Yes, there should be a legitimate market in organs for transplantation

Click on the title, above, for a comment in the New York Times "Freakonomics" column by Stephen J. Dubner:

Another man in Brooklyn, Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, was accused of enticing vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000 and then selling the organ for $160,000. Mr. Dwek pretended to be soliciting a kidney on behalf of someone and Mr. Rosenbaum said that he had been in business of buying organs for years, according to the complaint.

Remember this story the next time someone brings up the need for a legitimate, regulated market for human organs, as we’ve discussed here many times in the past. Many people’s objection to such a market is that poor people would suffer because a) they won’t be able to afford to buy organs; and b) they may be coerced into selling them. But with the current black market, poor people are already being excluded from getting organs (because there’s a scarcity of donated organs) and being lured into selling them - although in this case, it appears that a middleman got to pocket $150,000 while the “donors” got only $10,000.

And please, fellow Objectivists, hold back on knee-jerk reactions to "regulated." I doubt that in this context it means anything beyond objectively necessary requirements for fully informed consent, and safeguards against fraud.

Free Speech and "Disorderly Conduct"

I'm amazed at the paucity of principled comment about the recent (and unfortunate) arrest of African-American literateur (and Harvard professor) Gates, by Cambridge police officer Crawley, on charges of "disorderly conduct." Gates' "disorderly conduct" is described, on the charge sheet, as "loud and tumultuous behavior in a public place" - the "public place" being the porch of Gates' home, and the "behavior" being loud verbal criticism, probably inaccurate, of a police officer.

Before the essentials, though, I need to say why I tend to think that Gates' criticism of the police officer as a "racist" was inaccurate. I once knew a Jewish gentleman from a country in Central Europe that back in the 1930s practiced its own kind of "Jim Crow" against Jews; anyone who so much as "looked Jewish" was excluded from the "better" places of commerce in that country well into the 1980s. Like many American immigrants from Central Europe, my friend favored shorts in the summer. And, looking for a good place to eat lunch, was often stopped at the door, and told that shorts were not considered acceptable attire in the restaurant that had caught his fancy. On those occasions he was certain that he had been stopped at the door because he "looked Jewish" - even though the same restaurant would welcome him with a smile in winter, when he wore slacks.

When dealing with people who had faced racism in the past, a competent police officer will take the context and effects of their experience into account. Gates, unfortunately, permitted his experience - his first faculty job was in a part of America where racism was common and assumed - to bias his judgment. He probably owes Officer Crowley an apology for inaccurate criticism - or would owe Officer Crowley an apology if Officer Crowley had not taken Gates' error as cause for arrest.

Of course there are, even by the most stringent standard of individual rights, contexts in which loud speech can be objectively criminal. But, outside the context of fraud, or of violations of intellectual property, any legitimate regulation of non-governmental speech must be strictly content-neutral. In a free society, there is only a small set of contexts in which non-governmental speech can be a cause for arrest:

1. The speaker uses a private platform belonging to someone else without the owner's consent. Gates spoke from the porch of his own home, so this is not relevant here.

2. The expression interferes with the process of justice. Gates was not in a courtroom during a trial, and in any case a policeman is not a judge. A policeman is a specialized emergency worker, trained to keep a cool head even in contingencies far more disturbing than loud and inaccurate verbal criticism from an unarmed and otherwise innocuous citizen. So this is not the case here either.

3. The expression invades the property of others and interferes with their other rights. For example, shouting loudly at night, when the noise would disturb the sleep of one's neighbors, might be criminal. But it was daytime, and no one (other than the arresting officer) was irritated by the noise. So again, no cause for arrest.

4. The delivery of a credible threat. Not the case here, and not even alleged.

5. The proverbial "shouting fire:" speech that, in context, can cause a crowd to panic and stampede; or perhaps the incitement of an unruly crowd to a lynching or a riot. But there was no crowd; the handful of non-police onlookers at the scene were outnumbered by uniformed police.

So what was it, about Gates' conduct, that could possibly have crossed the line into "disorderly," meaning "criminal," action? Objectively, nothing. Subjectively, the arresting officer may have perceived Gates' speech as repulsive and insulting. But this is hardly enough reason for a professional public servant, sworn to defend the rights of the people, including the free speech rights of Professor Gates, to arrest Professor Gates for nothing beyond loud and insulting verbal criticism of a government employee, even when that criticism was publicly delivered, on Professor Gates' porch, in that employee's face.

