Social justice gets tossed around a lot on our campus. But do any of us know what it means? When I tried to investigate this, I found myself engulfed in a spectrum of political opinions and issues that I do not agree nor identify with. Subsidized housing, socialized medicine, minimum wage rates, sweatshop labor, the list goes on and on.

Supporters of the phrase express justice as equality. These issues are examples of inequality and therefore are deemed unjust.

I don’t understand how equality can possibly serve as an adequate definition for the term justice. As the Rev. James Schall, S.J., pointed out just a few weeks ago, reality is not equal nor fair, and justice has no place in reality. I will never be hired as an actor to play Martin Luther King, Jr. That’s reality.

Justice, or lack thereof, takes place within the relationships of human beings. Does this make the search for justice futile? No, but it does make the search for equality futile. Or, better yet, the usage of equality to define justice incorrect, ignorant and idiotic.

Justice is easy to define. Human beings are endowed with certain rights such as life, liberty and property. Life and liberty are easy enough to understand, but property is what the advocates of social justice don’t seem to understand. You have the right to the property you own. You own something by making or homesteading it, buying it or receiving it from a rightful owner. You do not have the right to any physical property on this Earth otherwise – not food, not clothing, not water, not housing. You do not have the right to take money or resources from some people to provide these things for others.

I wouldn’t be surprised if social justice supporters secretly understand this. Robin Hood may have looked snazzy in his tights, but he’d get his butt kicked in today’s society. Maybe that’s why they hide behind the false legitimacy of government. All governmental action takes place by force. Some people benefit while others suffer. So I guess you could say that “social” justice takes place when bad, capitalist, rich people suffer and poor, helpless people benefit. Real justice exists when the rich people give up all together so there won’t be anything left to steal, and then we can all sit on this spinning rock and starve to death.

Justice is simply an observance of the rights aforementioned. Injustice exists when these rights are violated by aggression of one person against another by physical force or fraud. Poverty is not an injustice unless it is the result of theft.

I am more impoverished after paying taxes to provide for welfare and health services than I would have been otherwise.

There are people who walk around this campus and openly support this theft. They are to blame for its implementation. They claim to be supporters of justice and critical thinking, and they accuse the opinions of the right to be immoral and unwelcome. This is an injustice.