In addition to getting rid of attempts at vulgar humor on the editorial page, the Daily Tar Heel’s professionalism would also be enhanced by some fact checking. The actual story is that a contractor traveling with an RNC expense account spent $1,946 at a strip club. The staffer responsible for approving the receipts for the expense account has been fired.

Now, I understand Michael Steele won’t win any popularity contests with the Daily Tar Heel editorial staff (or with the Carolina Review staff for that matter). But there’s still an obligation to print basic factual information. Errors are understandable, especially in a college paper. Publishing slander is not.

Health Care has cleared the House of Representatives. Now, it goes to Obama’s desk. Now, we’ll see how the long-term effects play out.

The bill requires virtually everyone in the United States to purchase health insurance. It contains financial aid to help people purchase insurance, but no “public option” creating a government-owned insurance company. All policies will be purchased from private insurers. On the flip side, insurers will no longer be allowed to deny a person coverage or charge them more due to a pre-existing condition. Both policies require the other – if people were not required to buy insurance, they would simply wait until they got sick before buying. If insurance companies could turn people down, then people legally required to buy insurance couldn’t buy it.

What this essentially does is take away insurance corporation’s freedom to make business choices, while simultaneously supplying them with tens of millions of new customers. The trouble is, insurance companies currently disqualify people with pre-existing conditions because they are not likely to be profitable for the company to insure. Upon being forced to insure millions of unprofitable customers, insurance companies will quite possibly become financially insolvent in the long term and require hundreds of billions of dollars in federal bailouts to maintain our national health system. Insurance corporations would become virtually a part of the government, and the “public option” would effectively become reality.

On the other hand, the influx of new customers could create more profits for insurance companies, since many people currently without health insurance are young and healthy people who choose not to buy it. This will lead to insurance companies standing to gain from the maintenance of the current system, leading to these corporations gaining undue political influence on national policy decisions. An industry getting a  law passed which requires everyone in America to buy their product is unheard of in American history. What’s more, the bill does not contain any price controls on insurance. Once all Americans are required to own health insurance, what’s to stop insurance companies from tripling their prices? No one will have any choice but to pay. Federal financial aid is based on a person’s income as a percentage of the poverty line, not the cost of insurance. Insurance corporations have literally been given the power to bankrupt many people for their own profits if they choose to do so.

What is clear is that the health care bill will not, as Nancy Pelosi predicted, “unleash tremendous entrepreneurial power into our economy.” Neither is it a socialist bill. Instead, it represents a move towards a corporate state, where privately owned corporations become a virtual part of the government and influence the government into passing laws which serve to benefit them by increasing their customer base or harming their competition.  Corporatism is a violation of the way free markets and free democracies are supposed to work. It is not free in any sense of the term.

In short, governments should be for all the people, not just for those with lots of money and influence. Free markets should be truly free. An environment where large corporations use their influence to pass laws creating monopolies, requiring people to buy their product and expanding corporate profits is not a free market. Corporatism is as much of a threat to American freedom as socialism.

But the protesters are absolutely right. I’m completely offended at the non-inclusive language that the DTH uses on a regular basis.

For example, they continue to use the terms “man” and “woman” or “male” and “female” in their writing. By pushing the false male-female dichotomy on our society, they are being offensive to intersexuals and making them feel like a small minority who shouldn’t be able to dictate the English language to the rest of society. The use of terms that distinguish between men and women only serve to highlight the differences between us and strengthen the sexual inequality inherent in our society.

For example, the differentiation in articles between men’s and women’s basketball teams inadvertently highlights the inequality between the programs in terms of attendance, stadium size and entertainment value. From now on, the DTH should refrain from identifying which basketball program it is talking about in an article. Also, player’s names should be made gender-neutral so we can’t cheat and tell which team they are talking about that way. From now on, all members of UNC basketball teams will take the first name of “Taylor” or “Madison.”

I also want to end the use of the term “March Madness.” While it is a widely accepted term in American slang, “Madness” is also an insulting archaic term for those who suffer from mental illness. The continued use of this term shows appalling insensitivity.