One mark of a Police State, is that one may not speak ill of a police officer without risking arrest. Where is the First Amendment when we need it?

Economics as it can be and ought to be

What would Economics be like without the grossly false, yet somehow widely accepted, belief in the automatic and universal rationality of economic actors? MIT finance professor Andrew W. Lo, and Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson, are making progress in that direction. The title above this blog post is a link to a Niall Ferguson lecture about the complicated relationships between the application of genetic algorithms - "evolution" - in biology and in economics. Ferguson induces his concepts from the facts of reality that he studies as a business historian. Finally, an economist with an epistemology that an Objectivist can applaud. Having once read Ayn Rand's marginalia comments about how lousy the epistemology of Ludwig von Mises had been, economics was the last place where I'd have expected scientific work - with a sound, inductive, contextual epistemology - to emerge.

Conservatives criticize official for opposing reproductive choice. Yes. Really.

The conservative blogosphere has exploded with condemnation of a federal official for expressing opposition to reproductive rights. Yes, you did not accidentally inhale: the same people who would forcibly stop a woman from aborting an unwanted pregnancy, and force her to give birth against her will - including thousands of officials who once held jobs in the Bush administration on the strength of this position - are now a-blather because 32 years ago a Dr. John Holdren, now director of the Obama White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, better known as the "science czar" (barf) expressed support for a Chinese-style "one child policy" with "population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion."

Consider my experience, with what those two variants of opposition to reproductive choice mean in practice. Back in the 1980s, my then-wife and I wanted a child - but we were faced with a significant risk of genetic defects. The prospective results of having a genetically defective child were so catastrophic that for many years we did not dare to take this risk, and nearly resigned ourselves to never having a child. And then amniocentesis for genetic testing became available, together with safe and legal second-semester abortion, eliminating the risk: now we would be able to try again if our first fetus happened to be defective. Fortunately our first fetus turned out to be OK, and eventually became a healthy child. Thanks to the availability of safe and legal abortion we became parents. Without the availability of abortion we would have continued to face an unacceptable risk, and we would have been forced to remain childless.

And then consider the position of the Conservatives. They, under the previous administration, happily endorsed the appointment of officials whose anti-abortion position, if enacted into law, would have forced me to remain childless. But now they turn all hysterical at the appointment of their fellow scumbag whose policy, while despicable, would have been less devastating to my happiness, than their own policy would have been.

Oh well. One more fact in evidence that the bulk Conservative is cognitively crippled, unable to think conceptually about either life, or morality, or politics. But then, they do not even pretend that what they have, instead of ideas, is the result of anything beyond intuition, "common sense," and supernatural revelation. Their usual opponents, on the other hand, are beset by delusions of cognitive adequacy. Creepy and loathsome, the slime on both sides of the sewer.

Three Democides by False Morality - Part II, The Ban on DDT

(This part follows Three Democides by False Morality - Part I, Holodomor.)

If there is a single idea at the foundation of all contemporary collectivisms, it is that the individual human is merely an organ or a cell of some supra-individual social superorganism. Collectivisms differ as to the identity of this alleged superorganism - family, clan, tribe, state, nation, religion, race, even all of humanity - but they all agree that the only "moral" action for an individual, is action that benefits the designated social "superorganism," even if it harms or kills individual humans, often including the individual for whom that action is alleged to be "moral."

Just as the root of altruism in Western cultures is the Christian doctrine of "Imitatio Dei," applied to Jesus' total self-sacrifice for the sake of sinners, so too the core doctrine of modern collectivisms - the notion that human individuals are mere organs or cells of the body of a collective superorganism - derives from Christian doctrine. It comes from Saint Augustine, who wrote (in Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus, 21[8]) "We have become Christ. For, if he is the Head, we, the members; he and we together are the whole organism." It is on the basis of this doctrine that the Church justifies the extermination of heretics, as no less moral than the amputation of a gangrenous limb for the salvation of the "whole body of the Church." And even as some still healthy flesh may need to be cut off in such amputations, so the faithful Christian must not hesitate to sacrifice, in a crusade against heresy, some lives of the possibly innocent: "Kill them all - God will know his own." This conception of the collective "body of the faithful" as a superorganism was later copied by Islam, and by every collectivist ideology since. In every collectivist "morality," the individual is no more than dispensable flesh (or sacrificial meat) to the collective Superorganism.

