Every day, 17 individuals die while waiting for a vital organ.

In 2004, 3,886 people died while waiting for kidney transplants alone. Even many whose lives were saved by transplants had to wait for extended periods of time in order to receive an organ. During the waits, their bodies experienced irreversible damage. The easiest and simplest solution to the problem of organ shortages, however, is allowing compensation to be offered for an organ donation, a practice which unfortunately is prohibited by federal law.

A fundamental axiom of economics is that the higher the price of something, the more willing suppliers are to offer it for sale. In a competitive market, when the government sets a price ceiling for a product -- not allowing the price to rise above a certain level -- shortages occur if the market price would be higher without such controls.

For example, if the government capped the price of gasoline at 50 cents a gallon, severe shortages would occur because producers would not be willing or able to offer as much gasoline at that price as consumers would demand. Contemporary history holds countless examples of such well-intentioned but disastrous policies.

In the case of organs, the ban on selling organs essentially operates as a price ceiling at $0. Some people still provide organs because doing so allows them to help other people with little harm to themselves, which creates a net benefit for a donor with a utilitarian philosophy. Although many people claim to hold such ethical beliefs, if everyone followed them, there would be no shortage of organs. Allowing organs to be bought and sold would encourage even those not motivated primarily by concern for others to provide organs to those who need them.

Opponents of organ markets tend to stick on this subject, stressing that organ donation is a moral, charitable act that appeals to the best in us, while an organ market would appeal to greed. Yet, while those advocating this position hold that organs should only be allowed to be donated if a person's motives are pure, someone facing death on an organ waiting list would probably disagree.

Some opponents of organ markets envision a nightmare world where people would be murdered for their organs, or where you might go out for a drink at a seedy bar and wake up the next morning with crude stitches on the skin over where your liver used to be.

These irrational fears stem from ignorance of how an organ market would actually work. You wouldn't simply be able to take a pancreas down to the local pawn shop and tell the owner that you found it on the side of the road. For live organ transplants, such as a kidney transplant, the exchange would be facilitated at a hospital. The donor and receiver would receive operations in tandem. Because kidneys are highly perishable, and because there is a constantly renewing demand for kidneys, there would be no banks of kidneys sitting around, and no opportunity for buying or selling harvested kidneys when the donor is not directly involved.

Kidneys represent a special circumstance in organ transplant, however, because a live donors can provide one of their kidneys with few associated risks. Hearts, livers and lungs are necessary for survival. Donating these organs while living would constitute physician-assisted suicide. These organs should instead be harvested from cadavers after death.

In the present system, checking the organ donor box on your driver's license is not enough to ensure your organs will be donated. Your family must also give consent. Furthermore, if you die outside of a hospital, your family may simply not think of arranging for your organs to be harvested before you are taken to a funeral home.

Cadaver organ harvesting in a system of legalized organ selling would most likely be facilitated by contracts signed long before death, not premortem. While living, a future donor would sign over the rights to his or her cadaveric organs to a third party. The third party would pay a sum to a donor based upon the likelihood that her organs would be harvestable and her estimated life expectancy.

Upon death, the third party would automatically harvest the deceased's organs if possible without needing to obtain permission from the family, and these organs would then become available for immediate sale and transplant. Under this system, profit of the third party brokers would be maximized when these brokers correctly estimated the demand for vital organs. Thus, the goal of the firms (maximizing profits) would correlate with saving as many lives as possible.

Aside from the lives that would be saved by such a system, an organ market would provide numerous other benefits to society. For one, a family member or friend with a matching kidney for someone needing a kidney transplant would no longer feel obligated to provide that kidney. In other words, because a large pool of kidney donors would exist, the family member or friend would not be the patient's only chance of survival. Furthermore, everyone living would be eligible to receive cash payments for the rights to their future cadaveric organs.

One argument against an organ market is that only the rich would be able to afford organs. But because the potential supply of organs is so huge, and the costs of donating future cadaveric organs is nonexistent, relatively small amounts of money compared to operating and hospitalization costs would induce a dramatic increase in the supply of organs. Who wouldn't accept $100 now for something that would happen to your body after death, save several lives, not affect you adversely? Also, helping those who could not afford organs would simply require a donation of money, whereas in the current system there is no way to help someone who needs a heart or lung.

Opponents of an organ market claim that selling bodily organs as commodities is immoral because this would objectify the body. They claim this is a concept many have fought long battles against and finally won, and that allowing a person to be thought of as a commodity would be a reversal of this moral advancement.

The problem with slavery, however, was not that people were viewed as property, it was that they became someone else's property without giving their consent. A person's right to control his own body was not recognized. In fact, making organ selling illegal commits the same violation of a person's right to control his own body as slavery does.

While those opposing organ markets sit comfortably in their ivory towers contemplating the purity of humanity and decrying the objectification of the body, criminalization of organ markets condemns over 6,200 innocent Americans to unnecessary and preventable deaths -- more than the American casualties in both the World Trade Center attacks and the Iraq War combined.

-- Tanner Jones is an economics senior. He can be reached at dailyopinion@ou.edu.
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