All movie and theater reviews will cease to use the term “actress,” as women in the dramatic arts fields will feel more equal and special if described by the masculine term “actor.” Actually, we’ll just get rid of the term “women” and call them “men” instead.

Actually scratch that, it’s sexist. We have to call them “persons.” Because nothing makes a person feel loved and appreciated more than calling them by a term that could apply to any Homo sapiens that has ever been conceived. Nothing is more inclusive than using a term that includes all of humanity. Actually, this might be offensive to other intelligent sentient life in the universe, so we’ll just use the term “sentients” instead. It’s very endearing.

The sentients at the DTH might want to further examine their sports page, specifically their reporting on mascots. For example, names like “Fighting Illini” that honor the memory of Native American tribes that our states were named after and who were all killed by other Native American tribes centuries ago are offensive to the descendants of these people, even though they don’t have any. The DTH should refrain from publishing such offensive and insulting mascots.

But it’s not just Native American mascots. As an American of Irish descent, the name “Notre Dame Fighting Irish” is highly offensive to me. We did not travel over here through Ellis Island just to be mocked by a university with a dancing leprechaun mascot. What’s more, as a descendant of protestant Irish, the use of the nickname “Fighting Irish” as well as associated green imagery by a Catholic university is highly offensive to me as it shows a distinct pro-IRA sympathy. The sentients at Notre Dame may not realize this, but their noninclusive language is creating a climate supportive of terrorism on another continent.

I would also be offended by the Syracuse Orangemen because I don’t want my heritage used for amusement purposes even though the origin of the Orangemen nickname has nothing to do with Irish, Dutch or Protestants, but they changed their name to the Syracuse Orange so they get a pass. Although the color purple might feel excluded and offended.

You may think this is going too far, but I don’t believe in being contained by the box society tries to put me in. In fact, using any sort of definition in any language automatically creates a boundary. By defining what something is, we are also defining what it is not. For example, when I saw “man” I am defining it as “not a woman.” When I say “plate,” I am defining it as “not a bowl.” By defining things, we exclude other things.

This is intolerant and not inclusive. To remedy this, I recommend the abolition of language. It is a tool of our patriarchal society which is used to oppress those who don’t fit inside its definitions. The solution is to stop defining things. That way, we don’t have to draw boundaries that might exclude some things. I realize this will make complex communication impossible. However, wolves, dolphins and chimpanzees manage to get along socially without language, so I don’t see why it should be a problem for human beings to do the same thing. After all, a lack of gendered language has allowed these species to form societies where everyone is equal and there are no dominating patriarchal hierarchies.

Now my fellow sentients, if you’ll all excuse me, I’ve got to stop using language now in the name of inclusiveness.

Grrrrrrrrowwwwllll….Arrgh…woof…woof…woof…

I encountered the small crowd of about 30 of the usual suspects as they crossed Polk Place, rudely interrupting the people at the dedication of the Eve Carson Memorial Garden with loud drumming and chanting.

Stealing a page from the recent student body president campaign of Carolina Review Editor in Chief Nash Keune, the protesters called for the abolition of all tuition charges as well as the firing of the university’s upper level administration. They accompanied this with creepily totalitarian chants of “the people, united, will never be defeated!”

In the crowd, many of the usual suspects in the gang of thugs known as Students for a Democratic Society could be seen. This is the same group responsible in the past year for attacking Tom Tancredo, threatening UNC faculty, and stealing copies of the Carolina Review.

The protest moved to the steps of South Building, where a woman with a loudspeaker proclaimed that “you cannot legislate civil disobedience” and stated that the protesters fully intended to break the law by protesting inside South Building after it closes at 5 PM. The potential of trespassing charges did not seem to deter them as 15 more daring protesters entered the building. The rest of them stood outside and listed grievances against the system barely related to the current budget crisis, including calls for unionization of campus workers and admission of illegal immigrants under in-state tuition rates.

“Education is a right, not a privilege.” “A Job is a Right” “Repeal Jim Crow” (!?)…just a sampling of the intellectual level we are dealing with here.

In the meantime, University officials observing the protest could but stand and laugh and the juvenile nature of it all.

