Organ Market

[Renton]

New thread topic for a new statism vs free market poo-flinging contest!

Two questions:

1) Should it be legal to sell your own organs while you are still alive? Why or why not?

2) Should it be legal to sell your own organs in the event of your death? Why or why not?

[Savy]

1) Yes because why shouldn't it be?

2) No because when you die they are no longer yours, if you want to leave them specifically to your family or friends or whatever then go ahead but if they can't be used within the time they need to before they are no longer usable then it's just a waste.

I also think people should not be able to opt out of donating their organs too though so what does my opinion matter.

[rpm]

i have no moral frameworks to hold up these positions but my immediate reactions are:
1) sure. it's my body so if i wanna sell some parts off it who's to stop me?
2) i don't care, i'm dead. you can rape my carcass if you want, too. feed me to the sharks during the 3pm feeding at the aquarium.

[Renton]

No because when you die they are no longer yours

Is this your opinion or what? Whats your basis for reasoning?

if you want to leave them specifically to your family or friends or whatever then go ahead but if they can't be used within the time they need to before they are no longer usable then it's just a waste.

I also think people should not be able to opt out of donating their organs too though so what does my opinion matter.

So you think that while people no longer own their corpses in the events of their deaths, they should still have the authority to bequeath their organs to family members, but that otherwise the state should have all authority to rifle through them in search of organs?

Supposing a system of mandatory organ donations, how do you think they should be distributed?

[Renton]

2) i don't care, i'm dead. you can rape my carcass if you want, too. feed me to the sharks during the 3pm feeding at the aquarium.

Wouldn't you at least want your loved ones to have a say about what happens with your body? Wouldn't you want them to be paid for valuable organs to lessen the burden of your deathbed healthcare and funeral costs?

[eugmac]

Distribution should be based on a priority using some sort of scoring system taking into account the urgency of a transplant, good patient behavior (alcoholic cirrhosis patient who shows disregard for doctor's advice to stop drinking scores significantly worse), patient age (why give a transplant to the 80 year old rather than the 35 year old?), and overall probability of success of the operation. There are possibly more factors I haven't thought of.

[Savy]

Is this your opinion or what? Whats your basis for reasoning?

So you think that while people no longer own their corpses in the events of their deaths, they should still have the authority to bequeath their organs to family members, but that otherwise the state should have all authority to rifle through them in search of organs?

Supposing a system of mandatory organ donations, how do you think they should be distributed?

I'm not an expert but isn't that the case for loads of things like property and any capital you own? You can't own something if you die, you do however get the choice of who it is left to. If no next of kin can be found then does it not go to the government anyway?

Yeah, I think you should get to say who your organs are left to. As above I don't see it as being that different to any property you own. I don't think I'd be against them being sold when you were dead and that money being thrown into whatever inheritance you are leaving when you die. Especially if it increased the amount of organs donated.

As for the system of distribution I think they do an ok job currently with the organs that they get donated, but once again not 100% on exactly how the system works to go into details.

[wufwugy]

Distribution should be based on a priority using some sort of scoring system taking into account the urgency of a transplant, good patient behavior (alcoholic cirrhosis patient who shows disregard for doctor's advice to stop drinking scores significantly worse), patient age (why give a transplant to the 80 year old rather than the 35 year old?), and overall probability of success of the operation. There are possibly more factors I haven't thought of.

So, a centralized arbitrary actor instead of many individual arbitrary actors? What if the centralized form makes it more expensive, more wrongly discriminatory, and more wasteful?

[rong]

If we have a legal market for organs, won't we just see a general transfer of organs from the poor to the rich?

Lots of rich old people with nice shiny new organs and lots of poor people unable to afford them, until of course capitalism leads to improved technology to such a level that either we can create organs from scratch or make it really cheap to do the operation? That's how it works isn't it? Seems really fair to me.

[wufwugy]

If we have a legal market for organs, won't we just see a general transfer of organs from the poor to the rich?

As well as a transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor. Not allowing the transfer produces nothing. Allowing the transfer provides value in health and wealth for all parties

It's like if you have leftover food on your dinner table and there's a starving person outside your door who wants to buy your leftovers, yet you have to throw the leftovers away because the law says so. You make less money, the starving person continues to starve, and the food turns to mush.

