Oh. My. Goodness…
Did you want thousands of your dollars spent on ponies, bounce houses, mechanical bulls, balloons, pizzas, and drinks today? Proponents of democracy and the ASUN would argue “yes” since you were afforded the opportunity to either run for election and “change” the situation or vote for people you feel would do a good job. They will argue that unless you select either one of these two options, you are implicitly agreeing and supporting their activities. What proponents of such a system fail to realize is that you never agreed to have such a system in place to begin with: when did you agree to have a club commission allocate over a hundred thousand dollars of your money to the most active students? When did you agree to pay the student government officials $7,000+ a year to sit on their asses and spend your money? When did you agree to have yearly elections to decide which members of a small minority get spend your money? You, and 90% of campus never agreed to this by the very fact of not participating in their election — the vast majority of us simply don’t care about our student government.
With homework to do and tests to take and jobs to fulfill and families to be responsible for and beer to drink and TV to watch, we rarely get an opportnity to study the nature of government. As such, there exists a large body of us (most of us in fact) who know very little about what a government really is. The consequence is that we tend imagine that it can do certain things that it cannot do and that it can be prevented from doing certain things that it can do. We think government can eliminate poverty and violence. But it cannot. We think government can resist expanding both in size and waste. But it cannot.
It cannot because all governments are based on force of some kind – either the suggestion that force can and will be used or the actual use of that force. For instance, if you don’t pay taxes you will be thrown in jail. Similarly, if you don’t pay your ASUN fees, you will be kicked out of the university. Now, even if we agreed to this — Which. We. Don’t. – the revenue generated can never be spent in an efficient or optimally productive manner because the motives which dictate the allocation of funds are based upon individuals with differing opinions, stances, morals, behaviors, and beliefs. Not one individual, or a group of individuals elected to “represent” other vastly differing individuals, can ever arrive at a fair, efficient, or optimal outcome. So long as policies, laws, and rules created by some individuals are enforced through force upon other individuals, neither a fair nor a voluntary agreement can ever exist. As a result, we are subjected to a never-ending cycle of strife and disagreement. The only fair way to resolve this is to leave all such decisions in the hands of the individuals themselves.
This event was meant to expose the utter and absolute waste inherent in our student government, in all governments. It was meant to show the absurdities of compulsory fees absurdly and mock anyone who thinks they know how to spend your money better than you with all the mockery we could muster. This event is a joke. The whole thing is just a big joke. The punchline, of course, being “Government Works!” It doesn’t. It can’t. And as long as some of us aren’t afraid to laugh at the jester pointing to the emperor without clothes, we can do something about it.
Abolish ASUN.
A recent commenter on our site made the insight that we might have done a little preaching to the choir and not enough to the people standing at the back of the congregation. As we want to bring everyone into the fold of sound economic principles, we need to drive home our message involved in abolishing ASUN. To quote this commenter verbatim:
1. ASUN is inescapably subject to waste.
2. No policy may avert this, as waste is subjective to individuals.
3. ASUN must therefore be abolished as differences cannot be reconciled.
4. ALL ASSOCIATED FEES ONCE ATTACHED TO THE ASUN must thereby be revoked.
5. Reduced fees allows people to retain their money, which can then be used to start up a club–or not.
These are the basic tenants behind the Abolishment. We’ll elaborate more on these in the coming days. Our work is far from over.
I know I often use evidence from evolutionary biology to make many of my points. Since we’re not all biology majors, sometimes it may seem a little remote or implausible or downright wrong. Perhaps this little video will highlight a few of the things I talk about. (Bear in mind that studies on monkeys and primates are often excellent examples of what occurred during our early evolutionary history.)
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And this is John Russell’s response to Patrick Delaplain’s argument in favor of ASUN
An Argument Against ASUN
I would invite other club leaders to respond to this as well, but allow me to answer these questions based upon my experience (worked for asun, ran for election, club leader my entire time). Before starting the list, you mentioned that the ASUN may have affected students in a way that they do not immediately notice, such as campus escort or free food. The problem with this argument is that those services you provide cannot be provided to every single student, so that means there are certain people getting screwed (the apathetic – super majority) and others who are benefiting (us – elite few). This is wrong, very, very wrong. Okay, let’s begin:
1) This question falsely assumes student input is already in the process of how ASUN spends money. Last I checked, the ASUN itself is powerless in the allocation of nearly 50% of its funds as it is being gobbled up by the staffers. This is wrong.
2) Profits? The 5% profit that ASUN is skimming off the top of every textbook? Well I hope that would be eliminated and provided at cost.
3) Why should such organizations/activities endure if people are unwilling to pay for them? It is similar to asking “What if the hole diggers and the hole fillers were eliminated?” – Nobody wanted them in the first place. Which leads into number…
4) Nobody wants them. (and by nobody, i mean the other 90% that don’t vote/dont even know what ASUN is. Those are the people are who are really being screwed).
5) I did not realize student organizations needed to be managed. If by managed you mean completely disenfranchised by bureaucracy, then I suppose this claim has legitamacy. Otherwise, human beings will still organize and rally themselves just as we have done since the stone age. The only difference is that clubs that cannot survive without club funding will be eliminated while the good clubs who have enough synergy will endure and be just as strong. People who think clubs would just disappear if ASUN did are generally only ASUN hacks.
6) Again, you are assuming the ASUN is the voice. On average, the ASUN has about a 10% voter turnout. The ASUN senate, as mentioned in a previous post, is dominated by a certain group of people.