Don’t get me wrong, budget cuts are a serious issue. They affect all of us negatively. They affect me negatively. But the fact is we are in an economic recession. In a recession, people spend less money. When people spend less money the state collects less revenue in sales tax. This causes the state to have a budget shortfall and requires it to cut spending. Hence, the need for budget cuts. To pretend that the state of North Carolina can do otherwise in the current situation is to deny the basic laws of addition and subtraction. Apparently SDS has decided that trying to launch a social revolution is not enough and now they intend on launching a revolution against mathematics.

We can debate where the wisest place to cut the budget is. But these sorts of juvenile protests calling for completely unrealistic goals such as the abolition of tuition (because a free education is “a right not a privilege”) or the firing of administrators is completely pointless, and will change nothing. It’s just an excuse for some leftist activists to yell in the streets and pretend to be doing something of importance.

PS -- I guess it could have been worse. According to the CNN article on the nationwide protests, police at UC-Davis had to fire rubber bullets at protesters to keep them from blocking an interstate highway, while police at Wisconsin-Milwaukee arrested 15 people after they tried to storm the main administration building.

Update: No arrests were made as the protesters agreed to leave the building peacefully. A short video of part of the protest can be viewed here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbXx45stEsM

Here at the Carolina Review we strive for the highest standards of excellence. Therefore, I was as shocked as the rest of you that “Tik Tok” and “Bad Romance” have somehow occupied the two top spots on our playlist.

Rest assured, the person responsible for repeatedly playing these songs in our office will be hunted down, identified and to erase this great shame they have caused our publication they will be given a wakizashi and encouraged to commit seppuku like a disgraced samurai.

In place of the last list, I would like to invite you to browse the National Review’s list of the Top 100 Conservative Rock Songs of all time:

The Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs of All Time

The Next 50

PS – “Tik Tok”?! Seriously? “Tik Tok” is down there with “Wannabe,” “Surfin’ Bird,” “Your Body is a Wonderland,” “Crank Dat” and anything by the Dixie Chicks in competition for the title of Worst Song of All Time. I fear for the future of my generation…

I do not mean to de-emphasize Christ’s humanity in this post, after all a core tenet of Christian doctrine is the Hypostatic Union in which Christ is fully human and fully divine. But by emphasizing Christ’s earthly ministry, we de-emphasize His divinity.

Christ was fully human, and he carried out a temporal ministry which we are called to emulate. But Christ was and most importantly is divine. Christ is a friend, but he is also King.

In a way, this serves to better emphasize the love of Christ, after all, what earthly king is also a friend to humble and poor? But I believe the concept of Christ the King has several implications which make it somewhat uncomfortable for those on the theological left.

Firstly, the concept of Christ as king emphasizes the sovereignty of God. By emphasizing Christ’s role as king, as ruler, as lord, we emphasize God’s final and ultimate authority in all things. God in his infinite knowledge knows more than any man ever can know, and this idea is unsettling to many people. Rather than working to end suffering on this earth, the doctrine of the sovereignty of God tells us that we cannot know why there is suffering and that suffering will exist to the end of time. And the permanence of suffering emphasizes more than anything else that mankind cannot be saved and redeemed through temporal earthly ministry and social justice.

Secondly, the concept of Christ the King emphasizes the existence of absolute morality. After all, if Christ is the ultimate sovereign ruler, then it logically follows that the pronouncements of such a ruler serve as an absolute moral code. “Love” as defined by the theological left is often relative to the circumstances. It is centered around not appearing judgmental, intolerant or absolutist. Yet, as Christ was about to ascend into heaven his last words to his disciples were not “be open-minded and tolerant”, the were to “go and make disciples of all nations…teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

Thirdly, the concept of Christ the King emphasizes the existence of absolute truth and reason. God’s existence, and therefore his sovereignty, are unchanging and immutable. This is a attribute that many on the theological left find distasteful. Shane Claiborne, for example, writes The Irresistible Revolution that “religious doctrines just aren’t very compelling, even if they’re true.”Post-modernists and Emergents argue that God is encountered emotionally rather than intellectually. As a result, Biblical morality becomes subjective and relativistic. Theology becomes based on feelings rather than objective truth.

