I got involved in a discussion over at the Econ Lib blog on the question of baby-selling. The question arose when Bryan Caplan opined that it would be best for all concerned if women considering placing their children for adoption could recieve explicit payments for their babies, not just compensation for their hospital expenses and the like. As part of his argument, he claimed:
In a free market, most of the baby suppliers would be poor families in the Third World, and most of the baby demanders would be much richer families in the First World. The exchanges would drastically raise babies’ well-being and chances of survival.
Here is the gist of my response (made after I teased people a little, and drew some of them out a bit.)
1. Some posters seem to think that allowing explicit payment for an adoption would leave the adoption institution intact. But this is not appropriate to assume that “adoption” would continue to be the same kind of institution. Currently, and for a long time in the Christian West, adoption has been considered a child-centered institution. It is a solution to the problem of a child without suitable biological parents or other relatives. Any benefits to the adoptive parents are strictly incidental. This is what makes it different from market transactions, where the focus is on a calculation of costs and benefits from both parties, who are assumed to be able to fend for themselves.
Allowing explicit payment does more than change existing incentives, i.e. something that used to cost $5 now costs $6. Allowing explicit payment for infants changes the very structure of incentives: transactions that are now literally unthinkable will become subject to cost benefit calculation. This fact will change the structure of a whole variety of incentives. Many of the people who are objecting to paying for infants are making this point in one way or another.
2. Some of the comments in some form or fashion, echo Bryan’s original observation that people who adopt babies almost always love them. Implicit too, is the idea that mothers almost always love their babies too much to sell them into terrible circumstances without good reason.
You are in effect counting on an unnamed, undefined and unanalyzed factor, namely, the maternal instinct, to prevent the worst abuses from occuring.
I find it mildly amusing that you tough-guy economists are relying on mothers to keep you out of trouble. BTW, do fathers have any rights at all in these transactions? I realize that is slightly off this thread, but that is revealing in and of itself. The baby-making process has become an individual activity, rather than what it is in fact: the ultimate in team production.
3. I also find it mildly amusing that a point of view that starts out with a presumption of liberty can’t come up with a principled reason for prohibiting the buying and selling of the weakest and most vulnerable of human beings.