Welcome to Free Thoughts, a project of the Cato Institute's Libertarianism.org. Free Thoughts is a show about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it. I'm Aaron Powell, a research fellow here at Cato, an editor of Libertarianism.org. I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Today, we're talking about what it's okay to buy and sell. Some things strike us all as totally fine, like books and cars and houses. But even the thought of money for other things, like love or organs, makes many people uncomfortable or even angry. This commodification has become a hot topic recently, both in popular and philosophical circles. Commodification is a controversial topic and sometimes an upsetting one. But Free Thoughts is about exploring ideas, even controversial and sometimes upsetting ones. Still, it's worth noting that nothing expressed in today's podcast necessarily represents the views of the Cato Institute or its scholars. Joining us to discuss it is James Stacey Taylor, an associate professor of philosophy at the College of New Jersey and the author of Stakes and Kidneys, Why Markets and Human Body Parts Are Morally Imperative, and the forthcoming book, Toxic Trade, an Unapologetic Defense of Universal Commodification. Welcome to Free Thoughts, James. Thank you. It's good to be here. So, I think it is the case that most of us have a sense that there are some things that's just not right to trade for money, that we get this kind of yucky feeling at the thought of it, but that at the same time, many of those things, we have no problem giving away or exchanging when money's not involved. So what's going on there? Is it money that makes this an issue or is it something else? Yeah. So, I think that it is the case that money is the issue. There's many things like kidneys that people are willing to allow us to give away, but they get uncomfortable and perhaps feel it's morally wrong to buy and sell these. And I take issue with it. I think it's perfectly morally permissible to buy and sell many things, but currently, we currently have prohibited markets in. And there's a lot of discussion currently in the philosophical literature about this. Michael Sandel has written a popular book called What Money Can't Buy, but there have been other philosophers who've written more serious works. Is it the case that mostly it's their criticism of its money, that it's the object here, and therefore inequality or something else is going to be true to it? Mostly Bawari is, but money is somehow infesting areas in which it ought not to play a role. So Sandel has Bawari that prisons, for example, allowing prisoners upgrades who can afford it. And Debra Sats, who's also written on this issue, is concerned that money is playing certain moral roles, but it's not appropriate for money to buy to play. So would this be some of their, like Michael Walter's work on spheres of justice, it's two spheres that should be mixed with each other. So if you make a lot of money in one area, it shouldn't determine your placement on the organ transplant list. That's exactly right. And something else should. And quite a few people are concerned that money is going to allow for rich to gain access to certain privileges or goods that are denied for poor. And my view is that might be true. It might be the case that if you allow an organ market, for example, then wealthier people are going to have, perhaps, preferential treatment. But I think that what's overlooked in most of these discussions is that if you allow goods to be commodified, which we currently, we're only allowed to give away, many more of those goods are going to become available and it's going to be much better for everybody, for rich and for middle class. So in terms of organ markets, would that be where the argument mostly lies that none of the current methods of distributing organs, I guess we could just call it distributing, whether it's donation or presumed consent or mandatory consent, none of those methods increase the supply. Right. None of those methods are actually very good at increasing the supply at all. And at the moment, we perversely have a price cap of zero on organs. And if you think of what price caps are going to do to the supply of organs, this is manifestly perverse if we really want to secure more organs. So imagine we have a price cap of zero on burgers. The number of burgers that are actually procured is going to collapse. There'll be a few burgers which we get because some McDonald's managers or five Guy's owners might voluntarily and altruistically give away burgers. But that's going to be a tiny compared to the amount of burgers that become available now. Could one come back and say that maybe there are certain things that we don't want to increase the supply of, that if selling them would increase the supply, that's not necessarily a good thing. So buying and selling love, buying mail order brides or whatever, we might just say, look, that's not the sort of thing that we want to increase the sale of our children. Or prostitution. Or even organs, that if more people were giving up their organs in exchange for whatever, that wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. I'd have to have an awe about why it wouldn't be a good thing. Organs are an easy case for me because obviously if we increase the supply of organs, we do two things. We help people who need organs, we either save their lives or we rescue them from the debilitation of dialysis if it's a kidney. And we help for people who are selling the organs. We might not necessarily rescue them from poverty, but we certainly make their lives better. So you're saying that this feeling that seems to be, whether it's specific to organs or people have this feeling about a number of different things, that it's just irrational and we should kind of set it aside entirely and get on with the buying and selling and increasing supply or does that feeling represent, is there something going on there that's legitimate and worth examining even if it's not enough to