Keeping this view of Christ the King in mind also gives the Christian a proper sense of reverence for the divine. God is infinitely greater than man, and being reminded of this serves to remind mankind of his true place in the order of things. With the immensity and power of God in mind, earth’s problems seem small by comparison. One’s own life is of small concern. Christians in Cuba executed by Che Guevara (a man idolized by some proponents of the social gospel such as Shane Claiborne as an example of a fighter for social justice) did not go to their deaths at the killing walls of La Cabana Prison shouting “Christ the Fighter for Social Justice!” or “Christ the Defender of the Poor!” Rather, they died shouting “Viva Cristo del Rey!”

I am not trying to minimize Christ’s temporal ministry, but to put it in its proper perspective. Christians do not just follow the earthly Christ of Thomas Jefferson’s The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. We follow the divine Christ, Christ the Redeemer, Christ the King. Christ is worthy not only of our emulation but of our reverence. Emphasizing Christ’s temporal ministry at the expense of his divinity is to miss half of the point. We follow Christ’s earthly ministry, but we also follow the Risen Christ. Christ is not just our friend, He is our God.

The book and author are the latest iteration of the stream of Christian theology which was known as the Progressive Gospel in the early 20^th Century, Liberation Theology in the 1970s and 80s and the Social Gospel in the early 21^st Century.

What these theological movements have in common is an emphasis on the church’s role in doing good works on the earth in the present as opposed to proclaiming the world to come. As Claiborne himself writes, “We can tell the world there is life after death, but the world really seems to be wondering if there is life before death.” In his view, the church’s goal is not so much to convert people to faith in Christ as much as it is to convert them to a better way of living. He argues that “conversion is not an event but a process, a process of slowly tearing ourselves from the clutches of the culture.” By practicing social justice, we are, in Claiborne’s words, “practicing resurrection.” The salvation of man’s soul through the redemptive sacrifice of Christ takes a secondary place to the salvation of man’s earthly body from poverty through following the earthly example of Christ. In short, we are to “believe so much in another world that [we] cannot help but begin enacting it now.”

Whatever else you can say about Claiborne, he does attempt to live out his philosophy. He lives in a communal house in a poor neighborhood in Philadelphia, where he ministers to the poor, homeless and drug-addicted. He lives a life of poverty and chastity, and his ministry (called The Simple Way) is run based on donations.

Part of the problem is, Claiborne’s proposals to enact heaven on earth are simplistic, naïve and juvenile. He advocates not only for the abolition of the death penalty but of the prison system as well. He dispenses with the nuclear family, saying that God has achieved “final triumph over patriarchy” and that fathers are no longer necessary because “only God is worthy to be seen as Father.”

He does not stop there. He calls for the abolition of money, because it encourages materialism and the unequal distribution of wealth. In its stead, he proposes replacing it with a system of bartering. He does not seem to recognize that bartering is simply a less complicated version of the materialism of monetary exchange. The underlying problem, as Paul wrote in 1 Timothy 6:10, is the love of money, not money itself. Replacing money with another form of wealth exchange will not change this.

But it’s not just money that Claiborne is after, it’s the entire system of market economics. In Claiborne’s ideal world, the free market will be replaced by sharing or bartering, and there will be what he calls “mystical multiplication” of resources. He remains hazy about what this means, which is easy to do when one’s economic model is reliant upon miracles to function.

Claiborne uses the event of Jesus feeding the 5,000 as an illustration of his economic model. He does not ever address the fact that this event was a miracle, and as such it was a singularity rather than an economic pattern. What’s more, the purpose of the miracle was surely not to provide an economic model, otherwise Jesus would have repeated it many times instead of only performing it twice. Rather, Jesus later explained (John 10:38) that the purpose of these miracles was so that “that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father.” Jesus performed miracles to show that he was God, not to provide examples for us to live by. It is not our job to take on the role of Christ and perform miracles.

But the biggest problems with Claiborne’s philosophy are not his proposals for social change but his theology.

