What Money Can’t Buy

Michael J. Sandel

This book make you realize that almost everything is on sale today. A prison cell upgrade for $82 per night, the right to immigrate to the United States for $500,000, the right to shoot an endangered black rhino for $150,000, the right to emit a metric ton of carbon into the atmosphere for $18 and the list goes on and on.

Life insurance was considered disgraceful and prohibited in most European countries for centuries. It was sort of gambling and thought to create an incentive for murder at the beginning. It began to grow 1850s by emphasizing its protective purpose. As the industry grew, life insurance became an instrument of saving and investment. Then a century later the lines separating insurance, investment and gambling have all vanished. Corporate-owned life insurance (COLI) such as “janitors insurance” and viatical industry trading life insurance policy for those in ailing and terminal condition flourish. An investor buys the policy from a person desperately in need of cash at a discount of $50,000, then the original policy holder dies, the investor collects the $100,000.

It seems that capitalism market has invaded into the area which should not have.
We need to rethink the role that market should play in our society before it getting too late.