Until Rachel Carson and the advent of Environmentalism, appeals to the collective as a "superorganism" always included in that superorganism the biological relatives, and especially the children and grandchildren, of the human individuals comprising the collective in question. Because one's progeny are a genuine value to the individual, this allowed the false morality, of sacrifice to the collective, to be cast as a matter not so much of consent to one's own self-destruction, as one of working for the life and happiness of one's children and grandchildren. The children, and the future, were the central theme in the propaganda of the collectivisms of old. Invariably the "members," or "cells" of the corresponding "superorganisms" were themselves individual human persons. It is this aspect of traditional collectivisms that was transcended by the first American to perpetrate a world-scale democide of her own.

Rachel Carson was a marine biologist and science writer fascinated by the unfolding scientific understanding of the complex web of interrelationships among the many organisms in natural ecosystems. Her fascination with the emerging understanding of biological ecosystems led her into a Platonic reification of the global ecosystem as the ultimate social Superorganism, one that included not only the humans, but every organism on Earth, and their environments as well. This made her particularly aghast at the use of chemical pesticides with the potential to eliminate entire non-human species, such as the insect vectors of malaria parasites and other deadly microorganisms, to save the lives of humans. In Carson's view, this amounted to one kind of cell harming the Superorganism for its own benefit - the equivalent of a global cancer.

Carson set out her view of the global ecosystem as a Superorganism, of which the individual human was at most a disposable cell, in her best-selling book "Silent Spring." The title "Silent Spring" is a masterpiece of bait-and-switch propaganda. It is sane and good for people to enjoy birdsong, and to value a healthy and abundant natural environment for human life. But in the course of the book Carson gradually shifts the viewpoint, so that by its end an intellectually careless reader has been persuaded that the global ecosystem constitutes a Superorganism with an intrinsic moral value far greater than that of individual humans, or indeed of the entire species of Homo Sapiens. Once this viewpoint is assimilated, it becomes a "moral crime" to view the global biosphere as merely a value for human existence, a value that can be technologically improved, by human action, for human benefit. The reader is persuaded, instead, to view the global ecosystem as a single living Superorganism - and that morality consists of subordinating not only one's interests as an individual human, but even the persistence of the human species, to this Superorganism's welfare. Rachel Carson's book gave rise to a new kind of Collectivism, and to a new false morality of unequaled virulence.

Malaria, a disease caused by mosquito-borne parasites, was on the verge of eradication in 1948, the year Swiss chemist Paul Mueller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1948 "for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods." "Silent Spring" was a best-seller that spawned a mass movement whose first target was the use of DDT against malaria-carrying mosquito populations. The new "ecological" collectivism first grew in the United States, and within 10 years became influential enough to push through a federal ban on spraying DDT (in 1972,) and by 1985 also on manufacturing DDT, even for export. Because malaria was most widespread in countries that lacked the industrial infrastructure to manufacture DDT, the spraying of mosquito populations stopped, and deaths from malaria surged back to between 1 and 3 million per year - between 24 and 72 million to date.

In 2001, demand from countries where malaria was widespread led to a slight relaxation of the anti-DDT regime. In the Stockholm Convention of that year, the use of DDT was authorized - but only for applications that did not threaten the "integrity of the global ecosystem." This means that DDT is only available for indoor use, which can only protect those who live and work in houses with solid walls. The latter include the politicians and diplomats who negotiated the Stockholm Convention. People who live or work outside those walls continue to die.

Three Democides by False Morality continues: Part III, The Ban On Cloning

Death by Conservatism

" .... The Strongin-Goldbergs, in turn, had nine unsuccessful invitro attempts, and finally had to use marrow from an imperfectly matched unrelated donor to treat their son Henry, who was running out of time. He died of graft vs. host disease at the age of seven. .... One of the reasons that the Strongin-Goldberg family lost Henry was because research on PGD was stalled for a year and a half in the middle of their attempts to use it — stalled by government officials who called it stem cell research, and who feared a slippery slope, and designer babies, and parents who use their children for spare parts. Had this family not lost those 18 months of research time, their real life story might have had a different ending."

Read the whole story (click on the title, above.) Everyone dies, sooner or later, but how much sooner depends on whether the politicians in power are on the side of Man, the animal that lives by his mind - or on the side of faith, of ghosts, and of living and dying in fear of their stupid and arbitrary God. And, depending on which medical technology your life will eventually depend on, consider how many months or years of research time they already took away from your life.