We understand the concept of trade in most things in our lives (a plumber trades you his service and you trade him your money), but on the kidney issue, we're not applying the concept. I think this kind of schizophrenia is rampant in society

[rong]

As well as a transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor. Not allowing the transfer produces nothing.

Not quite. Not allowing the trade leaves the status quo. Where chance of a kidney is not (in theory) effected by personal wealth. By allowing people to sell kidneys are you not making it impossible for a poor and ill person to get one? So it's not just simply win win for all.

[BennyLaRue]

It should be legal for me to sell my Black Keys tickets too but I can't even do that.

[wufwugy]

Not quite. Not allowing the trade leaves the status quo. Where chance of a kidney is not (in theory) effected by personal wealth. By allowing people to sell kidneys are you not making it impossible for a poor and ill person to get one? So it's not just simply win win for all.

This effect is quite small. It can be said that rationing does let some people who otherwise wouldn't get a product able to get a product, but that's at the expense of things that help poor people far more. Rationing like this effectively propels a small number of poor into a rich bracket at the expense of many poor people who are unable to sell their kidneys. It's a special interest lottery

From a different perspective, I don't think it's important to view it as a transfer from poor to rich. One of my old neighbors growing up was middle class his entire life. That is, until his kidneys failed. Now, through Medicare, he's on dialysis and overnight turned into a "rich person" at the expense of people less wealthy than him, who didn't hit the healthcare income/spending jackpot

Rationing doesn't help poor people. It helps a small number of poor people at the expense of many other poor people, who probably would have been better off in a non-rationing world in the first place.

A kidney market doesn't exclude the current donation market. It's not like there are lots of donations today that would stop if they could be sold. Most of them take place regardless of any wealth creation potential. Besides, if we go down this path, we should be logically consistent and say that a market for anything keeps it out of the hands of the poor. That means that it should be illegal to sell food or housing, which I think is the most destructive idea ever

[wufwugy]

Not rationing oil keeps it out of the hands of some poor people. But not rationing oil also helps keep civilization from turning into a desolate wasteland

[wufwugy]

I'm not trying to dismiss your point that some poor individuals wouldn't get kidneys without rationing. It is a technically accurate point. However, I think, while being technically accurate when applied to individuals, it causes more harm for the group. When we speak of the poor in aggregate, a kidney market helps them way more than no kidney market. But we still could find a small number of people in that group who wouldn't get kidneys without rationing. The problem is this sort of thing is like burning a dollar to give somebody a nickel when not burning a dollar would have given two other people a quarter each

[d0zer]

Isn't the big argument against a free organ market coercion? We already have debt bondage in brothels and rub & tugs in the first world, and a free organ market would open the opportunity for the same kind of coercion.

Like...soon enough we'll be able to grow organs anyway so w/e it's a temporary problem iunno who cares I don't need a kidney

[wufwugy]

Isn't the big argument against a free organ market coercion? We already have debt bondage in brothels and rub & tugs in the first world, and a free organ market would open the opportunity for the same kind of coercion.

How so?

A free market of organs is exactly that. People have no more an obligation to sell their organs than they do to buy snowboards. If anything is coercive, is it not the policy that mandates that any ailing person in need of an organ has no course but to seek donations, which means it falls on mainly family?


FWIW, I completely understand your sentiment, as it is precisely what I once thought. It makes all the sense in the world to view the corruption of wealth to be a product of wealth itself and the pursuit of wealth. But I think if you extract the government equation, you find that the corruption has no hold. Private prisons are a fantastic example of this. The demand for inmates exists because the government pays for it. Private industry seizes this and provides a service for the government. However, if the government did not exist, there would not be any profit in private imprisonment. Does this not mean that the fault of private prisons lies on the hands of the government, not on private interests? If the government passes a law that says it will pay me $100 dollars every time I punch somebody who is wearing blue, does doing so make me the bad guy, or the government?

