The cadaver market: Death, where is thy bling?

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21595433-growing-industry-tries-meet-demand-corpses-death-where-thy-bling

by colinprince • 12 years ago

2 1 12 years ago

ergoproxy• 12 years ago

"Every man has a Property in his own Person" (John Locke, Two Treatises on Government).

As a libertarian, self-ownership is a central principle. Most people don't have any assets, save their own bodies. People should have the legal right to sell their bodies for medical school research, pharmaceutical testing, organ transplantation, safety engineering or anything else.

Selling your own corpse on the spot market doesn't do you any good, so you'd need to sell your cadaver via a forward contract or a futures contract. Forwards are highly custom and generally can't be resold. Futures are standardized contracts; their legalization would make cadavers into commodities and would lead to the creation of a cadaver futures exchange as well as cadaver swaps and derivatives.

As a left-libertarian, I don't accept "laissez-faire" as dogma, merely as a means to the end of perfect competition. Government has a role, not only in (1) providing courts to settle cadaver forward/futures contract disputes, but also to (2) police the market to root out fraud and violence, such as the bodysnatching and murder-for-profit of William Burke and William Hare; and to (3) bust trusts/cartels among the body-brokerages.

The cadaver market: Death, where is thy bling?

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