Although you suspect that Steve Jobs received special consideration to move to the front of the line of the many Americans seeking liver transplants, you agree that “Paying for organs is properly banned in the U.S.” (“Wanted: organ donors ^[1],” June 25).

What’s proper about a policy that reduces the supply of life-giving transplant procedures and, thus, artificially raises the cost of such procedures?  What’s proper about condemning tens of thousands of people to lives of misery, and very often to premature death, when many of them would otherwise save their lives by agreeing to mutually beneficial exchanges with willing donors?  What’s proper about allowing real people to suffer real agony and real death simply to protect an aesthetic sensibility that is hostile to certain kinds of voluntary commercial contracts?

Far from being proper, this ban on organ sales is pitiless.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux