This is for the best.

Kidney for Sale

jeffmiller:squashed:

I know that you’re worried that rich people would get kidneys and poor people wouldn’t.  But this seems insane!  If a rich person and a poor person are adrift on a boat at sea, and you can either save the rich person or neither, you save the rich person!  You don’t sacrifice the rich person for the sake of equality.  It is not better to have everyone die in the boat.  And that doesn’t mean that you don’t keep working on ways to save both of them in the future.  But lives are at stake now, and a combination of indifference and squeamishness is killing them.

I think you missed the point, Jeff.  It’s not about rich people getting kidneys and poor people not getting them.  It’s about rich people getting them AT THE EXPENSE of poor people.  It’s more like being able to save either the rich person or the poor person and choosing the rich person because they’re rich.

You might have a nice high price for your kidney, and you might be an informed seller, and you might not ever get taken advantage of.  But why would anyone buy your kidney for $8 million when they could get it for less elsewhere.  Why not buy it from the homeless person on corner for $10,000, or even $1000?  What’s to stop people from selling organs that aren’t their own?  I think the likely problems are far more massive than you pretend they are.

Selling your eggs or sperm is very VERY unlikely tou any problems in the future.  You’re not going to die from it, but you very well MIGHT die from selling a kidney, or part of your liver.

I can’t believe this discussion exists.  It’s all fine and good to discuss in the abstract, but the reality of the situation is probably not how you imagine it.