What we view as control by private elites is actually control by institutions of law. Through profit incentive alone, people would not be arrested for smoking weed. Only through the government providing the demand for weed arrests is the profit incentive able to get in the game Does this distinction make sense? Does it make sense to claim that what is profit for a privately acting McDonalds is different than what is profit for a company that supplies a product or service for a government? The former is beholden exclusively to the free choice of consumers; the latter is a situation where industry is essentially beholden to the government's ability to maintain the mandatory collection of taxes.

[Renton]

Okay, it's time for the big long post explaining why there should be a free market for human organs. I'll start by establishing some givens that we may all agree on.

- [in U.S.] Each day, an average of 79 people receive organ transplants. However, an average of 18 people die each day waiting for transplants that can't take place because of the shortage of donated organs. (from American Transplant Foundation)

- More than 6,500 in the U.S. die each year while waiting to receive a transplant. (from Math)

- Extrapolating for world population this would be about 130,000 people dying annually.


So what this all means is that there's an obvious shortage. But I'm going to change the subject and talk more generally about what happens when you don't allow prices to exist.

The current setup in most countries is that it is perfectly legal to give away one's organs whilst living or upon death but illegal to trade them. Some countries provide small incentives for organ donors, for example in the U.S. you get your driver's license a little more cheaply if you check the organ donor box on the application. Other countries may provide larger benefits in the form of small tax breaks, but I'm not entirely sure. The result is that some altruistic people choose to be organ donors and most do not, because they have very little incentive to do so.

In the U.S., organs are then distributed based on localized committees of physicians. I'm not sure how jurisdiction is broken down for this, but essentially there are lists based on perceived health/longevity and whenever someone dies in the vicinity, the needed organ is whisked away to the person at the top of the list. The lack of prices and voluntary trade introduces a lot of possibility for corruption in this area as there are relatively small groups of people making decisions about distribution. There is also not a lot of incentive anywhere along the supply chain to get these organs to people who need them, and the risk for waste is high. There are also weird laws that directly cause waste. For example, in my home state of Georgia, your organs are null and void if you have been in a prison during the last such-and-such years. I'm sure there are some people on dialysis who would be completely ok with a felon's kidney next to the alternative of no kidney. Alas, the market has been subverted and these individuals have no say in the matter.

A big part of economics that isn't understood by laypeople is the idea of the seen vs the unseen. With prices removed from the picture, we are forced into this narrow view that the there are not even enough donor organs for people who are dying in need of them, and we ignore the possibility that there may be lesser needs unfullfilled.

For example, donor organs obviously need to go to people who are dying, but also to people who are simply sick but not dying. It's a lesser need but it is still a need. Past that, there may be other uses for the organs, such as for scientific experiment or medical trial. It's actually pretty much impossible to know what society can do with them until we create an environment of market-based supply and allow individuals to decide with their dollar how organs should be distributed.


I see three basic statist arguments against free markets for organs.

1) That it would lead to poor healthy people dying because they can't afford organs, while rich unhealthy people spend their money to buy organs they don't deserve. Also, it would lead to poorer people getting worse quality organs. The obvious argument against this is that there would be greatly stimulated supply when people have an actual monetary incentive to give organs. This monetary incentive would affect every part of the supply chain from the donor to the ambulance to the hospital where extraction takes place. Less wasted organs, greater supply, lower prices in time. The actual event of poor people dying from the scarcity of organs would be extremely uncommon if the price of kidneys fell to just a few hundred bucks or something. With the ease which credit flows in modern economies, at worst you'd just have poor people in need having to take on some debt to pay for it.

2) That it would create an incentive to murder people to extract their organs. First of all, murder is wrong and everyone agrees on that, and I'm pretty sure we also all agree on a society of law enforcement against murder. Second, there's already a black market for organs so that incentive already exists. And the artificial scarcity from the subverted market only skyrockets the prices of organs, while a market would lower and stabilize them.

3) That it is somehow inherently wrong to put a price tag on human organs. This is as fallacious as the argument for laws against prostitution. They are both things that are perfectly legal to give away for free that carry harsh punishments for selling. Everything in the world has monetary value, regardless of what we may pretend with our policies and laws. Laws against free trade of organs are just another case of emotion and irrationality infecting public policy.

