I was delighted to hear that the Dutch Minister for Public Health, Wellbeing, and Sports (no comment on his title) Ab Klink has suggested that the Netherlands adopts a system to pay people to donate kidneys:

The plan to reward donors with free insurance was drawn up by the Dutch Health Council, which advises the health ministry.

Although it is illegal for a donor to sell a kidney, the council argues that the insurance option would provide an incentive to donate. It claims the dearth of kidneys has already boosted an illicit trade in organs from living donors.

Trust the Dutch to come up with good ideas, particularly whenever it comes to selling one’s body.

A little while ago, Mark Wallace wrote a great article arguing in defence of one’s right to sell one’s own organs (specifically a kidney) for LibertarianUK.  That was in response to a reality television programme, called ’The Big Donor Show‘, based around a terminally-ill woman whose task was to choose a worthy recipient for her kidneys.  Since it was a Dutch programme, made by Endemol, it’s an idea that’s come full circle.

There are clearly still flaws with the system.  The fact that the government has set the price at the cost of health insurance, independent of the rules of supply and demand, means that the reward doesn’t reflect the outlay.  If free health insurance isn’t reward enough, there won’t be enough donors.  If free health insurance is too high a price to pay, taxpayers will be punished, and kidneys will be wasted.

Moreover, it undermines the very principle of health insurance: that one pays for the risk that one accumulates oneself.  If health insurance is free, whatever it costs, the reward is lowest for the most-valuable kidneys (i.e. those owned by healthy people, who have low premiums), and highest for the least-valuable kidneys (i.e. those owned by morbidly obese alcoholics with a penchant for playing knife games on their abdomens).  Indeed, providing free health insurance for life may induce or encourage some people to traverse from the former group to the latter, by removing the financial disincentive to doing so.

Instead of improving health, by increasing the number of organ donors, it may lead to either an over-supply or under-supply of organs, in addition to the spread of a malaise of apathy towards one’s own health, as observed in this country after the NHS was established.

Take a better system.  Iran has a relatively free market in kidneys, which are priced at $2,000 to $4,000 each, depending on conditions, circumstances, and (of course) the private agreement of the donor and the recipient.  The consequence is that Iran has more kidney donors per head of the population than any other country, and 150% more than the UK.

Far be it from me to proclaim either Iran or Mark Wallace as paragons of perfection, but Iran’s policy and Mark’s argument are far more developed and intellectually-consistent than this proposal.  If it’s yours, it’s yours, without qualification or qualm, whilst a completely free market in organs will be far more effective, removing all the pragmatic barriers to the success of the system.

At the same time, this is no damp squib.  In pursuing this policy, the Dutch government is taking a courageous step towards the free market model, and slaying a supposedly sacred cow in the process.  To allow people a choice over whether they have one kidney or two, and to reap the benefits of whichever they choose, is an eminently sensible idea.  It’s too bad that the Dutch seem to have all the sensible ideas, and leave none to our government.  Is an idea donation on the cards?

Inviting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to appear at speak at a top American university was never going to go down well. Inviting him to speak at Columbia University, in New York City, was the height of stupidity.

That’s the same New York City that counts amongst its inhabitants almost two million Jews that Ahmadinejad wants to wipe off the map, and was the target for the 9/11 terror attacks that Ahmadinejad has asserted was perpetrated by the US government.

But, just to make sure he goes home even more unpopular than he arrived, he pushed the boat out that extra bit further. Other than decadent Americans and conspiratorial Jews, I wonder who else the Iranian President hates. Oh, yeah…

In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who told you that we have it.

The evil tyrannical dictator doth protest too much. Or, if you’re more Simpsons than Shakespeare: “Nice man. I wonder if he’s gay.”

It came as a response to a question regarding the execution of Iranians - in total, 200 this year alone - amongst whom were homosexuals, who may or may not (or, put another way, were) executed for being gay.

Now, I don’t know who the heck taught young Mahmoud to debate in school, but he (or she, but it’s Iran, so he, otherwise she’d be stoned to death) should have told him never to accept the premise of an opposing argument. So, Mahmoud, strapped to argue that homosexuals aren’t stoned to death for the way they’re born, decided to attack the premise: by arguing that homosexuality doesn’t exist in Iran.

Yeah, I’m sure the decadent Western gay epidemic hasn’t spread to Iran. After so fully failing to understand history and geography, Ahmadinejad has decided that he would be even cooler if he flunked science, too. Oh, wait, that already happened. Boy, little Mahmoud must have been the coolest kid in the playground.

Having a world leaders conference at Columbia was a good idea. The best and most important universities in the world - a group to which UCL belongs - deserve to host the best and most important speakers. Sadly, Ahmadinejad was clearly not the best speaker, nor would he be particularly important were it not for the fact he’s making nuclear bombs behind the bike shed.

Rewarding him for his crimes, and those of his predecessors and compatriots, by giving his ideas the oxygen of publicity, is not acceptable. Except, of course, when his ideas are so f***ing stupid, that we can laugh at them, and hope the oxygen just allows that kid to burn up before he grows up to do something really stupid. Oh…