7) a. You assume campus programming is wanted. You assume people want the stupid flipside events.
b. What people have really failed to realize thus far is that our event is NO DIFFERENT than any flipside event, we just threw together a video of it actually happening. Thats the true kicker.
By illustrating our waste, we are illustrating the waste of the activities board of ASUN as a whole, and, as we have seen, people are pissed off. So much in fact, that they want it abolished.
Patrick Delaplain is amongst the coolest people you’ll ever chance to meet at UNR. He’s pretty smart, pretty funny, and remarkably level-headed. Admirable traits all. He actually took the time to respond to our Abolish ASUN Festival on our site, but just in the comment section. It’s actually such a rational response to the Festival (unlike 90+% of the other ASUN hacks) that I wanted to give it a larger audience here. I will show what he had to say on the issue and then I will post what our own John Russell had to say in response. If Patrick should object to his words having been posted on this site without his explicit permission, I will take this down. For now, consider his argument.
An Argument in Favor of ASUN
I suppose I would be lumped into the stupid category. The funding policies are based largely on trust; the trust that the club leaders on our campus will make responsible choices and not waste funds on events that aren’t meaningful. Perhaps a better word to describe me is naïve. I genuinely believe that most club leaders on this campus believe in what they’re doing and think that they are putting the money to a good cause. And to tell you the truth, I would rather be naïve and end up disappointed than think that every club leader on campus is too dishonest to be trusted with funding. However, as usual, I could be wrong.
I wouldn’t really describe myself as pissed off either. I believe firmly that a government is meant to serve its constituents. If the campus wants to burn ASUN to the ground then so be it. Who am I to stand in the way the will of the people? However, I think many of you who may be roused by a few people screaming on a soapbox should take the time to ask yourself, “Has ASUN touched my college experience?” If you’ve ever picked up a Sagebrush, gotten a ride from campus escort, had one day where you didn’t have to buy lunch because Flipside provided it for you, the answer to that question is yes.
It seems that a majority of your arguments apply to only one section of the ASUN and less than 10% of the overall budget-Clubs and Organizations. It would seem wise to discredit everything that ASUN does if you wish to abolish the whole institution. A few points to consider:
1. Where will all of the money go? The fee is a university student activities fee that is given to the ASUN. I find it highly unlikely, especially considering the current economic situation that this money will simply be given back to the students. More likely is that the university will simply reallocate the money and spend it on activities that they deem are appropriate, entirely removing student input.
2. Where will the profits from the ASUN Bookstore go?
3. What will happen to all of the services that we provide: campus escort, wolf pack radio, nevada sagebrush, brushfire, inkblot etc.
4. What will happen to the 100 student employees that are currently paid by ASUN?
5. Who will take over managing student organizations? The university does not have the resources it needs to effectively manage over 100 organizations. We have professional full-time staff to deal with clubs and organizations; the university does not have the resources to hire someone to fill this position. Will we simple get rid of university recognized organizations, except for fraternities, sororities and club sports, which the university already handles to some degree?
6. Who will be the voice of the student body? Will Chancellor Klaich be expected to hold a town hall meeting on campus and simply hope that enough people will show up and are informed enough to make meaningful comments?
7. Who will pick up the slack in terms of campus programming? Most of the events on campus that are held free of charge to students are put on by Flipside productions: will we simply have no movie series, limited campus speakers, no coffee and a concert series, no howl at the moon, no Friday festival, no welcome back week, no homecoming, and no reason to come to school except for classes?
I’ve discovered there are three ways people can respond to hearing about our event.
1) They love it. They love ponies, they love pizza, they hate the ASUN, they love everything about it.
2) They ask who the hell ASUN is. When we tell them (Eli Reilly gets paid how much!?), they quickly become members of group 1.
3) They hate every single thing about this event and what we’re trying to do.
Now, I don’t want to sound crass, but group 3 is filled with people either too stupid or too pissed off to realize that they’re actually members of either group 1 or 2. What we’re doing just doesn’t click with them: we don’t want clubs to be able to throw stupid events like ours. Our event is a complete waste of everyone’s money, it shouldn’t have been funded. That’s. The. Whole. Point.
I think, deep down, the deep seeded people who think government and taxes and money like this is good, they know how effective our event is to show how pathetic the idea that governments can fix the problems they create is and they are reacting emotionally, not logically, to it. It is as clear as day what we are illustrating. It is clear as day what the problem is. Group 3 just doesn’t like how well we’re packaging it. Their outrage is proof that they already agree with our position: wasteful spending should not be tolerated.
The times are too tough to be giving people like us money to buy ponies and bounces houses and pizza. Colleges are being cut, tuitions are being raised, and, to put it mildly, the shit’s really hitting the fan. We shouldn’t be paying the people who are weaving the basket to send us all to hell in. If it wasn’t for our group and our honesty regarding the truth of student funds, none of this wasteful spending may never have come to light. And this is why, above all else, we must abolish ASUN.
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1. The ASUN has already taken your money.
2. The ASUN policy grants this money to students.
3. We as students requested the money for a purpose.
4. We were granted the money for that purpose.
The trick comes when you find out that the “purpose” was to show that hidden between points two, three, and four, is the inherent flaw of the system caused by point number one. No one can spend your money as well as you can. No one is as responsible as you are with your money. There is no justification for the ASUN in taking money from students by claiming that they know how to better spend it than you do.
And of course, hidden behind all four of the above points is the implicit assumption: the ASUN exists.
