By Steve Byas

Back during the NBA playoffs between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Memphis Grizzlies, undercover cops arrested eight men outside the Oklahoma City Arena.

Their crime?

Why, these men were offering basketball tickets for sale! Had they stolen these tickets? Apparently not. Their supposed "crime" was that they offered their own tickets for sale to some undercover police posing as buyers.

This is wrong on so many levels.

This is America, where we claim to believe in liberty and free enterprise. The city council and mayor of Oklahoma City believe you are too stupid to decide on your own if you want to buy a basketball ticket above the face value.

They call it scalping, which is just a propaganda term for those who believe they should be your daddy. Adults conducting a free market transaction -- the buying and selling of basketball tickets -- need the city government of Oklahoma City to protect them from themselves.

If a person wishes to sell his ticket or tickets to a basketball game, he should be able to offer the ticket or tickets for sale at any price he wishes. The tickets are his property, not Mick Cornett's! If another person wishes to pay above face value for the ticket or tickets, it his money, not Mick Cornett's!

Apparently, these dangerous criminals who were offering tickets for sale need to be swept off the streets. Oklahoma City needs to hire police officers to pose as buyers and pay them money because were they not there, a man who wanted to sell his tickets would have done so, and some other guy who wanted to buy the tickets would have bought the tickets. What a horrible prospect!

Any government price control is wrong. For some reason, we have come to believe that a seller who offers a good or service for above the price someone else thinks is too high is some sort of criminal or at least morally reprehensible. I even heard a preacher say that "high gas prices" was the moral equivalent of the money changers in the Temple driven out by Jesus Christ. Really? I wonder if that preacher was out there charging motorists with immoral behavior when the price of oil dropped to about $6 a barrel in 1986. After all, many oil men went out of business back then. Were the consumers immoral for gassing up at sixty-five cents a gallon? Should they have been required to pay more? Why is it immoral for a seller to offer something for sale above a certain price, but not immoral for a buyer to buy something below a certain price?

I wouldn't pay $400, or some such price, to go to a Thunder basketball game, but if I had the money, and I wanted to pay it, and someone was willing to sell me his ticket for that price, who else's business is it? I see folks all the time shelling out money for things that I think are offered at too high a price, but I figure that is their business what they do with their money.

At least when a man pays above face value price for a sports ticket, he gets to see a sporting event. When the government sells lottery tickets, the buyer usually gets nothing in return.

Government price-setting for sports tickets sets a horrible precedent that government should determine the "Just Price" for all goods and services. The Apostle Peter said in Acts, chapter 5, that a man's property is his own property, to do with as he wishes, but I suppose that Peter never tried to sell a Thunder ticket in Oklahoma City.