The Senate immigration bill extends Davis Bacon to private businesses. In addition to being a blatant violation of federalism (though sadly no more so than much other federal legislation), this would be a disaster for small businesses nationwide. Encourage your congressperson to kill it in the House.

Epstein in WSJ and Satel in NYT both say something needs to be done about kidneys (reversing the Ethicist’s stand). They both look to big payments to kidney sellers as a way to stop “6,500 excess deaths” due to lack of kidneys.

It is against the law to offer “valuable consideration”. Kidney buyers can take the matter into their own hands and not wait for a law change. Instead of a “valuable” consideration for a sold kidney, consider the following proposal:

• Small payments to lots of prospective sellers upon death
• A contract that pays a buyers organization a large sum of money from the estate if the organ sale is obstructed by family

It would work like life insurance in reverse. Kidney buyers would pay lots of people a consideration that doesn’t trigger the “valuable” language. In the absense of a kidney being delivered on death if one is available, the estate of the deceased would owe a payment. Some donors might sign the commitment without a consideration just to create a strong incentive for their family to honor their wishes with regard to donation.

The proposal is not sensitive to the needs of the grieving family, but I would rather have 3250 irate families than 6500 extra prematurely grieving ones due to a lack of kidneys.

Thomas Sowell asks if thinking has become obsolete.

I doubt if this is a new phenomenon. I suspect that it’s been a problem down the ages, as have many aspects of human nature.

[Update a couple minutes later]

More evidence for my proposition.

The carbon emission offset market in Europe is in crisis because of an unexpected 50% price drop in the last couple of weeks. True to Europe, the traders are demanding government intervention to prop up the price(!) of carbon offsets. While it is true that the governments can afford to buy more, why would they want to? The high price of hydrocarbons will curb carbon emissions.

Assuming that the coal/methane/nuclear balance continues to move toward nuclear for electricity, high gasoline prices mean less carbon. So either we will run out of oil or we will have high CO₂, not both.

Louis Ruykeyser has died.

This is really a shame, because in the context of modern lifestyles and medicine, he wasn’t that old. I was a devoted Wall Street Week fan for decades.

Despite his loss of the ultimate battle, I’ll always remember him as the eternal optimist, an attitude well justified by events.

According to this, pennies are now worth less than their cost of manufacture. My rule for getting rid of a coin is the point at which you can no longer purchase anything with a single one of it. In fact, at this point, with multi-hundred-thousand-dollar houses, and new cars costing over twenty thousand dollars, is there even anything that you can buy with a nickel any more?

Time to can the coin, and come up with some other way to honor Mr. Lincoln.

Ron Bailey explodes it.

Ron Bailey explodes it.

Ron Bailey explodes it.

In The Ethicist column in the New York Times Magazine last month, Randy Cohen talked about organ transplant sales being unethical:

For a system of acquiring organs to be ethical, it must be equitable, which is not the case when one economic class is exploited (and put at significant medical risk) for the benefit of another. And exploitation it is when the seller is not making a truly voluntary decision but responding to financial desperation.

Is it unethical to hire a maid who is financially desperate? If I had trouble getting a job out of college, I would be financially desperate, but I would be very grateful for the opportunity to sell my labor.

Organs are different than jobs. But the difference is not financial desperation.