Dark Marketplaces

You can buy and/or invest in virtually anything in the market economy...Creating an economy-based corollary to Rule 34. That's the last bit of fun we'll be having in this post.

"Investing in a Stranger's Retirement"

Looking to make some money off of someone in need? Buy someone's pension! From the article: "Several buyers of pension payments who were interviewed by The Wall Street Journal declined to be identified because they didn't want to be seen as profiting from anyone's financial desperation."

"What's Your Dead Body Worth"

When you're dead, you can donate your body to science. Or sell its organs on the market. What are you going to do with it anyway? While you're alive you can also sell an organ to pay off that loan...or to buy bread for your family...or because you're forced to by other means. The poor providing organs for the rich; I can hear Aldous Huxley's unsold bones rattling in his grave.

Tropical Islands!

While most of us can't afford a tropical island, the collective actions of western society ensure that someone else pays for our lifestyle. Rising seas, the direct result of climate change, stand to displace 70,000 people. The U.S. has already guaranteed Marshall Islanders strife and disease for years to come, and defined affected areas in a limited way so as to limit desperately-needed reparations.

The darkest marketplace of all is the one in which the full price of unchecked industrialization exacts payments from indigenous people around the world. This tribute is fully payable in suffering.