4

It Discriminates Against People Who Don't Have Arenas

OK. Let's say that hypothetically we have some children, and maybe their right to life isn't so great. Maybe the children are wicked or something. But that still doesn't mean it's acceptable to put those children into an arena we have lying around, because poor people don't have arenas and won't have that option open to them.

Obviously, there are limits to this kind of argument. Inequality is always going to be present at some level in our society, and in general we have no problem denying poor people, say, their yachting rights. But we don't deny them voting rights, either. And by that measure, the right to dispose of wicked children has to fall closer to the voting end of the spectrum as a fundamental, inalienable right. Allowing the wealthy to dispose of children in arenas ...

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... and denying that same privilege to poor people is grossly unfair. Furthermore, the population balance between rich wicked children and poor wicked children will tip, and the poor wicked children will eventually overrun us all and eat our flesh.

Wait. Is that right? That's how Oliver Twist ended, right? Oliver ate all those people's flesh? Yeah, that sounds right.

3

The Children Will Haunt the Living Shit Out of Us

When conducting research for this article, for some reason I kept meeting people who live on the fringes of society. Among this population were a sizable number of so-called ghost experts, who all agreed on two points -- that you must pay up front to hire the services of a ghost expert, and that ghosts are more likely to haunt the living if they are killed in an arena. Opinions differed on why this is the case; some say the amphitheater shape of most arenas amplifies the natural energies of the recently deceased, while others state that people who are killed in arenas are just really angry with the living for some reason.

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"Why did you cheer my doom? WWHHHHHHHHHHHHY?"

2

It Costs Too Much

The costs of arena maintenance are of course substantial, and well documented elsewhere. But in this case, they're dwarfed by another, less obvious cost: the cost of the children themselves.

In the past, poets have attempted to assign a value to children based on hard-to-quantify notions like the warmth of their hugs, or the twinkle in their eyes, or the pure expression of delight on their faces when they see their first snowflakes. But later analysis has since shown that those qualities aren't actually worth anything.

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"Nope. Says here anyone can enjoy a snowflake. Except for scientists ..."

Now, economists are more likely to state that the value of a child is simply a discounted sum of that child's future economic output. And since children are, by convention, quite young, this implies that their future economic output is potentially quite high. By getting these children to kill themselves so wastefully, we're depriving our factories and Walmart entrances of the labor they'll need to compete in the 21st century.

1

It Wastes Valuable Child Meat

The meat from children is incredibly illegal to actually possess or even really to type about, so everyone just be cool, OK? But that said, there are people, on the Internet certainly, and I'm also going to guess in mountainside European castles, who are very interested in both child meat and not wasting child meat.