I agree with your sentiment that people should talk about benefits to dying. But your comment really says a lot about where the United States is at as a society. Selling organs to put grandkids through college. Wow.
College education is an example. People will spend resources on whatever they think is useful. Who are we to judge ?
We've gone so far away from proper notions of the purpose and meaning of a society that people are talking about selling organs to pay for public goods. I'm not talking about your proposal to sell organs. It's your proposal to do something so drastic to pay for something so basic.
You generally don't want to start going that road.
> Fast-forward 20+ years, and it'll become expected part of life,
Yes. I think people will probably have a reverse mortgage like thing where they will be able to borrow (but lot less) money today with a promise that they will have to donate their kidney when the time comes. People with certain ethnicity, blood group, genetic makeup etc. will become more valuable and hence will be able to derive more value and hence "rare type" will stop being rare type. This is a great outcome.
At the moment rich people from developed countries hunt for organ donors in Mexico, China, India and Africa bringing a lot of misery to those countries and money for the politicians and smugglers. Do you really like little Indian kids kept in a basement forever only to be killed like chickens later for their organs ? Or would you like to see the American justice system being applied to maximise individual freedom with full protection of law ?
Personally, I hope genetics will soon advance to the point the organs can be grown, thus rendering the whole issue moot.
They are not powerless to resist the ethical incentives. They are ethically corrupt and your implicitly endorsing their corrupt behavior by treating it as an inevitability that is better commercialized than eliminated.
In any case, it seems far more likely that some combination of medical technologies is likely to lead to lab-grown organs before the establishment of a fleshy stock exchange.
I find it weird that we are denying poor people an excellent opportunity to pull their family out of poverty instantly even after an unfortunate event. Here we are using nature's forces to force the "rich leeches" (as one person wrote above) to part with their wealth and help the poor family.
At the moment rich Americans fly to India and China where gangs (and government) illegally harvest organs for the benefit of world rich. If USA regulates the organ trade within USA we can avoid all that misery for poor Indians.
I suggest you want the Indian movie Ship of Theseus which dwelves on this topic.
My point has nothing to do with organ harvesting. It has to do with the U.S. being dysfunctional as a society that organ harvesting for something as basic as education is being talked about.