[wufwugy]

Again, Renton with a better explanation than my own

[d0zer]

People have no more an obligation to sell their organs than they do to buy snowboards.

There aren't people being shipped across the world, forced to buy snowboards for years, falsely promised that if they would just buy next year's model, they'd be free. But it happens in the sex trade all the time. The black market is a big disincentive towards an organ market, even though if there was an open market, prices would drop (ty 3rd world) to the point where it wasn't such a black market commodity...though ofc it would still happen. lots.

If you want more organs, a bigger impact than any capitalist solution is to just make organ donation a default, and allow the option to opt out of it if say you're like the gf I had when I was 16 who said "yeah but what if I need my organs in heaven".

[wufwugy]

There aren't people being shipped across the world, forced to buy snowboards for years, falsely promised that if they would just buy next year's model, they'd be free. But it happens in the sex trade all the time. The black market is a big disincentive towards an organ market, even though if there was an open market, prices would drop (ty 3rd world) to the point where it wasn't such a black market commodity...though ofc it would still happen. lots.

I'm unsure of what you're getting at because it sounds like you're saying two different things by claiming that legalizing behavior that is currently in a black market would lower prices yet that wouldn't deter coercion. This is a contradiction because black markets are a direct result of high prices brought on by low supply, which, in these cases, are brought on by government prohibition. So, when you drop the coercive sex trade into an area where there are not laws against legal sex trade, you find the black market can't survive. This is fundamentally why there is no coercive black market in food or smart phones or chainsaws. The sex trade is no different except for the extreme government intervention.

If you want more organs, a bigger impact than any capitalist solution is to just make organ donation a default, and allow the option to opt out of it if say you're like the gf I had when I was 16 who said "yeah but what if I need my organs in heaven".

This is theoretically possible. Prohibition of alcohol and drugs and sex and any other thing you can think of, as a means of optimally deterring an undesirable activity, is theoretically valid. We even have case evidence for it: child predation. The hyper-prohibition stance is universally accepted for child predation, and for the most part it works. But the reason it works while prohibition of, say, alcohol doesn't is that most people do not want child predation yet do want alcohol. What this creates is a practical effect of government intervention into child predation working, while government intervention into alcohol doesn't. We have to keep in mind the difference between being theoretically accurate versus practically applicable. On issues of sex trade prohibition, we have all the evidence in the world that prohibition does not work. This leaves us with only one option: treat it like we treat food, smart phones, and chainsaws. Enough people want to be able to pay for sex, and the only feasible way to turn it into a non-coercive market is through capitalism.


FWIW I disagree with the argument I just made with regards to prohibition having truly worked on child predation, but I think showing the difference between it and something that people generally want more of is still valid

It's also important to keep in mind that libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism, free-marketism, Friedmanism, whatever you want to call it, 100% espouses a belief in non-coercion. It isn't much of an argument against markets by trying to point out how they're more coercive, since by concept, they're less coercive. Even in some areas where they may not be fully non-coercive, everybody supports a regulatory structure that mandates non-coercion. I'm pointing this out because a claim like "if the sex trade is open and free, it will incentivize coercion of sex workers" isn't accurate by both natural economic market forces and the libertarian ideology of mandated non-coercion


As for your solution to the kidney issue, I think an unnoticed reason why things like this generally don't work is that they're viewed in a vacuum. If we had a government with just one job, to run a simple organ distribution bureaucracy, it would probably do a great job. So, in isolation, the idea looks good. However, the government doesn't do just one of these things. It does millions. For every one of these millions, it requires laws and taxes. The laws are swamped in overwhelming complexity and taxes are a drain on the economic engine. If our solution to every problem is a law that is enforced by a bureaucracy, we're doomed. Government works best when it handles only the problems that it absolutely must. If we can solve any other problems without government, it's better for everybody to do so. From that perspective, even if it is theoretically possible to make a "perfect" law about kidney distribution, it would still be wrong to attempt so

[d0zer]

I'm unsure of what you're getting at because it sounds like you're saying two different things by claiming that legalizing behavior that is currently in a black market would lower prices yet that wouldn't deter coercion.

