This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 20, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Iran may not offer much to praise in terms of civil society,

but it is the only nation with an operating market for human kidneys.

Dr Benjamin Hippen is a transplant nephroologist and author of a new Cato Institute policy analysis,

organ sales and moral travails, lessons from the living kidney donor

program in Iran.

When people try to defend subsidies for the arts, they often talk about megalangelo.

And the retort from libertarians is, do we really want to emulate the Medicis of Rome?

Here you have sort of a case where we have a country that we probably would not like to emulate in many ways,

but could be instructive for the purposes of understanding how to more efficiently allocate voluntarily our organs.

I agree with that.

The idea behind looking at the Iranian model

is not to hold it up as an example of things we can emulate.

The reason to look at the Iranian model is that it's the only model in the world that we have that actually

informs the theoretical debate pro and con over a regulated market in

organs.

Ron's the only country in the world that has a legal organ vendor market. They've had it for 20 years.

Consequently, the data that's been published from Iran gives us an opportunity to

test empirically whether some of the criticisms and concerns about

a regulated organ market hold up or not and what I found is that some of them do and

some of them don't.

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