Some Shorters

and a visit to an actual defender of Megan.

The Politics of Ick:

Needle exchange programs are JUST LIKE paying for kidneys. (Notice how Megan has dropped "organ donation" and focused in on kidneys? What about livers, Megan? With all that Ambien you'll need one eventually.) After all, ummmmmmmmmmmmmm, needle exchange programs are non-profit public health initiatives designed to slow the spread of HIV, primarily, and kidneys for money are a way for rich people to game the medical system just a little bit more. The comparison is obvious, insofar as Megan is in favor of both and some people don't agree with her.
And then there's this:

Similarly, if we didn't already have this ban on compensation for kidney donation, the poor probably would be more likely to sell theirs. Yet I'm not sure that it would then be obvious to many progressives that we should ban the practice to stop this disparity. In that world, the action--banning--would do obvious harm to actual people, the kidney patients who were already benefitting from donated kidneys. Banning compensated kidney donation would not be a cheap expressive good.

How DARE us lefties victimize these poor wealthy folk by not letting them use the poor as organ farms? We're bigots. Organ donation for pay is an abstract concept that would be just like Megan imagines it to be, and would involve no exploitation, end of story. There's no way, for example, that sweatshop owners might force employees to "donate" kidneys that are then sold for good money. After all, if those people weren't locked in unsafe factories for slave level wages they'd just be on a farm or out fishing or something worse. Us lefties are the ones who reallllllly hate the poor.

The Price of Innovation:

There's often a sort of implicit dichotomy in discussing health care innovation: you have academics, and then you have greedy people. Academics do a lot of important work. Greedy people steal that work, and make a fortune that they don't deserve.

Correct. These greedy people are called health industry executives. Instead of talking about them, Megan points to a very rare independent inventor as an excuse for the status quo. The system works for him, so therefore it works. Also, Pfizer totally has a couple former doctors on its board.

And now, a non-Megan shorter, discovered, as always, via Susan's efforts.

An Ugly, Nonsensical Attack On Megan McArdle:

Here we have someone in Megan's network taking umbrage at the devastating work of our hero, Mark Ames. The first thing you'll notice is the picture is of semi-pornstar Megan Fox.

(Note: we know that's not McArdle. But we dont have a good picture of her. So you get the other Megan.)

So in no way does Megan's vagina factor into this response. Nope. No reason to think so.

"From birth, Megan McArdle has been the beneficiary of public funds: taxes paid for her upbringing, paid her father to venture into a corruption-ridden business world based on using public money for private gain, and paid her wages in her first breakthrough job. Her response is to revile government intervention," Ames writes.
That's nonsense. It's not hypocritical to oppose something you have benefited from. I benefited from vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws because my father was an antitrust lawyer during my youth. Thanks to corporations hiring my father's firm to defend against antitrust lawsuits, my family got to spend our summers in Maine and Nantucket. If I now oppose the vigorrous enforcement of antitrust, that hardly makes me a hypocrite. In fact, it seems that something close to the opposite would be the case: I'd be guilty of intellectual corruption if I supported antitrust enforcement just because it helped my family.

He'd also be a bad son and shallow person for only ever considering how anti-trust laws impact him personally and not absorbing any of his father's motivations for that work.* Megan is a hypocrite not for failing to support something she has personally benefited a huge amount from, though that helps, but for, as Susan noted, not repudiating her father's doings and acknowledging the difference between her history and ideals. Instead she tries hard to maintain the common conservative conceit that living the life they rail on others for actually made them common, authentic middle class folk. Like O'Reilly.
N you've got to love that this Megan enabler calls mention of the conflict of interests issue regarding Suderman being part of astroturfing efforts Megan defended on her blog a personal attack while deciding a normal picture of Megan wasn't titillating enough to keep reader eyeballs. Using tits to dress up your argument is in no way a sign of weakness, so shut up.

Besides, I win, because I'll show you uncensored boobies.

*- I also lose, for poor reading skills. I pretty much had that backwards. Doh. My mistake. But it's a terrible comparison to begin with, in a sense I was giving him too much credit.