prohibit actual buying and selling? I'd like to give two answers to that because I think it's going to depend on the good that we're talking about. So I certainly don't think that the objections to commodification are necessarily irrational. I think that some objections are, I think, misplaced. But they might be philosophically persuasive, like the idea that people might be coerced by their economic situation into selling something they otherwise wouldn't wish to sell. And so if we allow markets in safe kidneys, then the poor might be economically coerced into selling kidneys. I think that argument actually fails, but I don't think it's an irrational argument for people to make. So I think that first off, we have to look very carefully at all of the arguments, both pro and con commodification and only then make our decisions. The second response that I would give when you asked about people's gut feeling, there I think it might depend on the type of good sold. So whereas organs are an easy case for me to make, a relatively easy case for me to make, something like prostitution might be a little bit harder because we might have a view that engaging in prostitution is unlikely to lead one to a fully flourishing human life. And so we don't want to legalize prostitution and encourage its commodification because that might encourage people to engage in a life that is less than fully flourishing. Sort of an Aristotelian objection there, but we can talk about money. I'm interested in partially, what is it about money that makes this different because there are many things where you could, I mean, economists like to get sort of, I guess, provocative about markets and everything. Right. If we don't pay money for something, we're paying in some other way. We're meeting times on market transplant lists or whatever. Exactly. So what is it about money? That's one that's always got me interested. I think partially it might be related to the fungibility of money to some extent because people can take money and do things with it that you really don't like. They can buy $100,000 bottles of champagne and smash it on a ship or just throw it in the air and shoot it with a shotgun as opposed to giving it to help the poor. Is that part of you think maybe possibly why people don't like money being in play here? I think that's right. And I think that the fungibility issue is at the core of some of the objections. But I don't think that it's people are worried that you'll just use money and waste it or misuse it. I think the worry is that if you allow certain things to be traded for money like love or sex, then it's going to devalue the thing that is being traded. And organs, I think, are a good example of this because sometimes people say, well, if you allow organs to be sold, you're putting a price on persons. You're putting a price on people. And some people who are opposed to organ markets even go as far to say, this is essentially tantamount to slavery. The anthropologist Nancy Shaper Hughes at Berkeley flirts with this issue in many of her publications. And I think that approach is completely misguided. I think that if we're really going to allow people full human dignity and respect their ability to make choices for themselves, what we should do is provide them with money because when they can make choices for themselves, instead of what to do with it, I think fungibility is wonderful, not something to be snared at. So in your book about organ markets, you specifically work within the rubrics of medical ethics to make the case, not within libertarian market theory or anything else just to say, because medical ethics has always been interested in autonomy and different types of self-direction within your own preferences and desires and you think it's morally imperative, not just a good idea but actually morally imperative. Absolutely, yeah. If we take the twin core, the twin values of contemporary medical ethics seriously, personal autonomy, self-direction and human well-being, we can make very quickly a very good case for organ markets. If you allow markets in human organs, you're allowing the would-be sellers the opportunity to direct their lives as they see fit, sell a kidney if they so wish. And you're allowing would-be purchasers the opportunity to direct their lives as they see fit, buy a kidney and then essentially live afterwards. So I think autonomy supports kidney markets and well-being clearly supports kidney markets as well. The would-be sellers are securing something they value more than their kidney and the would-be buyers are actually acquiring kidneys to live. The example of kidney markets or organ markets in general has that feature that I think sets it apart from a lot of other commodification issues in that it's often a matter of life and death for the buyer. What we're saying is like because we think that selling organs is morally problematic, we are willing to let people die and if we let them, the buyer wants to live. But a lot of the commodification issue, you talk about, your next book is subtitled, Defensive of Universal Commodification. Talking about things beyond organs and things that may not have such high stakes. And so are there areas where the stakes are much lower but you still think that we should buy and sell things that we're not buying and selling now? Sure. Votes. I think we ought to be allowed to buy and sell. Some people might say we already do but they'd be wrong about that. It's a campaign finance issue but specifically being like you want to vote twice James, here you go, five bucks. Absolutely. Yeah, literally the buying and selling of votes. And there might be people cringing right now with that very idea. Right. And this could be very practical. We can retain still Australian voting where you don't actually know, others don't know who you were voting for and we'll just load all of your votes onto a debit card and you can swipe it and if you're in California, you can sell your votes on whichever of the 300 propositions are up this week or you can sell your