Here’s a letter that I sent today to the Wall Street Journal:
Louise Benson says that allowing people to sell their transplantable body organs would result in poor people being “enticed by the money” to become suppliers; she thinks this outcome would be “sick” (Letters, May 31). Ignore Dr. Benson’s questionable presumption that her personal cultural aesthete should trump the freedom of other adults to make such choices. Focus instead on the economics. If organ sales were liberalized, the availability of organs would rise and their prices would fall. Transplant surgery would become more affordable and, thus, more lives – not only of the rich but of all classes – would be improved and saved.
What’s truly sick is government’s continued prohibition of organ sales.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
By the way, my GMU colleague Lloyd Cohen (who teaches in the law school) writes insightfully about organ donations. Many of his papers can be found here at his website.