Claiborne persist in perpetuating the idea that Jesus came as a social revolutionary. He goes so far as to write that “Jesus was crucified not for helping the poor but for joining them.” In portraying Jesus as an agent of class conflict, Claiborne conflates the Biblical idea of the poor with the Marxist concept of the proletariat. As Josef Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) wrote in his 1984 pamphlet, “Instruction on Certain Aspects of ‘Theology of Liberation’“:

…The “theologies of liberation”, which reserve credit for restoring to a place of honor the great texts of the prophets and of the Gospel in defense of the poor, go on to a disastrous confusion between the poor of the Scripture and the proletariat of Marx. In this way they pervert the Christian meaning of the poor, and they transform the fight for the rights of the poor into a class fight within the ideological perspective of the class struggle. For them the Church of the poor signifies the Church of the class which has become aware of the requirements of the revolutionary struggle as a step toward liberation and which celebrates this liberation in its liturgy.

Claiborne also goes off the rails in his definition of faith and conversion. For Claiborne, “conversion is not an event but a process, a process of slowly tearing ourselves from the clutches of the culture” after which we begin “practicing resurrection” by enacting true biblical social justice.

This has no basis in scripture at all. Biblically, when a person comes to faith, they acknowledge Christ as their savior, and are, in Jesus’ words, “born again.” However, in Claiborne’s theology being converted means to tear yourself away from the dominant culture and begin enacting the process of cultural change Claiborne wants to see in the world. Rather than works becoming an expression of our faith, it appears that works become our faith. Claiborne’s view of a converted Christian is closer to Che Guevara and Leon Trotsky’s idea of the “New Man” than a Biblical view of salvation.

Likewise, his definition of faith has problems. “Faith is loyalty,” he writes. In fact, it isn’t. A precise definition is hard, but faith is trust would be the best I can come up with. You can be loyal to someone without trusting them. Claiborne argues that the early Christians were executed for their lack of faith in the state. This is only true if you define faith as loyalty. In fact, they were executed because their refusal to sacrifice to the cult of the emperor undermined the Roman civic religion. Roman civic religion was not about belief, it was about unifying the people around a common symbol. As Dr. Richard Talbert has taught me, Christianity introduced the idea of faith and belief. It was a concept which was foreign to Roman civic religion. After all, it was the Roman gods which Seneca was referring to when he wrote that “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”

But Claiborne’s biggest problem, and one that eclipses all the others, is his view of the role of good works in the world. Claiborne wants to see Jesus as a social revolutionary, a savior of men on earth rather than just of men’s eternal souls. By wanting people who “believe so much in another world that [we] cannot help but begin enacting it now,” he wants to bring heaven to earth. In the words of Josef Ratzinger, he wants a “temporal messianism” in which Christ’s church works not only to save people’s souls but to save their physical, material lives as well.

The problem is, this is a fallen, broken world full of imperfect people who cannot redeem themselves  by their own efforts. Claiborne wants to bring to earth what is reserved only for heaven. Yet, no matter what people do, this broken world will remain broken. As Paul wrote (Romans 8:18-25):

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and   brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. ²⁴For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? ²⁵But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

Creation is in a fallen state, and it will one day be liberated. We can do nothing about this. However, our present sufferings “are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed” in the future when all creation is set right after Christ’s Second Coming.

When Jesus was in Bethany two days before his crucifixion, a woman came to the house he was staying in and poured a jar of expensive perfume over his head. His disciples decried the waste, saying that the perfume could have been sold and the money given to the poor. Jesus replied by saying “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me. When she poured this perfume on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial.” Here, Jesus indicated that his spiritual ministry – his death and resurrection – was more important than his temporal ministry to the poor.

The primary role of the church is to reach the lost with the message of the gospel. This is a spiritual ministry, not a temporal one. Temporal ministries may be carried out by the church, but it is not the primary mission of the church. We are called by Jesus to be the “salt of the earth.” Salt is a preservative. It slows decay. It does not stop decay, only decreases it. It certainly has no restorative power. Likewise, we have no power to restore the earth, just to slow its decay.

