox News boss Rupert Murdoch also owns the Wall Street journal.
ReplyDeleteIt's going to be like revelations. They have no moral limits. They don't even know what moral limits are.
ReplyDelete"If A's second kidney is worth more to B than it is to A, then we should allow that transaction."
ReplyDeleteNo wonder there's so many shows glamorizing vampires.
You can see the cultural reversal of morality in the vampire going from villain to hero.
"Or-gone"
ReplyDeleteThat hyphen won't keep the estate of Wilhelm Reich from suing.
… vampiric upper middle-class Boomers…--anonymous [& achronous-- no age given]
ReplyDeleteFunny you chose that term over "whites", which would have been equally accurate and descriptive. My guess is you're in one group and not the other, and you don't want to point the finger at your own.
At least the morality of these "donations" is a matter of discussion. Not so with sperm, eggs and "surrogacy", i.e., prostitution. Those foist the pain and loss onto a third person rather than the donor. A third person with no say in the matter.
And the market for this is, Sir Elton aside, decidedly post-boomer.
Just like those college kids in Oregon that loudly and vigorously cheered Bill Clinton for his displacement of whites. Those white college kids.
"Dr. Orgone's instant weight loss plan".
ReplyDeleteBy the same logic people ought to be able to sell themselves into slavery...so why not make slavery legal again?
ReplyDeletePerhaps my biggest beef with this kind of aspergy libertardian onanist kind of argument is how its all about freedom of choice and who would be against that?....but right now in the whole western world, if you choose to just say some or other politically incorrect thing you face ruin. And what about freedom of association? Why can't private employers simply hire whomever they *choose*.... Why can't apartment owners rent to whomever they *choose*? For the sake of logical and moral consistency I'd like to see these more fundamental freedoms defended first, but I'm not expecting to see that any time soon. In fact we'll probably see a legal organ donation market (perhaps dominated by Scotch-Irish hustlers) fairly soon, but the basic freedoms the western world once enjoyed will never come back.
"There are long term consequences for people who donate kidneys. Our current system does not even educate donors well. Once an organ is out of someone the donor system doesn't care about them"
ReplyDeleteNo, there's not. Long-term there's zero difference in mortality rate. Many, many Indians or Africans would be far healthier if they could sell one kidney and use the proceeds to buy clean water for their family.
The fact that kidney sales are banned, is just leftist, Marxist propaganda. The idea that everywhere some evil rich person is trying to "exploit" the poor in a hundred different ways.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=kidney-donor-mortality
I wonder what the brain of an economist would be worth?
ReplyDeleteLess than the heart, which has been garaged and is still in mint condition.
Shouldn't illegal aliens who rack up large medical bills be required to "donate" a kidney or part of their liver to pay back part of the medical bills?
ReplyDeleteThis would fix a couple of problems at once.
This would merely become another corporate incentive to import more illegal immigrants. I imagine the position of expanding medical complex would be this:
"We don't have nearly enough organ dono—er uh we mean healthcare workers! This industry needs more (un)documented immigrants so America can gain access to their precious, precious org— labor."
"DR said...
ReplyDeleteNo, there's not. Long-term there's zero difference in mortality rate. Many, many Indians or Africans would be far healthier if they could sell one kidney and use the proceeds to buy clean water for their family."
This is from your article:
"Segev and his team from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore studied mortality among 80,000 kidney donors over the past 15 years, comparing them to healthy people with both kidneys. The study, published March 10 in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association—60 years after the first kidney transplant in the U.S.—found no increase in mortality in donors once they recover from the operation."
And what about after 15 years? What if the donors develop a problem in thier one remaining kidney? In nature, as in engineering, redundancy is seldom present for no reason. If people have two kidneys, it is because it is beneficial for them to have two kidneys. Anyway the study you mention (cited in the unscientific, unamerican magazine known as "Scientific American") is irrelevant. The organ donor pool now mostly consists of people who are already healthy and who donate for altruistic reasons. Open it up to those who are only doing it for money, and you'll have a lot of less healthy people doing it - people who perhaps can't afford to.
I'm not surprised by your post, DR. Self-interested lies which serve the purposes of wealthy parasites are what I have come to expect from you. Parasite.
"Chicago said...
ReplyDeleteI wonder what the brain of an economist would be worth?"
What is a unicorn worth? It's hard to put a price on something which has not been proven to exist.
Maybe they want to create a legitimate organ market to make sure these lowlives don't profit off the illegal sale of organs.
ReplyDeleteI used to think Steve's readership was made of high IQ types who like science can think reasonably. The comments here give me doubts.
ReplyDeleteHere is something that would save thousands of lives and only involve transactions between consenting parties. How on earth could anyone be opposed to this?
"Organ Trail" - already done.
ReplyDelete"We need to ban organ matching based on blood types, it's ethnic discrimination." - Also already done. Closest genetic match was struck down a while back, diversityischaos site had a blurb about it.