I have nuanced opinions that sometimes sound contradictory, but I'm just musing on the various and sometimes opposing factors here. I forgot this is the internet and I'm supposed to take a side and ignore all evidence to the contrary.

The thing about supply & demand with the organ black market, is that market is castrated by virtual worldwide illegality. Legalize it worldwide (or even in a large market) and that demand skyrockets.

Reading this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_t...al_organ_trade provides many examples of problems with countries that tried legalizing it. India tried it and eventually decided it wasn't a good idea. And you're welcome to pull the theoretical libertarian cliche of "the government isn't good at anything" if you must, but...results indicate:

Research shows a 25-30% increase in the amount of available organs in opt-out countries

[bigred]

New thread topic for a new statism vs free market poo-flinging contest!

Two questions:

1) Should it be legal to sell your own organs while you are still alive? Why or why not?

2) Should it be legal to sell your own organs in the event of your death? Why or why not?

Well, I'm certainly not going to be able to sell this when I'm dead...

[wufwugy]

I have nuanced opinions that sometimes sound contradictory, but I'm just musing on the various and sometimes opposing factors here. I forgot this is the internet and I'm supposed to take a side and ignore all evidence to the contrary.

The thing about supply & demand with the organ black market, is that market is castrated by virtual worldwide illegality. Legalize it worldwide (or even in a large market) and that demand skyrockets.

Reading this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_t...al_organ_trade provides many examples of problems with countries that tried legalizing it. India tried it and eventually decided it wasn't a good idea. And you're welcome to pull the theoretical libertarian cliche of "the government isn't good at anything" if you must, but...results indicate:

[/FONT][/COLOR]

Of course there are going to be problems with those sorts of systems. When it's legal in one place but nowhere else, it's still not much different than a black market, with high prices and tourism. If something as simply awful as allowing people to sell organs that they cannot adequately demonstrate they own is allowed, it will cause all sorts of problems.

In your link, if any country is the best example of an experiment, it's Iran, because it looks like the only one that used policy that pulled it out of black market territory. This claim is funny

It has been argued that the Iranian system is in some ways coercive, as over 70% of donors are considered poor by Iranian standards

That's half the point. That's not coercion of the poor. That's allowing poor people to become less poor through choice.


I think part of what you're arguing against is the idea of pro-coercion. Nobody supports making policy that legalizes or promotes theft of kidneys. In a free market system, it is still majorly illegal to sell something you don't have the rights to. There are a million things that capitalism has extracted from what used to be coercive markets and turned into markets of totally free choice. What is it about current black market products that stop the same?

[d0zer]

What is it about current black market products that stop the same?

Well first of all, I've never been talking about coercion of the poor in the sense that they choose to sell their kidney to pay for their kid's education or something like that, so let's drop that strawman. I've always been talking about modern day slavery in the form of debt bondage.

A unique factor with the organ issue vs say drug prohibition or prostitution is that you're dependent on doctors to use these organs. Highly trained, educated doctors with a lot more to lose than your average pimp or drug dealer. This makes prohibition in this market more effective, basically shutting off the big supply of money that would come (largely) from the western world if the floodgates were opened.

[wufwugy]

Well first of all, I've never been talking about coercion of the poor in the sense that they choose to sell their kidney to pay for their kid's education or something like that, so let's drop that strawman. I've always been talking about modern day slavery in the form of debt bondage.

Debt bondage exists mainly (perhaps entirely) through government endorsement. Everything from historical American plantation slavery to current Saudi Arabian debt slavery are dependent on protections of the slave owners by their governments. Without the backing of government legal institutions and security forces, owners of debt bondage do not have the capital to enforce cooperation. Consider the Saudi example, where Bangladeshi laborers are engulfed in perpetual debt and have their passports confiscated. At first glance it may seem like their controllers are the private owners of the debt, but it is only through the government stopping the Bangladeshis' potential resolutions that the system persists. For example, fleeing is possible. They can pretty much all flee from the physical location of bondage and from the clutches of their masters. Except for one caveat: the government stops them from getting far through various "security" measures. So then fleeing isn't possible, and it's the government that has created perpetual debt bondage. The private interests on the matter are cunts, but again, if the government offers a $100 to anybody who punches somebody for wearing blue, the industry will be created. That scenario sounds ridiculous to us, but it's not, because we have ample examples of equally ridiculous things like imprisoning people for smoking a joint

[d0zer]

Debt bondage exists mainly (perhaps entirely) through government endorsement. Everything from historical American plantation slavery to current Saudi Arabian debt slavery are dependent on protections of the slave owners by their governments.