votes in presidential races and so forth. And what would we get out of that? And would we get, we could get a more sort of respectful, a personal autonomy democratic system because a vote might be something you should be allowed to sell as a matter of property. And we could also possibly get better outcomes. I think both of those weigh in favor of selling votes? Absolutely. Yeah, I think that they both would. And I think the beauty of votes buying and selling would be even people who are generally apathetic about voting might actually now start taking some interest in politics if only to work out who's offering more money for their vote. And then they might start to ask why it's one party offering more money for my vote. And then, of course, political ignorance is a huge problem. And so there are whatever 50% of people, if not more who don't vote. Right. So maybe money will make them interested in who's wanting to influence politics. Now, what do you say to the idea that only rich and powerful people will then influence our elections? I think that's entirely false and for this reason.  Democrats offer you $10 for your vote. It's pretty clear who you're selling to. You might even still donate to the Democrats. But if the Republicans started offering you $15, $20, $50, then it's likely you might start to be swayed. So I think if we had a market in votes to answer your question directly, it won't simply be a matter of somebody extremely wealthy being able to corner the market. Because depending on what their policies are, people are going to be more or less likely to sell to them. Extremely unpopular policies will have to pay a lot of premium to secure votes. So in order for that argument to work, would that demand a lack of anonymity in vote buying? Because if I have something I want to sell right now and I want to get the maximum price for it, the place that chances are I'm going to go is eBay, where I'm just going to put it up, let people bid, and it's an effectively anonymous. I mean, there's a reputation rating for the buyer, but I have no idea who that buyer is, and I simply don't care. And so why would voters care who they're selling it to versus just going on to eBay for votes and selling it to whatever random stranger happens to bid the highest? I think that markets in votes will be interesting because people would actually try to secure. Purchasers would try to push the price down by saying, my policies are in accordance with your values. Now, there's going to be some people who just go on eBay and sell to random anonymous individuals. But presumably if there's a system whereby enough people are actually interested in the policies offered and are concerned about that, then the random anonymous markets aren't going to tip in favor of anonymous wealthy individuals. Interesting. So can we figure out any sort of commonality between votes and organs that people are cringing? There are some people out there cringing that we're even talking about this. Is there something that we can figure out philosophically to what kind of things those are? I'm not sure if there's any obvious commonality between them. It might just be that people think some things should not be commodified because they're somehow special and that money debases things. It just reduces everything to the lowest common denominator of a certain amount of dollars. That might be the only commonality that we can find between things as disparate as, say, sex, organs, votes, parental rights and the like. I wonder if, though, that it seems to be the one thing that's common between all of those, among all those, is the level of personal connection that we think is present. So that's obvious for selling sex. It's obvious for selling organs. For votes, votes are supposed to represent your deep seated beliefs as a citizen of a country and we see citizenship as a powerfully constituent part of who you are. So is it that that there's some things that are so kind of tied to us that it's just not acceptable to part with those for money? You need to have a much better or purer reason. That's interesting and I think it's persuasive, but at least initially persuasive because notice that that's adopting a particular view of voting sex, organs, which might not be shared by everybody. So if I'm just completely apathetic about the political process and somebody says you ought not to sell your vote because it's something deep seated and represents your belief, why couldn't I just respond, no, I just want five dollars? And is this any different than other disputes about preferences or values that people have, which in one instance is inherent to the functioning of a market because if two people agree about how valuable something is, they're not going to trade it, right? Right. But on the other hand, when you read the Michael Sandel book, it seems a lot of times like a list of things that he values very highly and therefore doesn't think should be sold. And it's hard to suss out whether it's because of inequality reasons or depriving people of human dignity reasons, but he includes HOV lanes, I think, and box seats at stadiums. And what's interesting to me is that those have some distribution method already. And it's interesting to decide whether or not the traits that let you win in standing in line, for example, to get box seats at a stadium are the kind of meritorious traits that we think should determine the distribution of concert tickets as opposed to paying someone to stand in line. And I think there's some element of merit there. We think that the person who stood in line outside the Apple store for two hours sort of deserves it in some way. And some guy comes along and says, $1,000, I'll take your place in line. Right. And I think that idea of merit applies to, apply to the voting question as well, because I think what we want, we wanna say that if you're a candidate that you earned your votes, so there was merit involved in you receiving them. You were persuasive, you had good ideas that you convinced people would help the country