I still remember a schlock-value TV magazine show in the Philippines, where they featured a town where almost every grown man had one kidney and a foot-long scar along their sides to show for it. Sold at anything from two hundred to a thousand dollars, they were portrayed as prostitutes of their own flesh, forced by poverty. The host then wondered out loud how “government” could do something to simultaneously aid them in their suffering while preventing organ sales.

I won’t turn this into a long discourse in Philippine economics but in short, the TV-mag’s message was that these people need to be protected from exploitation by those with money. Organ sales were also banned in order to “level the playing field” and make sure the process was not decided on wealth. I think it’s a bunch of hooey.

Dodd Harris, on the other hand, shares my view that organ sales should not be banned:

Thomas Sowell proposes to bring an end to the shortage of donated organs by lifting the ban on organ sales. I cannot do otherwise than agree. As someone who believes liberty is founded, at the very root, in the concept that one owns oneself (as opposed to one being the property of the state), I find this ban patently offensive. If I want to sell a kidney – a part of my body, which belongs to me and me alone – what possible business is that of the state?

[...]If someone has a rational argument why this ban is worth its cost in lives, I’m open to hearing it. But I’ve been thinking about it for years and have yet to come up with any rationale for it that, when you get right down to it, isn’t just a thin veneer covering a personal distaste for allowing dirty, filthy money to exert any influence at all on who gets organs and who doesn’t.

He then proceeds to say that “fair” would immediately invalidate the argument, which is true. In all of this kaka flying around, it all boils down to such synthetic, empirical principles of fairness, that are, as usual, forced down our throats by the very same people who know what’s good for us.