I agree. There have been and continue to be cunty governments. But debt bondage is more prevalent in some countries with governments than it is others, maybe because some governments suck more than others? To pretend that debt bondage only exists because of government is ridiculous though. It exists more easily when governments are extremely corrupt and easily purchased but when you consider lower rates of debt bondage in countries with more "mature" governments I don't know how you can pretend that this validates the notion that government in inherently bad.

You start to sound like a wingnut when you boil every every single problem down to the existence of government. Not to undermine the influence government has, but issues are more multi-faceted than simple government influence.

[wufwugy]

I agree. There have been and continue to be cunty governments. But debt bondage is more prevalent in some countries with governments than it is others, maybe because some governments suck more than others? To pretend that debt bondage only exists because of government is ridiculous though. It exists more easily when governments are extremely corrupt and easily purchased but when you consider lower rates of debt bondage in countries with more "mature" governments I don't know how you can pretend that this validates the notion that government in inherently bad.

You start to sound like a wingnut when you boil every every single problem down to the existence of government. Not to undermine the influence government has, but issues are more multi-faceted than simple government influence.

I have discovered it's a very difficult subject to discuss without sounding "like a wingnut". I mean, I have stated several times that I'm very pro-government enforcement of non-coercion policy. I'm not so much "anti-government" as I'm "anti-government of coercion". While there is merit to the idea of private industry using insurance systems to fully replace government, the overwhelming majority of libertarians support governments that enforce private property, privacy, and safety against non-consensual harm. This means that a libertarian government is one with a constitution that does not allow the justice system to prosecute drug users yet requires it to prosecute murderers and thieves and other coercive criminals

I think we view what made democratic revolutions and what began with the US Constitution wrongly. We tend to say "they grant more rights to citizens, that's why they're great", but then we stop thinking about it. Well, ask yourself what those rights are by way of government intervention, and you'll find that they are nothing other than laws that make it illegal for the government to do certain things. Speech rights, religious rights, privacy rights, etc, are all simply just materialization of the government not being allowed to intervene. Libertarianism is about furthering this. If it gives me an anti-government label, then fine. Just acknowledge that everything we currently take for granted as a progression of society has come by the hand of making it illegal for the government to do things. I'd like to make even more things illegal for the government to do. I mean, didn't it work out so freaking well the first time? Just a handful of basic things that the government cannot do is what makes us so free compared to pre-democratic revolutions societies

Within framework of government intervention into economies and social lives, there certainly are good and bad. But it isn't a coincidence that the good is when government enhance the ability for its citizens to choose more freely. Take education for example. I think a European style voucher system would work much better than the US system. I also think an amendment that makes it illegal for the government to be involved whatsoever would work better than our current system. Granted, as for a policy measure, I support the former more than the latter. Part of that is my own sheepishness though. An amendment that made it illegal for government intervention into education would probably result in a system that blows the socks off anything yet imagined, but it's a scary idea.

[boost]

What up Renton? What up wufwugy?

[bigred]

WHAT UP BOOST YOU BLUE HELMET MOTHA FUCKA

[wufwugy]

I SEE HIM!

[bigred]

[a500lbgorilla]

New thread topic for a new statism vs free market poo-flinging contest!

Two questions:

1) Should it be legal to sell your own organs while you are still alive? Why or why not?

2) Should it be legal to sell your own organs in the event of your death? Why or why not?

1) Yes, people should be able to utilize that which their mother gave them to better their own ends.

2) As part of buffing up your estate? Yes.

[wufwugy]