Blood is worth a lot, people know that already, and illegal blood farming exists in some countries.

But paying for blood increases the risk of people lying about the quality of their blood, which is why the administration doesn't incentivize blood donations.

Your argument about criminality is very wrong. Maybe I speak for myself, but I'd much rather be a criminal than a professional blood donor. People are not criminals because they have no other way...

> risk of people lying about the quality of their blood

this is where middlemen companies come into play, testing the blood and ensuring level of quality

> People are not criminals because they have no other way

sorry, i was not clear enough in my comment. what i meant is that opening up the legal way to sell blood reduces the incentive for criminals to do blood farming or human trafficking for the same purpose. much like legalizing marijuana will push drug traffickers out of the market.

In the US it's already legal to sell plasma, semen, eggs, bone marrow , breast milk, and rent wombs as a surrogate [0]. The legality of selling blood would not eliminate donations much like the ability to sell clothing does not eliminate clothing donation. Considering that there are negatives to selling blood (e.g. time, marginal risk, inconvenience, etc) I think some form of compensation is fair and would only increase the supply

[0] http://www.therichest.com/rich-list/10-body-parts-you-can-le...

>rent wombs as a surrogate

If the tenant stops paying does the baby get delivered prematurely?

Back in college I donated sperm for money. It's not like I was forced into it; it was just nice to have an extra source of income besides my student job.

This also enables sperm banks to retain recurrent donors, which means they can afford to do very rigorous testing amortized over several dozen sperm samples. DNA screening, urine tests, blood tests, etc. That wouldn't be viable under the blood donation model. I've donated blood 5 or 6 times but I doubt even that's enough to make it worth the kind of testing they did on me as a sperm donor.

Western world is already struggling to find enough blood donor, and one of their main source are the students.

You would not want to force those students to have to choose between morality and 1 order of magnitude more money than what they can do in the official public blood donation center.

i don't buy it. my gut feeling is that loss in number of donors due to incentive to sell will be completely offset by lowering the barrier to giving your blood. companies fighting for customers and public image will start charity programs where some % of sold blood will be donated. there are just many more ways in which blood would be donated into the system with open market than with the closed one.

It is not immoral to sell one's own blood, so long as one is not left unable to fulfill other moral obligations.

The moral bit is choosing between 2 competing blood donations service - one that is run publicly to save life, the other to extend the life of healthy individual. I make the assumption that the remuneration of the second one will be most likely way bigger than in the first case. The only reason people would chose to donate to the first one is morality which is unfair.

The morality of the remuneration is orthogonal. I assumed we were talking about countries where it is moral and legal to remunerate blood donation. I don't think that countries that today do not allow remuneration (for any reason) would allow it for this new use case.

You can still use blood from a private company for the treatments you would use "public" blood for.

struggling to find blood because almost nobody wants to give it for free. pay people for their time and donation. thats what markets are for.