The National Kidney Foundation's argument against paying organ donors:The National Kidney Foundation opposes compensation on the grounds that it would "cheapen the gift"--that it may be an "affront" to those who have already donated. ("The argument that paying organ donors is 'an affront' to unpaid donors is disgusting," Virginia Postrel, who donated a kidney to her acquaintance Sally Satel, wrote on her website. "Are unpaid donors giving organs to save lives or just to make themselves feel morally superior?")
Conservatives seem to worry a great deal about others feeling morally superior. I can understand people worrying that they should donate organs as well, in death if not in life, but a lifetime of parents inducing guilt in their children for their supposed sinful natures has unhappy effects on people. People who have been raised to believe that they are morally superior by virtue of birth have other problems.
Having volunteered for Habitat Humanity several times in college, I am personally offended by the existence of Toll Brothers. Also, I've worked in a soup kitchen, so I'm suing Friendly's for defamation. As for hotels, as the former employee of an organization that provides homeless shelters, I can only say: have you no shame, sirs? At long last, have you no shame?
Such as snide, shameful disrespect and disregard for the humanity and vulnerability of the poor. Our elite and their enablers may sometimes have a crises of conscience, but in general their denial is too strong to overcome because they utterly depend on their perceived superiority for their self-esteem. Bob Altemeyer says of these people, whom he calls social dominators: [pdf]
If you stare deeply into the souls of social dominators, they believe “equality” is a sucker word. Only fools believe in it, they say. And if people took equality seriously, if society did try to provide equal opportunity for all, and if the playing field really were made level so that bootstraps could be pulled up and multitudes of lives bettered, the social dominator knows he would get less. And he very much dislikes that notion. He says so.
What we have here is a woman who sees no reason why she should not be able to buy your kidney. Why shouldn't parts of other people be for sale? She might want it, might need it, and who are you to deny her what she wants? Someone desperate and desperately unimportant to the elite. A poor person who needs money for a child's operation, to keep a house, to gamble on his own business. A piece of goods in the marketplace, a cog in the machine, a chess piece to be moved and disposed of at will. That's what we are to the elite, and their pathetic, sniveling wanna-be enablers.
6 comments:
Ah, the terrible, hollow analogies we've come to know and love from Megan, equating human organs with hotels and chain restaurants. She really is a completely vile, smug, self-satisfied idiot.
And the quote she's thinking of is "at long last, have you no sense of decency."
I guess the word keeps slipping her mind. It's not like she needs it anyway.
It hawas too much work for the useless git to READ the position paper she was dumping on.
That was good work, Downpuppy. Although she always ignores the substantive arguments to pick at strawmen, as Nutella pointed out. Still, it needs to be said.
The virginia postrel quote is very funny. I just read an article about kidney donation in the New Yorker that reveals that Postrel is so libertarian that she agonized over whether to *give* her kidney to her needy friend Satel because she didn't want to infringe on her right to *sell* it even though she didn't actually want to sell it. The principle of the free market nearly outweighed her willingness to simply do good without expecting reward.
Funnily enough (not) of course the question of whether Sally Satel, or Postrel herself, or Megan could afford to buy a kidney if there *were* an actual market in them is apparently beyond them. And yet none of these people live in a world in which they can actually afford all the perks of the truly rich rich. If Satel, Postrel, and Megan lived in a world where poor people auctioned off their kidneys to the highest bidder and they discovered that they couldn't afford the cost of the kidney and the surgery we'd start hearing about the immorality of anything but first come first served pretty quick.
aimai
Yes, exactly. It just doesn't occur to them that the can be harmed by others' actions. They're supposed to be protected from harm by virtue of their class.
I think that that factor contributed immensely to their reaction to 9/11. It wasn't nameless soldiers dying that time, it was the upper class, people they knew. It could have been them, and they were utterly terrified. We saw the same thing with the DC sniper.
I guess McArdle assumes that insurance would pay for the organ. And if they balk, she could just call them up and yell at them, and they would be happy to pay whatever the donor demanded.
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