or the stage or the city or whatever. And I think that that notion could also be related to why people get upset about what they see as the role of money, not vote buying, but just money in politics, is that it corrupts it somehow, such that people who really don't merit these votes are getting them. And that's the corruption idea. In the more, not even in the technical sense of political corruption, but tainting. And that money is somehow disgusting or in taints areas. I don't know if you would agree with that or not. No, in fact, I would go the opposite direction. I think that your comments about merit are, I think they're well placed. And I think that people do think that politicians ought to earn their votes through good ideas or good policies. But I think that has implicit within it a premise which I would completely reject, namely that people who have money, even very wealthy who have money, it somehow fell into their laps like manner from heaven. But it strikes me that in most cases, people who are wealthy, even middle class people who are successful or even very wealthy like Bill Gates have secured their wealth precisely through being meritorious in a particular way. They're producing a good or a service that a lot of other people actually want to secure and they're willing to exchange money for. So if we think of standing in line as being meritorious, that strikes me as less meritorious than your hypothetical person who offers $1,000. The guy who's standing in line for two hours can do that, presumably, because the other uses of his time aren't particularly valuable either to him or to anybody else. The guy who's got $1,000 is wealthy enough to do that because he's provided goods or services to other individuals. So I think if we're concerned about goods being distributed on the basis of merit, we ought to be having markets in goods rather than not. It'd be interesting to know, to ask someone who was against commodifying a place in line if it would be, so if a man went out and dug ditches, you know, worked really hard on the farm or something and got $1,000 and then immediately turned around and walked to the first guy in line and gave him that $1,000. And then another guy traded hedge funds, something inscrutable and kind of bizarre and he took, he got $1,000 from that and went to the guy in line and offered him $1,000. I think there are people out there who would think that the man who worked hard for the money to pay that person, you know, he's like, I didn't have time to stand in line but I had time to dig ditches and then give you this money that maybe he deserves it more in the transaction because of this idea of valuing a certain type of work. Would you agree with that? Maybe people out there would think that? Have you seen that literature at all? I haven't seen that literature, I can see but there might be some sort of appeal to that view but again, it strikes me as rather odd in that why should earning $1,000 from digging a ditch be in any way more meritorious than earning $1,000 working as a hedge fund manager? Yeah, I'm not sure. You don't have to pay them $1,000, someone else does and that's the transaction. So endorsing markets in general whereas where people trade money with other people for things they think are worth it is generally something we should be promoting and that means that people with different preferences will be doing things with their money that you don't like and you might have to just accept that I would say. But if we get down to voting in other possible markets we had organs, anything else that you see in the literature places where you think markets would be helpful could be feasibly helpful or things that people are very upset that there are markets in now on either side of that are people who write about how markets should not be allowed in certain areas? I think medical research compensating people who engage as essentially guinea pigs there's a lot of discussion as to whether or not we should use compensational payment to encourage people to do that. And it strikes me but we should be compensating people to do that. And that probably the same argument there about whether or not we're exploiting the poor. Right. And that's an idea that is always present in discussions of free markets in terms of poor having no other options. And you mentioned that a little bit. Would you flush out why you think that argument is not very valid? Sure, I don't think it's a legitimate argument because it's false. And normally when we start off discussions of exploitation we have the example where you're drowning forever I've got the only life belt and I say give me $10,000 for this. That's presumably a paradigm case of exploitation. You really have no other option. But it seems that when we're talking about market transactions, markets are the paradigm case of providing additional options to people rather than closing them off. So nice example of this can be taken from an article which was written by Matav Goyal called The Economic and Health Consequences of Selling a Kidney in India. And this article is very much not in favor of kidney markets, black markets and kidneys in India. But it does show something really interesting. He was able to find in Chennai, India only around 300 people who'd actually sold a kidney out of all the hundreds of thousands of deeply impoverished people in this team in urban metropolis. That seems to show that people in the economic situation who are likely to sell a kidney in India have plenty of other economic options. They're probably not palatable to us in the West, but they could become beggars, street vendors, fruit pickers or kidney sellers. Very few of them become kidney sellers. Does that the fact that there are only 300 cut against the argument in the other direction because if only 300 people sold a kidney then it really didn't budge the needle in terms of how many people were getting kidneys. And so markets don't seem to have had. Well, 300 people got kidneys. That seems to be it. Sure, but I'd say out of how