I care for kids, families, the sick and the elderly, working class, middle class, and every American. To end poverty and advance the American Dream, I am Libertarian Girl.
I met a New York attorney at a conference over the weekend. When discussing the rabbis and mayors arrested in New Jersey, she mentioned that she didn’t want to live in a society where poor people felt like they had to sell their organs, and that these people shouldn’t be taken advantage of or made to feel like they had to do so.
I’m not sure exactly why this rubs so many people the wrong way. What does it make you feel to live in a society where someone feels they must have a job, or they must go to law school, or live in New York City, or commute to work, or attend conferences? Why is selling an organ that you’ll probably never miss that much different at all?
Terri Hertz died waiting for a kidney.
Megan McArdle explains how this isn’t even a moral quandary at all, when people are suffering and dying due to kidney shortages. Not everyone can be Steve Jobs and fly to the state with the shortest waiting line– what about them? Why should they feel pressured to die so that others can make a political point that people should only offer up their organs on a purely altruistic basis?
“It’s illegal in this country to buy or sell organs for transplant. This is an unjust law made and enforced by people who desperately need neither organs nor money. It condemns kidney-disease sufferers to death and potential organ donors to poverty. It’s a law that I will unhesitatingly break if one of my children needs a kidney, and I hope you will have the decency to do the same if a member of your family is in a similar situation.
The sanctimony of those who condemn these transactions strikes me as outrageous. If someone has the right to abort her own fetus, why does she not have the right to sell her own kidney? By what authority does the state tell me I cannot save myself or my family members by paying money I earned to a willing seller of a surplus item? In fact, why wouldn’t a system of national health insurance include a provision for organ purchases? These transactions should not just be legal for the rich but subsidized for the poor, all in a carefully designed and closely regulated marketplace serving buyers, sellers and even medical ethicists. It’s a shame that even one more person has to die before this law is changed.
Of course, kidney buying wouldn’t have to be subsidized for the poor. There are many poor people who amass hundreds of thousands of dollars through generous private donors for a potential organ transplant surgery, only to die while in the waiting line.
Thirteen people will die today waiting for a kidney.
I have no doubt that there is racial profiling, even rampant racial profiling, taking place every day in America. At first I thought this may have happened with Henry Louis Gates’ arrest last week.
If anyone racially profiled, it was the Harvard professor’s neighbor, who apparently called police and reported two black men breaking into Gates’ house. This is another lesson in why it’s important to get to know your neighbors!
The neighbor may have not called in the cops if Gates and his driver were white, but she/he may very well have still done so. Let’s imagine a different scenario: a robbery had taken place at Gates’ house, and the neighbor comes forward to say she saw it occurring but had figured the person breaking in was the owner locked out; I can imagine how she would have been ridiculed for thinking such a thing.
So it’s no surprise that if the neighbor didn’t know Gates lived there, she might have thought the men breaking down the front door were breaking into the house. This is true whether they were white or black.
So just the neighbor calling the police wasn’t inherently racist. I have relatives who always forget their keys, yet they’ve never had to break the door down to get in; they call someone who has a key or they find a hidden one. I’ve never seen a person breaking their own door down, have you?
But an aspect of this that hasn’t been reported in the media is that one of the officers that arrested Gates was black. You can see in this picture that as Henry Louis Gates is being led from his home in handcuffs, one of the officers standing in front of him is black (Gates is biracial himself, just as Obama is).
Gates hasn’t mentioned this at all, the media hasn’t mentioned it beyond publishing this picture. Isn’t that an important fact to get the whole picture of this story?
Sonia Nazario won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her series of articles chronicling the attempts of a teenager from Honduras, Enrique, to reach his mother in the United States. She later turned the articles into a book which was made into an HBO movie.
Enrique experienced far more problems getting through Mexico than he did once in the United States. What do the Mexicans think of Central American immigrants?
Chiapas is fed up with Central American immigrants, says Hugo Angeles Cruz, a professor and migration expert at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur in Tapachula. They are poorer than Mexicans, and they are seen as backward and ignorant. People think they bring disease, prostitution and crime and take away jobs. Some cannot be trusted. People in Chiapas talk of being robbed by migrants with guns and knives. They tell of an older woman who welcomed an immigrant into her home and was beaten to death with an iron pipe.