"Hepp said...
ReplyDeleteI used to think Steve's readership was made of high IQ types who like science can think reasonably. The comments here give me doubts."
Perhaps you misunderstand the meaning of the words "science" and "reason". Neither necessarily have anything to do with justifying a ghoulish trade in human body parts.
"Here is something that would save thousands of lives and only involve transactions between consenting parties. How on earth could anyone be opposed to this?"
Because they have a moral sense? Because they do not mistake econometric judgements for moral ones?
What if your 18 year old son or daughter wanted to sell an organ so as to make a little money? Would you be cool with that?
@notbob: Shouldn't illegal aliens who rack up large medical bills be required to "donate" a kidney or part of their liver to pay back part of the medical bills?
ReplyDeleteOr what about a visa for a kidney plan?
NAMs are notorious non-organ donors. Cash for organs would encourage more NAMs to donate.
ReplyDeleteSomething tells me the kidney might just not be the most critical of organs to a commenter named "E Rekshun". Just a feeling…
ReplyDeleteCash wouldn't encourage more blacks to donate, as they abstain for religious reasons (and fear of being harvested alive specifically for their organs).
ReplyDeleteNo idea why, if indeed it is the case, Hispanics donate at lower rates.
"In the 2000s, Scheper-Hughes investigated an international ring of organ sellers based in New York, New Jersey and Israel. She interviewed several hundred third-world organ donors, and reported that they all felt that they had been taken advantage of, and were often left sick, unable to work, and unable to get medical care. Some of them were tricked into donating organs, and threatened at gunpoint when they tried to resist. Some transplants took place at major New York City hospitals, and Scheper-Hughes said that the hospital personnel knew illegal transplants were taking place. She informed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which led to arrests several years later.[8][9] When the events became public, she said that much of the world's illicit traffic in kidneys could be traced to Israel.[citation needed] In a 2008 lecture, she is reported as identifying two motivations of Israeli traffickers as "greed" and "Revenge, restitution—reparation for the Holocaust." She is reported as describing speaking with Israeli brokers who told her "it’s kind of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We’re going to get every single kidney and liver and heart that we can. The world owes it to us.’"[10]"
ReplyDeleteFrom Wikipedia article on Nancy Scheper-Hughes
I read somewhere that blacks are the least likely to donate organs, supposedly they 'don't want whites to get them', or some such. Does anybody have any stats on this? I live in Toronto and have donated blood for years. I have never seen a black donate blood.
ReplyDeleteTrayvon's heart - was it actually given to Dick Cheney?
ReplyDeleteYears ago, the term 'cannibalizing' vehicles for spare parts used to be in vogue. This was during the second world war, mainly, and the term meant that a broken down vehicle would be stripped of in order working parts to keep a running vehicle going.
ReplyDeleteI think the word and thae analogy still holds.
Notice how its Friedmanite economists who are pushing this proposal. Apparently Iran is their model - how can any reasonable person use Iran institutions and customs as a model for anything? - the same neocons wet their panties about Iran on a daily basis.
Friedmanism is all about money - maximizing wealth for the rich whilst advocating a liceneced hatred for the poor. That's it explained in a nutshell, the hatred for the poor is the kernel of Friedmanism. Friedmanites pride themselves on their rational, cold, hard analysis and on how they maximize wealth for their supporters. An obvious policy for Freidmanites to push is compulsory euthanasia for the poor - what else could increase wealth and cut liabilities at a stroke. just like that. Why shouldn't all those who are a net economic liability simply be destroyed to maximize the wealth of the ownership class?
Why can't Friedmanite economists just have the guts to say this out loud?, after all, isn't this the Darwinian paradigm that shaped us?
No part of a human being's body should be for sale on a speculative market. If you don't understand why,, you don't understand human nature. You're either one of the murderers yourself, or you're what used to be called "a moral imbecile."
ReplyDeleteTo C.Van Carter.
ReplyDeleteThank you for that. I have worked with blacks who believe even crazier stuff, superstitions and conspiracies. I like at the 26 second part of that clip how they call for a boycott of white businesses. Don't these clowns have eyes? Zimmerman has brown skin.
Meh, old white people don't donate blood either. Blood donation is mostly young white women and basically nobody else.
ReplyDeleteIf the dollar sours, will immigration amnesty have providentially provided not only a larger source of organs for cannibalizing but also... Soylent Bean?
ReplyDeleteWe keep hearing how Mexicans are the fattest folks in the world - from writers apparently bent on this seemingly trivial factoid - don't we? How many times in how many places has the meme of "fattened Mexicans" appeared lately, and why?
Asking because I have no idea: would NAM organs be that useful to elite whites? Organs have to "match," after all. I don't know what all they have to match on, but it seems like you'd be more likely to match someone of your own race.
ReplyDelete