Dark Hearts and Bloody Money

It was bad enough that Megan McArdle was incapable of thinking through her recommendation for the sale of organs and seeing its potential harm to the poor and desperate. To make everything worse, now she compounds her thoughtlessness with smug, snide disrespect as well. Here is the entire post:

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.