Boys like Enrique are called “stinking undocumented.” They are cursed, taunted. Dogs are set upon them. Barefoot children throw rocks at them. Some use slingshots. “Go to work.” “Get out! Get out!”
Some migrants say Mexicans exploit illegals for a fraction of the going wage, which is 50 pesos, or about $5, a day.
Except for children throwing rocks and slingshots, does this all sound familiar?
Residents of the state of Veracruz are kind to illegal immigrants from Central America, but those by the border aren’t very accommodating.
He cannot beg 100 pesos. People in Nuevo Laredo won’t give. Mexicans along the border, he notices, are quick to proclaim their right to immigrate to the United States. “Jesus was an immigrant,” he hears them say. But most won’t give Central Americans food, money or jobs.
A friend recently began having attacks where he couldn’t breathe, and his doctor prescribed him an asthma inhaler. Asthma inhalers aren’t something you think much about if you don’t have asthma, but the government thinks about them. Not how they’re saving lives, but how they’re causing the depletion of the ozone layer (never mind that Air Force One and its associated entourage of jets probably causes more ozone depletion in one day than America’s entire population of asthma sufferers).
Imagine that! Many doctors and the government insist they work just as well, but asthma sufferers such as Megan McArdle disagree.
ETA: A reader points out to me that it was not necessarily the American government mandating this change- it was actually an international treaty that America signed along with many other countries which forced the switchover to non-CFC inhalers. This is even more of a reason why many of the international treaties we agree to are completely worthless for what they’re meant for and should be avoided. The consequences are simply not adequately studied ahead of time, and are different than the intentions.
… For $48,000, down from $2 million two years ago and equivalent to the drop “from about the price of a luxury sedan to, well, the price of a slightly less luxurious nice car.”
Thus, we have a perfect example of the free market at work.
If the government had gotten involved to “usher the technology along,” the price certainly would have increased UP from $2 million, and the technology would still be in research stages and unavailable to the general public, probably on the basis of “consumer protection.”
“I once worked on a chicken farm. Actually ‘farm’ is far too gentle a word for the way these chickens were raised, and ‘factory’ sounds too clinical. This was the seventh circle of chicken hell, a clucking, stinking, filthy production line with just one aim: to produce the maximum quantity of edible meat, as fast and as cheaply as possible, regardless of quality, cruelty or hygiene.”
“As swine flu spreads, and fear spreads faster, it is worth remembering that this, and other animal-to-human viruses, are partly man-made, the outcome of our hunger for cheap meat, the result of treating animals as if they were mere raw material to be exploited in any way that increases output and profits.
There is a tendency to see a flu outbreak, like the plagues of old, as an unstoppable natural event, a scourge visited on Man from above. But there is nothing natural about this form of disease: indeed, it stems from an abuse of nature.
Vast modern pig farms, like the huge poultry plants across the globe, are ideal incubators of disease, and many scientists believe that viral mutation can be directly linked to intensive modern agricultural techniques. With enfeebled animals packed into confined spaces, pathogens spread easily, creating new and virulent strains that may be passed on to humans. When dense populations of factory-farmed animals exist alongside crowded human habitations, the potential for disaster is vastly greater.”
The results are disturbing anyway, because the real effect could be that scientists are less likely to criticize something they know or suspect is wrong in fear of harming their careers:
Once polywater was considered a failure, not only were those who had written in its favor punished, but those who had written against it were punished just as strongly! If this is a typical outcome, we can conclude that academic incentives are to just ignore contrarian claims that you do not believe will become mainstream. Try to refute a contrarian claim, and even if you succeed you will be treated just like its defenders.
Arlen Specter is the least likable type of politican– the one who switches positions based strictly on polling and whimsy (most of Congress does this in some form, but not as blatantly).
In addition to his long list of other embarrassing blunders (claiming the Military Commissions Act was one of the worst laws to ever be proposed before Congress and unconstitutional, then voting for it is one low point), we now have this: Specter proposing a law banning party changes by Senators after Jim Jeffords turned independent in 2001. As we all know, Specter switched parties on Tuesday after polls showed he had no hope of winning the Pennsylvania Republican Senate primary next year.