Claiborne’s teachings are not only wrong, they are extremely dangerous. When people put their faith into an ideology which promises to save the world, they inevitably get their faith shattered when their ideology fails to deliver.

For many decades, communism was such an ideology. Utopia, it was believed, was right around the corner. Yet, in 1991 the system met its final collapse. It was shown once and for all to be practically and morally bankrupt. As a result, the masses lost any remaining faith in communism. The faith survives in a few scattered pockets left behind by modern society, but it is for all intents and purposes dead.

Likewise, suppose a large number of Christians someday put their faith in Claiborne’s ideology. Like all ideologies which promise to bring heaven to earth, it will someday catastrophically fail. Will this mean a mass exodus of Christians who leave the faith? This already happened in the 1940s, when the global horror of World War 2 showed that the Progressive Gospel rang hollow. As a result, Christianity declined, somewhat in the United States but especially so in Europe.

Temporal ministries to the physical needs of people are not wrong. But they are not redemptive. We can feed a hungry person, but we cannot end hunger. We can find a homeless man a home, but we cannot end homelessness. We can heal a sick person but we cannot end sickness. We can end a war, but we cannot end warfare. We can save a person’s life, but we cannot stop them from dying. Only Christ can do that, and it is not our job to attempt to take his place.

After all, if men are in congress disproportionate to their numbers, maybe other groups are represented disproportionately as well? Would this mean the campus election system is rigged or stacked in some way so as to prevent underrepresented groups from being elected to office?

Fortunately, every congressperson’s major is available by looking at the student congress website. Here’s the breakdown of all 25 undergraduate seats in student congress, according to the directory. The total number will add up to more than 25 due to double majoring:

The data appears to show that congress is not representative of the student body because it is dominated by Political Science, Economics and Peace, War & Defense majors. In fact, in this school full of pre-med students we have only 3 science majors out of 25 congress people.

Now, is the failure of congress to, in the words of the DTH, “fail to demographically or ideologically represent the student body” in this manner the fault of “the way members are elected and the way individuals seek seats make the organization”?

Or is it simply that some people are more likely to want to be on congress than others? Could it be, as many of you are probably screaming right now, that people in politics-related majors (Poli Sci, PWAD, Public Policy, Econ, etc) are more likely to want to be part of a political body? Congress races are rarely competitive. In fact, congress has trouble getting enough people to fill its seats. Almost anyone who wants to be on congress can be.

So if almost everyone who wants to be on congress can be, and no one is stopping anyone from running, and some types of people are more likely to want to be on congress than others, then what is the problem when certain groups of people want to run for congress at lesser rates than others? It can’t be a problem with the system.

If congress doesn’t “demographically or ideologically represent the student body”, what if the student body just doesn’t want to be demographically represented? There are few obstacles to being in student congress, so I must conclude that demographic disproportions are due to people who don’t want to run. Are we going to force people to be in congress who don’t want to be there?

What is the point of all this? So long as the election process is fair and open, there is no reason to worry about disproportionate demographics of any type. So long as there is equality of opportunity, the rest is up to the candidates and the voters. Complaining about demographics when there is equality of opportunity is simply nonsense.

2009 Season

vs. Florida International – 53% of student tickets used.
vs. N.C. Central – 47% of student tickets used.
vs. Valparaiso – 24% of student tickets used.

2008 Season

vs. Pennsylvania – 65% of student tickets used.
vs. Kentucky – 85% of student tickets used.
vs. UNC-Asheville – 40% of student tickets used.

CAA director John Russell says that students are simply not taking advantage of other ways to get tickets. For example, he points to the fact that although 400 tickets were returned for redistribution for last Sunday’s game, only 20 were claimed. However, returned tickets are only distributed at 5:15 PM the day before a game. But for most heavily scheduled college students, going to a game is something that requires a bit of planning in advance. Not knowing whether you are going to get a ticket until the night before is a major inconvenience when planning schoolwork and other activities. It’s a simple truth that making it harder for students to get tickets is going to decrease attendance.

