I have serious doubts about the degree of commitment to the free market held by some of its so-called supporters. They usually lack the courage of their professed convictions. Take Social Security reform, for example. The nattering nabobs of negativity claim the Social Security fund will be soon bankrupt. How unimaginative they are.
Even the most indigent American is wandering around with priceless assets that the business-minded Federal government prevents them from capitalizing upon. At current rates, each of us has some $200,000 worth of transplant material wrapped up in our mortal coil, yet because of the 1984 National Organ Transplantation Act, we cannot raise any readies from them.
Doctors, hospitals and morticians can be rewarded – and generously so – for their cooperation in dismembering and distributing us to well-insured recipients. Is embalming fluid free? How many transplant surgeons do you get working for free? The AMA would have them stripped of their stethoscopes and have their scalpels ceremonially broken for merely thinking of pro bono work. But because of this confiscatory and probably unconstitutional organ transplant law, the legal owners of these assets – ourselves – get not one red cent from the use of a precious resource in which we have each invested a lifetime of toil.
Adam Smith’s invisible hand is just begging to be transplanted into this field. Of course you may object that it’s difficult for a cadaver to take profits from such a sale, but that is being heretically pessimistic about the ingenuity of the financial markets. For example, remember viaticals, which allow people to cash in on their life insurance while they still have a life to enjoy? What’s wrong with a futures market in organs that would make a return for the living, and help those in need of the organs?
At present there is a chronic donor shortage because we are relying on that most fungible of qualities, altruism, to provide a supply. A limited number of people will put their heart and soul into a good cause. Far fewer will follow up with their liver and pancreas. On the other hand, offer a serious financial inducement and people would be lining up outside hospitals to make an offer. After all people get paid for sperm and ova donations, why not for testicles and ovaries? And while they’re at it, why not hearts and kidneys?
Once the money was on offer we would begin to see the market operate at its best, matching supply and demand and fixing appropriate prices for organs and tissue, going beyond the old barter economics of a cornea for a cornea. We would see the rapid development of a spot market, of derivatives, futures, hedging. Investors could go long or short on the organ of their choice.
The pool of transplant parts would be much bigger, allowing better tissue typing and consumer choice. It would be the patients’ right to choose whether they wanted to expend their resources on a top-class athletic heart, or go for a cheaper brand – a couch potato clunker with just a few years left on the clock. It would be market heaven as people threw away their crutches and ran on newly transplanted legs, fueled by their recycled hearts.
However the liberation of our organs from the state can also solve other pressing social problems – not least the timidity of Washington in dealing with Social Security reform. In the longer term, the people who would rush to sell organ futures would very likely also be the people least likely to have private pension schemes and who could benefit most from topping up their social security funds.
Rather than allow people to spend the advance donor payment immediately in one big binge (bad for the livers), only a modest incentive sum would be paid directly from the proceeds of an organ futures purchase – just enough to give a Keynesian kick to the consumer market. The cash-up-front part of the deal would allow future donors to buy a new home theater system or, better still, a new pick-up, which would not only give a welcome boost to Detroit, but also hasten delivery of the driver’s organs when they hit the road alongside their celebratory six packs.
That would still live a six figure sum (exactly how much would depend on how the market shook down) to be vested in a private Social Security top-up investment fund to be put in the stock market – you know, blue chips such as Enron and the like. Once again, the free market would actually deliver to the poor and disadvantaged those things that the anti-business, bleeding-heart liberals are always going on about.
It is true that some people might feel squeamish about the organ market, but not nearly as squeamish as Capitol Hill decision-makers feel about the most horrifyingly simple way to save Social Security: to end the ceiling on contributions and make the high earners pay on their full earnings. In comparison, peddling organs is a no-brainer. Now brain transplants…. There’s an idea!
