Bathtub Full Of Ice

I shudder to think of my kidneys failing from complications from my type I diabetes in the future. I try to limit alcohol, I am eating right, but they still might fail regardless, a common problem with people who have the diabetes.

I should hope that in the future I might be able to contract directly with someone willing to sell a kidney. I might want a kidney more than I want my money, and a donor wants money more than he wants his kidney. Seems like a good exchange, eh?

I love these moral arguments because I am rarely on the side society chooses. In my world, I'd legalize the selling of organs -- supply would eventually reach or exceed demand, the price would drop, the price would normalize, 15,000 fewer people would die each year and 15,000 other people would have money to go blow at the casino. These arguments that the poor would be put at surgical risk, the assumption being that they would be the first to donate: I don't buy this argument because no one is forced to donate. If they weight the costs and risks associated with donating a kidney (a legal option for anyone today), why should anyone else care? Everyone would have to assume their own risks if they did. Is it the government's place to limit a poor man's risk? Suppose he also likes to skydive...you know, in between stints at the homeless shelter. Should we be limiting that, too?

I also don't buy the argument that it would create a black market for organs, that people might wake up some evening in bathtubs full of ice.

Black markets exist for products and services not freely available, such as for vicodin, sex, lungs, caviar, snuff films, knives, cigarettes, pirated videos, roll-your-own tobacco, firearms, fuel, currency, and in times of war, rubber, coffee, metal, beans and butter. If it were legalized, I'd expect the supply of organs to dramatically increase, to the point that a black market wouldn't be a viable business proposition.

I mention all this, because in my dreams I dream of a modern day depression where black markets would dominate, and I wonder how I'd personally manage through one. It makes sense to engage this though experiment because a depression isn't outside the realm of possibility, not with a government spending one point three million million more each year than it takes in, with a constituency that's conditioned to consume five times the resources per capita of every other nation. It is possible. And I wonder -- what would I be able to offer on a localized black market for the things I want?

A kidney?