There’s no doubt about it, demanding that people have money taken off them in order to provide for the poor and or unfortunate robs the transfer of its moral transcendence. If we must, by law, pay for the housing, food and clothing of those poor then there is no moral virtue to that activity, is there?

Thus, in aid of the moral development of us all, we must ban this taxation and transfer. Instead, we must return to a system whereby the richer do exercise that moral worthiness by voluntarily providing. This has been the operating system of the world before now, in fact it was from Ur of the Chaldees up to perhaps the Elizabethan Poor Laws. Time to return to those old verities.

True, there is an argument or two against this. That many of the poor ended up dead in a ditch as a result is one, for reliance upon moral precepts in humans beings can leave rather large holes in the safety net.

And now to the not very well concealed point. When talking about such body products as gametes (both eggs and sperm), kidneys and partial livers and lungs for transplant, whole blood and blood plasma, reliance upon purely that charity isn’t enough - too may end up dead in those ditches. It does actually work with whole blood, doesn’t with gametes - the UK imports many of them given local restrictions upon payment for them - doesn’t with organs as the deaths on the waiting lists prove and most certainly doesn’t as Bloody Well Pay Them shows for blood plasma. No country that doesn’t pay providers collects enough for its own use, all countries that don’t pay providers import from those who do.

We’ve tried the purely voluntary method of providing for the poor and decided that it’s not enough, we must move to a more effective method. Taxation, a social security system and redistribution. We have the evidence that a purely voluntary system of plasma collection does not work. We don’t need to go to compulsion for we know that mere payment works.

And if the compulsion in the payment against poverty is morally correct then why isn’t the payment itself to solve the inadequacy of charity alone in plasma also morally correct?