That’s the gist of what Lorri Marquez Chapman of West Hartford, Connecticut wrote in a letter to the Wall Street Journal today. She was responding to a modest proposal by Sally Satel for people to be able to donate their kidneys to others in return for “contributions to retirement funds, tax breaks, loan repayments, tuition vouchers for children and so on.”

Dr. Satel explained:

Were donor compensation legal, it might have been a good option for Donna Barbera of California. Last week, she wrote me asking how she could sell her kidney. She sent her phone number and blood type. “I do not find anything immoral about helping someone get a kidney and in return they help me out of a financial bind,” she said by email, noting that she faces foreclosure on her house. “I have a donor card on my license, so my intentions have always been to help. I just thought maybe someone could help me too.”

Killing two birds with one assault on free exchange, Ms. Chapman wrote:

Altruistic organ donation stands as the highest ideal and should be valued as such, rather than devalued merely because it cannot be employed with the level of perfection we increasingly clamor for in America.

Heaven forbid the day comes when a home foreclosure is forestalled by the sale of a kidney or a piece of a liver. Dr. Satel could more nobly use her pen and voice to encourage others to follow the high ideal that her kidney-donor friend did.

Heaven forbid? It’s awful for someone to be able to avoid foreclosure by giving someone else a kidney or a piece of liver? Wow!