One market still works: the black market in organs

Here's some good news that will be deeply deplored by our mostly deplorable news media: There seems to be a thriving international black market in human organs. Willing buyers are paying up to meet the demands of willing sellers. Even in the age of Obama, markets work.

Here's the scoop:

"In 2005, a rebellious and sporadically employed Israeli man flew to New York to give up a kidney to save an American businessman. For that, he says he was paid $20,000, which appeared in a brown envelope on his hospital bed after the operation.
That payoff would be illegal.

But the kidney donor, 39-year-old Nick Rosen of Tel Aviv, says that doesn't matter. "I smoke pot. That's also against the law."

Rosen believes he did a good deed and that organ donors like him should be compensated. Much of his story can be confirmed, and the case gives new resonance to claims that a black market for kidneys has thrived even in the United States."

The Obama administration faces a choice:

1. Come down hard on Mr. Rosen, start an FBI investigation of how big the organ market is, and then try to stamp it out with prosecutions and regulation.

2. Try to consolidate its dwindling base by wailing about how unfair, even evil, it is that the well-off can buy replacement organs while the poor have to soldier on with the old, worn-out ones.

My bet is they'll go with the class warfare angle.