America’s organ problem

In the United States, selling your organs is illegal.

As if the government didn’t already violate every right to your body imaginable by telling you what drugs you can and cannot use, what property you can and cannot own (in Vermont, a 16 round magazine just became illegal, but 15 is just fine). Where you can live (borders). Where you can work (minimum wage laws in Massachusetts prevent workers from working at jobs for less than $12/hr), who you can have sex with (prostitution is illegal in most of the country).

The government even reserves the right to kidnap you at any time and force you to murder people and risk being murdered: it’s called conscription, and is a reminder that slavery is alive and well, it’s just a government program now.

But what really takes the cake. What really rubs it in your face that you don’t own your own life or body, is that the government has made it illegal to sell your organs. See, if you weren’t a slave - if you actually owned yourself, nobody could tell you any of these things. And the government certainly couldn’t tell you what to do with your kidneys.

People are dying because of this government law

I was at the DMV the other day to renew my license, and every one of their several dozen screens was playing the same message on repeat: donate your organs when you die, there’s not enough donors, the queue of people waiting is over 120,000, many die in line. The facts were promptly followed by guilt-laden imagery of how you’re a misinformed simpleton (even old people can donate!) who could be a hero (by saving a life!), if only you’d stop being so selfish!

Amazing, considering this entire shortage is caused by government regulation in the first place.

The solution is shockingly simple: let people sell their own organs.

Many people struggle giving their children an inheritance. They die in debt, or poor, with nothing to pass on. Many can't afford life insurance. Yet we carry within ourselves hundreds of thousands of dollars in organs. Each healthy human, should they wish, could sell their organs upon their death and have the proceeds go to their loved ones. You could write it into your will! That'd be nice.

With a monetary incentive, that waiting list would promptly disappear. You know what else would disappear? The black market in organ trading. The Chinese Communist Party murders about 100,000 people every year for their organs in illegal, not-so-secret military hospital operations. That's what they do with the Falun Gong practitioners they persecute, in case you were wondering. They then sell them to wealthy foreigners (a kidney goes for $62,000, hearts are $150,000) or make them available to top CCP officials. One doctor was recorded on tape as saying they can get you a fresh transplant from a live donor that same day, meaning they're keeping at least hundreds of people with different blood types and different-sized organs imprisoned, caged, ready to be murdered and their organs taken from them.

If you think the US government is bad, don't go to China...

Of course, there are private organizations who deal in black market organs, too, and I'm going to go ahead and guess that a black market organ extraction isn't as safe (or voluntary) as a legal one.

All of this would go away if people could sell their organs, if people's rights to do with their bodies as they wish were affirmed, rather than denied. But black market organ trading is profitable, to the official mobsters in governments and private mobsters alike, and while some politicians make a career out of talking about "pro-choice" and how women own their bodies and can do with them what they will, nobody seems to be making a talking point out of the choice to do what you want with your organs.