many, you know. That's because the marketing kidneys in India is illegal. Right, so this is a black market and there's significant penalties for being caught trading in kidneys. And you don't want to sell a kidney in India because black marketaires won't pay the full amount. They won't provide you medical care afterwards. Better example for the argument but markets and kidneys will generate a lot of kidneys is actually Iran. Iran's beautiful case because they legalized kidney markets in 1988. By the year 2000, they had cleared their waiting lists of people who needed a kidney. And now they actually have waiting lists the other way. People are queuing up to provide a kidney. Wow, and has the medical establishment, the medical bioethics establishment condemned that? They've condemned it with varying degrees of condemnation. So some people especially transplant surgeons that I speak to say this seems to be the way forward. Maybe we should have more regulation than Iran has but we certainly should allow this. Other people typically academic bioethicists have said, well, clearly these people are exploited or coerced or forced and so forth. Have we found, well, kidneys, of course, you only have one you can give but we see and you can, I think you can buy blood and bone marrow now and it will after an I.J. case that dealt with that. Only things that are considered reproducible in your body that your body produces again. That's currently the state of the law more or less. Right, I'm not sure about bone marrow because I think there was a decision about a week ago which places the status of that case on hold. So I'm not really competent to talk about it for a moment but certainly plasma is bought and sold in the United States and plasma is another terrific example of why markets are just wonderful because the United States exports a large amount of plasma to many other countries including Canada which is currently having a very vociferous debate about a proposal to open a four-pay plasma center in Toronto, Ontario. Canadians are deeply unhappy with this and conveniently overlook the fact that a significant amount of their plasma now is imported from the US and is from paid donors. And so the interesting question I'm sure they're debating about having people become, poor people become plasma farms going every week or so which happens, I had a friend in college who did that a lot and sold plasma consistently but he had the option to do that. As you said, the options are increased, they're not limited by giving them the market ability. Let me ask that about another renewable resource that people want, which would be children. I mean, do these same arguments apply? Not for those renewable so long as... We can make, one person can make more of them. Right. It's not the kidney thing. There's going to be some cap on how many... They can be generated. They can be generated. Renewed. But I mean, would these same arguments apply to that that would say, look, what we ought to do is open up a market in babies and people can get pregnant and sell them over and over and over again? I think better way of putting it is a market in parental rights, yes. Yeah, I think that's a wonderful idea. And I think that would be something that people on the traditional liberal end of the spectrum should favor. After all, this is a wonderful example of women's autonomy, of women having a particular niche market that they can really dominate and exploit.  And of course they currently, you have... There's a lot of ways that people can spend a lot of money to try and get children who can't get them through natural means. So, I mean, we always have this concern about preferring the wealthy, right? The inequality of distribution that we'll develop from this. And that's one concern. The other concern is that a fagin will come along and buy all the orphans and have them on the pickpockets or whatever, we can address that later. But in terms of in vitro fertilization, which costs a good amount of money and definitely privileges the rich in that area, just getting an adoption can cost a significant amount of money. People might be, again, cringing at the idea of markets and parental rights. But again, the idea of whether or not money devalues something is what we're talking about and whether or not the total outcome of people who don't want their kids and maybe would be willing to give them to someone else who would give them a better home. And of course the parents sort of like the vote buy thing. The parents would have the ability to decide whether or not they wanna sell. So, someone wouldn't come along if a fagin comes along and is twirling his mustache and saying, oh, I would like your child. They'd be like, I'm not gonna sell them. But if a really nice family comes along and says we definitely wanna give your child a good home, then they can make that choice. Right, and I think that questions of fagins going around and acquiring child gangs by purchasing children, that's highly unlikely to occur and we have legal restrictions against that. Those are already against the law, yeah. Yeah, so we have children, we have voting, we have organs, can we think of anything that shouldn't be commodified? I'm having a hard time thinking of anything that shouldn't be commodified. I can think of things which can't be commodified. Such as? So, friendship. You can't really buy friends. You can buy people who might behave like your friends but you can't really buy true friendship. So I think we can't commodify friendship. So that's interesting, actually. I like the friendship example may point us toward trying to dig into people who are against commodification because in friendship, it actually perverts the concept. It's antithetical to the concept and you won't actually get more supply. So neither of those conditions that we think come with commodification, you'll get more supply of people waiting to hang around you and maybe, I don't know, LeBron James or someone has a retinue of people who hang around them, but that's not friendship. And