The Senate capped what the players who fill the seats earn

The Senate has decided how much a college athlete is allowed to earn. On Monday, September 28, it passed the Protect College Sports Act by a vote of 77 to 22. The law caps what universities can pay their players. It also hands the NCAA a shield against antitrust suits. Senator Ted Cruz spent a year negotiating it. He called college sports a "Wild West" and said the bill would bring order to the chaos.

Order has a price tag this season in Columbus, Ohio. Ohio State paid its football team an estimated $49 to $55 million. Its biggest star, a sophomore receiver named Jeremiah Smith, reportedly took home around $5 million. His earning window is a few short years, until an injury or a slump closes it.

Two thousand years ago, a traveling preacher named Paul made almost the same argument about himself. He was defending his right to be paid for preaching, and he reached back to an old farm law in Deuteronomy 25:4. On the threshing floor, an ox walked in circles over the cut wheat, its weight shaking the grain loose. The rule was simple: you could not tie the animal's mouth shut while it worked. It ate as it trod the grain. The worker shared in what the work produced.

This week the Senate put a ceiling on the ones who do the treading, written by the ones who do not.

The strange part is who objected. The vote did not split along party lines: fifty Republicans and twenty-seven Democrats passed it together. The loudest defense of the athletes came from the free-market right. Joe Nocera, in The Free Press, called the law a theft of "the economic rights that every other citizen is entitled to." The libertarian magazine Reason called it plain government overreach, and Senator Rand Paul told the floor to leave college sports alone. When the case for paying the worker is loudest on the anti-regulation right, the usual sides stop explaining much.

Strip away the money and the lawyers, and what is left is older than the vote. The farm law never pretended the ox was holier for going hungry. It said the animal straining under the load had earned a mouthful of what it carried. A young man does the work that fills the seats. The oldest rule on the books says he should get to eat from it.