Skip to main content

It's About the Money

This CBS News "48 Hours" story speaks for itself, so I won't add much of my commentary to it other than to note that it is not isolated to Focus on Children or to Samoa. Within the last two years, similar cases have developed with China, Guatemala, Viet Nam, and other countries.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Agregate Demand and the US Savings Rate

In my last post, I touched on the differences between the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes and Ludwig von Mises. Immediately aftward, I was directed to this story in the New York Times. It seems that americans are saving more instead of spending the their money on consumer goods. Up until this downturn, about 70% of the US Economy was consumer spending, and in 2005, the US Savings rate was negative 2.7%. The "stimulus" is supposed to stimulate spending to get money moving again. But it isn't happening as planned. Folks are saving for down payments because they don't expect to get zero down home mortgages; they're saving to replenish their decimated retirement and college funds. The austrians believe that the best way to "fix" the economy is to allow the "malinvestment" created by the false signals in the economy (from the open market ops and deficit spending) to be liquidated and the resources repurposed into better investments. It...

Haiti Adoption Story

Most of us have seen or read stories of adoptions of Haitian children following the earthquake last month. Some of the stories have had a positive slant (the charity has saved children...) other's have had a negative slant (the "missionaries" who kidnapped and tried to smuggle 33 children across the border into the Dominican Republic). At a family gathering yesterday, my wife heard a story about a couple that was "finally" able to adopt a child they've been trying to adopt for about 4 years. As the story was related to me, this couple had originally been matched with this child about 4 years ago, but the adoption was cancelled when the parents of the child took her back and parented her themselves. After about three years of caring for the child, the natural parents returned her to the orphanage because both of them had been diagnosed with tuberculosis; a death sentence in Haiti. (Mortality for untreated TB is about 67%.) The adoption was finalized just befo...

If It's Not Baby Selling, How Do You Explain This?

Apologists for the infant adoption industry like to claim that the fees collected by adoption agencies are to cover expenses and so on, that there is no profit or profit motive involved in the practice. I usually counter this by pointing out that part of purchasing a car goes to pay the salesman, some pays the rent for the dealership, some goes to taxes, and so on. When money changes hands, and a product is delivered, it is selling. With infant adoption, the product is a human baby. The only difference between a for profit company and a non-profit is that one's books say "shareholder equity" and the other's say "retained earnings.' But in light of this ABC News story that ran last Mar 12, I don't think even the "it's only fees and costs" story holds up: When a couple seeking to adopt a white baby is charged $35,000 and a couple seeking a black baby is charged $4,000, the image that comes to the Rev. Ken Hutcherson's mind is of a practi...