people understand that with, but organs, it's not diminished. It still saves a life if you purchased it and you can increase supply. So friendship would be something that money does pervert so I can completely understand that. I'm not so sure that organs are perverted by commodification or not or children for that matter. But is it slavery to even put a price on people in some way? I don't see why it would be. So we have insurance, differential amounts of life insurance for different people. And if you're, say, an actor, presumably, you're going to have higher insurance than a philosophy professor. But I don't think that I'm somehow enslaved because actors have higher insurance amounts than they. Presumably, the horrors of slavery is because you're treating people as property and you're bending them to your will. So rather than saying that markets enslave, markets seem to liberate, it's the prohibition of markets and the prohibition of voluntary transactions that isn't slavery, but it's sliding towards that end of a spectrum. I think a worry that a lot of people have about buying and selling all of these things is not just the effect it would have on the seller, that it would incentivize sellers to behave in ways they wouldn't have otherwise and might later regret or whatever. But the fact that when you introduce money into any sort, any area, it somehow cheapens it or coarsens it. And so it has negative externalities. It makes society worse if we are all like actively putting price tags on each other. Is there, I mean, is there anything to that or is it just, look, it's voluntary exchange? Well, you mentioned prostitution, would you say you have to see a better case for than organs? And is that tied to that sort of? A better case for not for prohibiting selling sex than prohibiting selling organs. Right, prostitution, I think you could have, it's going to be a harder case to make and the good being sold isn't going to be lifesaving. It's just life enhancing. But I'm not sure that that in itself would show that prostitution should be prohibited. It just shows that it's not as easy a case to make as say, organ sales or plasma sales. And I think that if people choose voluntarily choose rather than a traffic to a coerced, voluntarily choose to go into prostitution, then that should be their choice. And if you don't like it, then I think you can try and persuade them, argue with them, maybe even offer them incentives to get out of prostitution, perhaps and buy community college courses or buy a elementary or buy or pay for tuition at any college of their choice. I think some people would definitely quick though at the use of the word voluntary, there are people who think that no one would voluntarily go into prostitution. Right, because it's so generally unappealing to most people. But I think that first response is there might be people who have very different tastes. So there's a whole range of interesting sexual tastes that people have, some of which are really quite revolting to most people. And yet the people who pursue them have shown every indication that this is exactly what they're interested in. So it might be that some people went to prostitution do it because they enjoy it. More likely the majority of people do it because they see that it's their best economic opportunity. And it strikes me that prostitution like other types of unpalatable trade that is unpalatable even for people who are pursuing them. The response isn't to take away what they perceive to be their best economic opportunity for a correct response is to try to alleviate the poverty that they're in. Well that often seems to be the case that poverty is the problem. And when you, I see a lot of appeals to me I understand the objection that these people who work horrible jobs and horrible conditions have few better options than that. And I think it seems strange to therefore cut off one of those options when you make this observation about their status in life and then make a legal one of those few options that they already have when it seems like what you're actually having a problem with is poverty which is what we all should have a problem with. Child labor exists in states of poverty. Child prostitution often in states of poverty. It's poverty, it's the problem that creates the seemingness, the seeming lack of voluntariness in the transaction. But do we need to define voluntary in some way to support markets in some of these things? Do we have to have a good definition of it? Sure, and I think a good definition will be a person acts voluntarily if her actions stem from her will rather than the will of another individual. So we want the conditions are sort of irrelevant in that situation. Sure, I think that they are, but I think that they're relevant in this respect. Persons autonomy and persons voluntariness can be of different values depending on the conditions in which they're in. So if you're middle class in America and you're extremely fortunate and if you're able to use your will to pursue your life pretty much with a wide range of open options. If you're impoverished living in the slums of India you might still be voluntary but your voluntary nurse is going to be less valuable to you simply because your options are curtailed. But again, I think for the response to that isn't to curtail people's options yet further. Instead it's to try to open up their options. And give them more probabilities to get out of poverty. Absolutely. I think one thing that it strikes me maybe kind of important to put out there is that a lot of the objections to opening up markets in these various areas seem to be that the markets will then explode in them. That if we open up markets in selling votes or selling organs or whatever then everybody's just gonna start selling them all the time. But that's not necessarily the case that if these feelings of aversion that we already have are still there and there's no reason to think that just making things for sale would change that then people aren't gonna be as willing to sell