By: Barry Belmont
Our Abolish ASUN movement has garnered so much publicity that it is not at all uncommon for us to give interview after interview on the subject. Unfortunately, only a small fraction of those interviews ever gets seen — a nugget of an idea here, a simple quip there. Because we feel we provide perhaps our best explanations when we are giving candid interviews, and because we are often asked questions which we have previously answered, we have decided to release a few of our “uncut interviews” on the subject of abolishing ASUN.
The first we will release is from that wonderful piece about us in INSIGHT magazine.
Interview by Cambria Roth. Interviewee: Barry Belmont
What are the motives of Abolish ASUN?
The whole point of the movement is for people to understand the nature of bureaucracies and governments. It’s to foster discussions about how people let authorities manage and allocate their resources. Essentially the idea is for people to draw the larger parallel to real governments when they think their student government does dumb things.
How did this club begin/ start up?
It was mostly as a means by which to take the absurdity of governmental rules to a new level. The idea that an organization in charge of properly managing funds would allocate a significant portion of those funds to a movement that expressly states that it will mismanage those funds speaks to the ridiculous situation that governmental systems place people in.
What do you want to accomplish? What is your mission?
There is no mission, there is nothing to accomplish. The point of the club is its essential pointlessness. Maybe someone will understand that our pointlessness is intrinsically tied to the inherent pointlessness of all governments, of all bureaucracies.
How are you accomplishing these goals currently?
How does one increase apathy and antipathy in equal measures?
What kind of problems or encounters has Abolish ASUN had with ASUN in terms of the “becoming a club” process or anything else?
The problems we underwent in becoming a club was followed by the Sagebrush and on the UNRforLiberty.com website to a fairly adequate amount. I suggest you consult those sources. Briefly, we were obviously “discriminated” against (which I do not have any problem with: we should not have been allowed to be a club), but in an attempt to save face (for having followed their own pedantically stupid laws) eventually granted us recognition. Then one of the club commissioner (Mr. Agora, I think) tried to get the entirety of our club funding pulled for how we planned to use our funds (a decision I agree with). But since we jumped through all their hoops, we were granted a full $4995.00 in less than 15 minutes.
The process of becoming and maintaining a club is too hard and too easy in all the wrong places. However, since it is governmental/bureaucratic institution in charge of establish those rules and procedures, they are unable to properly gauge how to correct these issues. They lack the fundamental corrective nature of a market.
How long did it take you to become a club compared to most other clubs ASUN approves?
Well we were denied the first time…which just never happens. Just flat out denied. When we came back they couldn’t approve us fast enough. Less than 30 seconds. We have it on our site (UNRforLiberty.com).
When were you officially named a club in ASUN?
No idea, check our site.
How many members does the club have currently?
No idea, we’re a diffuse group. The vast majority of people either don’t care about the ASUN or have a healthy dose of dislike for them. In that sense, we’ve got a large member base. We also, from what I can tell, have a fine number of fans who enjoy what it is we do.
What kind of events do Abolish ASUN hold for its members?
It would be quite a selfish thing to only do things for the members of the club. We aim to waste everybody’s money for everybody. That’s why we have Abolish ASUN extravaganza’s. It’s why we are so open about our wasteful spending.
It’s not our money, we shouldn’t even be allowed to have it. We can lay out this argument using sound economic principles, drawing upon fields from ethics and psychology to evolutionary biology and game theory, and no one seems to really care. This is why we’ve tried another route: throwing your money in the wind. It is quite hard for proponents of the pooled funding utilized by the ASUN to find fault in the way we spend money as opposed to how a club like the Hawaii Club spends it. One of the main differences is that we buy ponies for everyone to enjoy, we buy enough pizza for everyone to get a slice, we get bounce houses for everyone to play on. We waste our money for everybody.
How is UNR Students for Liberty different from Abolish ASUN? (President of both)
There is not one single difference…besides the name I guess.
What did it take for you to continue with your mission, despite the student government against you?
The only thing I needed was knowing that my arguments were sound, my logic straightforward, and my evidence freely available. In short, I was pretty sure I was right. At the very least, I knew at least one of us was wrong. By this I mean to say that as we were making mutually exclusive claims about the world (a student government is on the whole either is or is not beneficial to students), one of us must necessarily be wrong. It is important to inspire a public discussion to figure out which one of us it was. If it happened to be me I would be more than willing to accept this. If they presented me with evidence and said Here, Look, This is our evidence, This is why you are wrong, and it turned out this evidence was solid, I would have no choice but to accept that they were right and my position defeated. Unfortunately, it appears, time and time again, that the claims I make about a number of topics (money mismanagement, inefficiencies, poor decisions, the inappropriate use of time an energy, and the utter lack of caring from the overwhelming majority of those within the ASUN) seem to invariably manifest themselves in the institution.
I wish I was wrong about the reality of governments, but I fear that I’m not. It’s that fear that keeps me going.