Russell continues to justify the new policy by arguing that students are now twice as likely to receive a basketball ticket. This is true, but they are also far less likely to find friends with tickets in the same phase, and are therefore less likely to use their ticket. CAA Associate Director Clint Gwaltney argues that the previous system of giving two tickets to each student was not working because tickets were still being unused, claiming that only 85% of student tickets were used for last year’s game against Kentucky and something had to be changed.

Russell argues that students can get tickets if they really want them. This is true. This was true last year too. But the issue is not whether you can get a ticket if you try hard enough, it’s whether it’s worth the trouble. And when it becomes more and more trouble, more and more students will decide that it’s not worth it.

The solution to this is not to make it harder for students to go to games. Common sense dictates that if people aren’t doing a certain thing, then making it harder for them to do that thing will not make them more likely to do it. You simply do not promote attending basketball games by making it harder to do.

Unlike last week’s debate on the ethics of health care reform, this debate actually focused on moral issues. The debate was sometimes heated and threatened to spin out of control at times, as Byrns and Lewis on occasion resorted to shouting obscenities at each other over the pleading voices of the moderators. Once order was restored, the debate centered around the issue of rights, whether they exist, where they come from and what they guarantee us.

Lewis argued that we do not have a right to anything, we only have the right to take certain actions. Lewis is an atheist and rejects any sort of divine origin of rights, rather, he argues that rights come from our nature. We are individuals, and we make decisions as individuals. From this, we derive our fundamental right to action. This right is often expressed as a right to own property.

In Lewis’ view, the role of government is to protect our rights by preventing us (through retaliatory force against criminals) from infringing on the rights of others. This creates what Lewis defines as the free market. The free market is not anarchy, after all, Lewis points out that there was no free market in Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s. The free market must be protected by government. However, government should limit itself to retaliatory use of force. Actions such as taxation, wealth redistribution and corporate bailouts are government interventions, and ultimately government initiations of force. As these violate our rights to property, Lewis views them as immoral.

Byrns counters these claims by claiming a different definition of freedom. Rather than the absence of coercion, Byrns views freedom as a condition with the most available possible choices. Limiting our rights can give us more choices. Byrns challenges the origin of rights. Also rejecting the divine as an explanation, he says that the government is what defines property rights for us. And if the government defines our rights, it can change them. Ultimately, our rights are defined by consensus.

Lewis countered Byrns’ view of freedom by pointing out that if we all stole from each other, we would have a more available possible choices than we do now. Byrns did not answer this directly, but later said that we should not be able to own certain types of property, such as slaves. He apparently believes that choices should be maximized within reason, but limited by other factors.

Byrns on the other hand attacked the realism of Lewis’ views on government. If government is supposed to exist to protect our rights and punish criminals but never initiate coercive intervention, how should such a government fund itself? Taxation, after all, is a coercive action backed up by force  (jail if you refuse to pay) and according to Lewis it is immoral.

Lewis countered by saying that his ideal government would be one tenth the size of today’s government, and that there would be plenty of ways to fund such a government non-coercively. However, he never specified what these methods were. Thinking on this, it’s hard to think of a way a government could be reliably funded that would not involve either a tax (coercive initiation of force) or state-run businesses (a government intrusion into the free market).

And that was the main problem with Lewis’ argument: It was consistent, but it fails when you try and apply it practically. Byrns on the other hand has only a vague definition of what rights are, and since he says they are defined by majority rule he should probably just scrap the term entirely. Byrns’ view that rights are decided by the majority without any sort of divine input is societal relativism at its most dangerous. With no divine moral mandate and majority rule deciding what is right and what is wrong, people can decide to take away anything if they can get enough people to agree with them. The door to dictatorship, communism, Nazism, and all sorts of despotic and tyrannical government is opened by this philosophy.

Although I disagree with the concept of natural or inherent property rights, I hold that there is a divinely granted moral law which governs what we should and should not do. Stealing is not wrong because it violates someone else’s rights, stealing is wrong because it is in violation of that which God hath commanded us. However, this is a topic for another post, but for now, I will give the edge in last night’s debate to Dr. Lewis, although it was a close one.