them in the first place. Just because you can sell something doesn't mean you're going to. And if you were people are selling them then it's gonna be harder to buy them or the price to overcome that yucky feeling is gonna be so high that buyers aren't gonna be interested in the first place. So I mean, I think that we always have to kind of recognize that there's that check that if we have a strong aversion to something and it's a societal level then even opening up markets isn't gonna change. Yeah, realising prostitution would make some people on the margins, I guess, okay with prostitution but you wouldn't greatly increase the supply of prostitution by legalizing it because those feelings that are animating this entire discussion. Or necessarily demand. Or demand, yeah. Those feelings that are animating it are still there even after you put markets in them. It just there's just more respect for autonomy. And I think that I mean, what have we learned in Iran in terms of the kind of people has there been any studies on the kind of people who were selling, who have been selling organs in those markets? Tends to be people who are poorly off. But what we do have some anecdotal evidence of and of course, anecdotal evidence, we can take it for what it's worth is that now people who are potential kidney sellers are actually seeking medical care and trying to document what they've received, some type of long-term medical care, routine checkups and the like so that they can get to the head of a line of kidney sellers. Interesting. So like car facts, make sure you have all the documentation. Kidney facts. Yeah, kidney facts, that's interesting. And so I think that sort of close that the bigger issues that we have with people have with markets. Some of those have come and it's the same discussion when we have questions about wild animals and nature, I think. And especially endangered species and poaching, this happened all over Africa of people having the ability to buy and sell something that they think is owned and common, which was never alleviated by prohibitions on poaching. Again, a same type of idea that money taints and therefore perverts something that is more valuable than money itself. And that caused a lot of problems in Africa and we fixed some of those by allowing markets. You can go hunt an endangered species now for a fair amount of money, which means that they use that money for animal husbandry, for keeping the endangered species alive as opposed to saying it's owned by everyone. So allowing these rights and allowing these transactions to occur can make everyone happier, even people who love these animals. I think that's a general lesson we can learn from markets. So let me just ask, there's been a lot of philosophical writing about commodification in my senses. The bulk bit has been against commodification one form or another, but you've been pretty dismissive of the arguments in general. Are there any arguments against commodification generally or in specific areas that you think are, I mean, if not ultimately persuasive, at least powerful enough to spend some time with? Sure. I think that arguments offered by Paul Hughes, who's at the University of Michigan, one of the branch campuses, are persuasive at least initially. And Hughes's argument is with respect to kidney selling, that if we're genuinely concerned about people's autonomy, we ought to prohibit kidney markets. And his reasoning is that there are certain options that people have, which he terms constraining options. But if people pursue them, they're going to be less likely to be able to use their autonomy in the future. And his view with, say, kidney markets, but we can expand it to something like prostitution, is that if you engage in this particular activity, then you're going to be in kidney markets debilitating yourself physically, which will restrict your future options. Or if you engage in prostitution, then you'll debilitate yourself socially and people will be less likely to be willing to hire you into normal mainstream employment. That's, I think, is an intriguing, I think that's an intriguing argument. I think it's mistaken because it rests on the claim, but the only thing of value is personal autonomy and the ability of people to have a wide range of options. I think that we might have people who are willing to give up their autonomy for something that they value more. So if you're, say, end of a Catholic priesthood, then you close off a lot of options to yourself and you do so because you want to pursue a way of life that you consider to be best for you. And if you're perhaps a slum dwelling would be kidney seller, you might realize that overall, your options might be closed off, but you might want the influx of cash to perhaps provide for your children. And I think that people should be allowed to make those options, make those choices for themselves. I mean, would that we do this as a weighing because he seems like we're also, or he uses for getting the really constraining, autonomy constraining thing as death and so the recipient of the kidney. Are we gonna count out how much autonomy we have and the equation at the end of the day? Is that what we, should we do that with autonomy? Would this is more autonomy maximizing to a larger group of people or less? Is that how we should make decisions about this? I don't think that we should really do that because it's going to be very difficult to place a value on your autonomy versus mine given that you might value your autonomy very differently than I do. You might just knowing you to ever this is plausible. You might wish to enter a monastery and pursue contemplation and restrict your options in that way. Whereas I might wish to have a full range of options available to me. Thank you for listening to Free Thoughts. If you have any questions or comments about today's show, you can find me on Twitter at arossp, that's A-R-O-S-S-P. And you can find me on Twitter at TC Burris, TC-B-U-R-R-U-S. And to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.