This concept is currently in play as an idea in the UK. We’re next.
STUDENTS should be able to sell their kidneys for tens of thousands of pounds to pay off university debts, according to a Scots academic.
Sue Rabbitt Roff believes making it legal to sell the body part would boost the number of organs available to save lives and help students struggling with money.
And then there is this website promoting the idea (could be a hoax, but funny).
Can we get the politicians to sell their brains to give to the brain damaged and retarded? It’s not like the politicians are using them…
Now there’s a win-win capitalist healthcare plan Republicans can live with!
School loans are the biggest scam on earth.
http://news.consumerreports.org/money/2011/06/us-student-loan-debt-set-to-hit-1-trillion-already-outpaced-national-credit-card-debt.html
I think the lenders should have to sell their kidneys when they make bad loans. Such as with the housing problem in the US. Go get some kidneys to pay off the bail out!
Bankruptcy laws should be changed to allow student loans to be dismissed in bankruptcy. That would force lenders to be far more careful and selective who they loan to. Less money being pumped into the system would deflate tuition prices. There would be less tuition assistance but prices would drop to compensate. You shouldn’t write a $300K mortgage for someone making $40K a year. You probably also shouldn’t lend $80K for higher education to someone who’s going to make $40K a year.
Rob for the win!
What is the market value of a kidney? Can I buy an Exchange Traded Fund in organs? A futures market?
May be the only way some of us ever get to the top of THE list.
If you sell both kidneys, as a matching set, you get a free tombstone.
In #6, What? said: What is the market value of a kidney?
Since its illegal, its what ever you can talk some schmuck into selling it.
Fervently religious people are all idiots so you have a very deep gene pool of vict… uh, donors to chose from.
Since their brains is treated like a cancerous growth when they are alive, they’re not going to put up much of a fuss and it’ll take a long time until they catch on.
Since you can buy a pubescent Taliban child bride for a couple of goats and a few old, faulty weapons, it might be worth it to buy a couple of tissue-matched brides, use them for a while, until the novelty wears off, then carve them up and put them on ice for spare parts.
Of course only a republican or a psychopath (but I repeat myself,) could be so callow.
Upon further reflection, I have noticed something…
The answer under both free market and black market conditions is the same.
Whatever the market will allow and caveat emptor apply equally under both.
Does that mean that there is no difference between free marketeers and criminals
Funny that just this morning on (I think it was) the Today Show, they did a segment about college students selling themselves to pay for college.
That is, young, good looking (mostly women, but some men)whoring themselves to monied old farts.
Makes a lot more sense than selling a kidney. After all, if you sell your XXX, you still have it to sell over and over again. And, nobody has to know unless you’re doing Elliot Spitzer.
But, a kidney? Where’s Dr. Mengele when you need him???
#9 Did you notice that this story is from jolly old England the home of the nanny state? This is also the place that suggested young women get jobs doing phone sex and is now most definitely rationing health care.
You see they’ve pretty much run out of other people’s money and now it has to come out of the under people.
We are at most running a few years behind them but don’t you worry about people like Obama, Harry, and Nancy. They will get all their bills covered and be at the front of the line. On the other hand you will most likely be allowed to die if you get serious sick once you are past sixty and you no longer have any value to society. Medicare lost 500 billion in Obama care and it got the ax again in this round of trades or didn’t you notice?
That’s the way it is in a nanny state once they kill the economy with taxation and regulation. They do want to take care of you but they want to take care of themselves more so if somebody has to die it’s going to be one of the under people like yourself.
#8 msbpodcast,
“If you sell both kidneys, as a matching set, you get a free tombstone.”
I’ll take mine with extra cheese and pepperoni.
I saw the loan whore segment this morning while getting ready for work. It was a chuckling when instead of shunning such behavior they promoted promiscuity because ‘sugar daddy’s’ and such are a very tricky thing to prosecute due to current prostitution laws.
I’m glad to be an old fart already.
Unfortunately, apart from my MS, I’m a fuckin’ healthy old fart.
When I slow down enough for them (you know, the great mystical them,) I should go in about a month from stomach ulcers from eating the processed crap they feed you in a nursing home. Yuck!!! (Canada’s elder storage ain’t no better unless you’re rich. I ain’t rich.)
Then again, I may get lucky and the US debt will drag down the rest of the world’s economies and they’ll be no state run nursing homes left anywhere.
What a shining, glorious future I’ve got to look forward to…
So the rich, older and well connected are literally consuming the younger, poorer. And this isn’t seen as cannibalism, but rather modern medicine. Well, I suppose you can dress up anything barrack, with enough science behind it. But hasn’t that always been the difference between science and religion. How much longer before Soylent Green becomes a reality?
So what’s the argument against selling your kidney? You’d rather keep people on dialysis for a longer period of time?
I almost destroyed my liver at university.
My father was born with one kidney. After a heart attack a doctor mistakenly gave him medication that killed that kidney.
I watched him deteriorate over 6 years on dialysis. He didn’t want anyone to donate a kidney because he did not want to cause the same problems for someone else in years to come.
Eventually he died as a result.
There is a reason we have two kidneys. Encouraging anyone to sell one on the basis that they will still have one left can be a prolonged death sentence and should be illegal everywhere.
The new broke at 21. Spend tens of thousands and get no job or a part time at WalMart and start paying those loans! Student loans will be the new Bubble that will collapse.
#19 What will collapse is tuition prices (just like inflated home prices). But, yes, we are in a bubble.