Well, like they say at Marginal Revolution, there are markets in everything. Checking eBay this evening, I noticed that someone is selling the domain name for www.TerriSchiavo.com, with over 22 bids so far (at over $400). (Curiously, all the other domain names up for sale have gotten no bids.) If you are interested, you can also pick up some Schiavo-inspired living wills, pro-life t-shirts, and even Terri-Schiavo-as-Joan-of-Arc cuff links.
Tasteless? No doubt. But as anyone who uses the Internet knows, there are literally millions of goods for which any one of us would have a zero or negative demand price but for which others would willingly shell out money if they could only find a seller. It is an unappreciated attribute of the market system that it creates incentives for entrepreneurs to search out and serve the demand of minorities—even minorities of one. This means that even people with tackier demands can still get served.
True, I am not pleased with the implication that the fact that someone is actually marketing this product means that there is probably someone who wants to buy it. But squelching such transactions would, undeniably, make us worse off, at least if in so doing there results less of an entrepreneurial incentive to serve the minority demands for those products we do want.
