15Oct09 AS(sholes)UN: $64,000 Extra = $64,000 SpentPosted By: Barry Belmont

For those interested in such manners (I’m looking at you VisLupiEstGrex), the ASUN Senate allocated an extra $64,000 in student funds yesterday. Why they didn’t just give $5 back to every student is beyond me. How are they to know that students wouldn’t rather get a Big Mac or pick around the Wal-Mart DVD bin? More importantly, who are they to decide how to spend student funds?

There were about 1,500 votes cast in last years ASUN elections. No single senator got even 200 votes, with the average being something like 75, let’s call it 100. The President got something like 850. However, there are 12,000+ undergraduates paying fees to the ASUN. Any justification the ASUN should make for itself, remember those numbers. This roughly translates to someone appointed by 1/15 of 1/8 of the student body claiming they have a right to spend mine and everyone else’s money.

How did they reallocate funds?

The Executive Board Account got $11,874.67
The Elections Account got $2,097.17
The Programming Board got $9,142.23
The ASUN Office Expenses Account got $23,729.66
The ASUN Sound/Light Account got $2,180.14
The Inkblot Promotions Account got $3,188.24
The ASUN Legal Services Account got $680.94
The Clubs & Orgs (US!) got $23,222.61
The Homecoming Board got $4,203.92

Not included in this list is the actual notably decent things of Wolf Pack Radio and the Brushfire and such, each of which got more money than was planned.

Oh, yea, also, Professional Salaries, Professional & Classified expenses, Club Support, the Programming Board, Diversity Initiatives, the Professional Salaries for ASUN advertising, the wages and fringe of the Senate, and the Homecoming account all increased.

Definition – Irony: the Fiscal Board has not only the smallest forward budget ($10!?) but it was the only account to be reduced.

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Comments Posted by Barry Belmont in Irrational, Money, Stupid Government
  • Alpha Wolf
    This is probably a rhetorical question, but is there any voter turnout rate that would support ASUN's legitimacy in your mind? And the "Fiscal Board" account, which is a relic of a bygone era in ASUN, is merely an accounting tool and does not reflect an actual distribution of funds. Also keep in mind that some of this "increase" was accounting for unspent funds from the last fiscal year, which I will admit indicates overappropriation of funds.
  • What's your planned mechanism to work towards the abolishment of ASUN?
  • Well, let's even assume a simple democracy. If half the students represented says yes, then yes, money can be appropriated and spent legitimately. This is of course assuming that democracy itself is legitimate...but I'll grant that it is for this example.

    That means that at most the ASUN gets to claim 1/7 of its current budget. This is assuming that Eli gets the most legitimate claim (he got the most votes) which was roughly 1/14 of the undergraduate population. This means at most (a 50-50 election) that he--and vicariously the ASUN as a whole--gets to represent is 1/7 of the undergrads (even though only 1/8 voted?).

    But, currently, the ASUN doesn't even have a modicum of legitimacy in that regard.
  • Alpha Wolf
    ASUN isn't a direct democracy. It's a representative government, pretty much like government in this country at the federal, state, and municipal levels. Representational governments rely on the premise that power flows from the people, or more directly from the people who vote. Is the U.S. Constitution a legitimate document? I know you subscribe to a view that no government is inherently better than any government, but let's face reality. You are surrounded by representational governments that are founded on documents that small portions of the population adopted at the time they were ratified. Try your legitimacy argument sometime when you're being coerced by the state.

    But you never really answered my question. What percentage of the membership of ASUN needs to vote in any given election to make the authority of the officers who are elected at that election legitimate? How do you deal with the population that, for whatever reason, chooses to not vote? You can assume simple, direct democracies all you like, but you're rejecting the reality of what you're dealing when when you do so.

    Based on your assumptions, ASUN should only be able to "tax" those who vote. Again, this rejects the coercive authority that is in place, through the Board of Regents.
  • Really?
    are you retarded? he said a democracy which i think we can assume means a direct democracy. that means if most people dont vote then no one should win.
  • Alpha Wolf
    Clearly you missed my point. Given that ASUN is NOT a direct democracy, what is the reason we should apply the same asserted rules of legitimacy (i.e. "most" of the people vote)? What is "most"? Even in a direct democracy of 100 people, how many of them must vote for it to be a legitimate election? All of them? 75? 51?

    Let's say "most" is a majority of the population. So 51 voters, given the example above. Let's say the election presented two choices, A and B. Let's say that A received just a majority, 26 votes. So here, just little more than a quarter of the population actually made this decision for the remaining three-quarters. Legitimate?
  • I care less about what the ASUN is as what the ASUN ought to be. To truly answer question, I would have to say that since I didn't say I agreed to the process the ASUN has used that it is illegitimate for the ASUN to claim to use that very same process to hold sway over me.

    Indeed this point can be seen quite eloquently put in Lysander Spooner's "No Treason" where the constitution of the United States can be viewed as a contract that binds future generations without their consent, and thus is not necessarily to be followed on the conventional authoritarian grounds.

    That said, I don't really see your point. I view the institution of something like a student government as necessarily wrong as it involves unnecessitated involuntary action. Therefore, even if say the "process" of electing that apparatus were in some way justified, its continued existence would not be.
  • Government Guy
    And yet you ran for an office within this illegitimate government? Are you really questioning the legitimacy of the government or simply being a little bitch because you didn't win.
  • I ran for office so people couldn't throw that "but you didn't even try to anything about it" nonsense at me.

    I tried to reform it one way, now I'm trying to reform it another.
  • Alpha Wolf
    "I am calling for the abolishment of the ASUN." Barry Belmont.

    Quite the reformation you've got in mind there.
  • Thanks?
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