UNR Students for Liberty » Abolish ASUN

Apathy…meet Antipathy

Barry Belmont — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 19:38:48 +0000

Apparently today is the day of voting for candidates for the ASUN.

So there I was, bored at work, having just heard some girl talk about the ASUN presidential debates and I thought, Hmm, Maybe I should watch those…Call me a gluttony for punishment. I knew nothing important was going to be said by either candidate, I knew it was going to be a waste of my time, and I knew I wasn’t going to enjoy it. But. My. God. To say that this is one of the saddest demonstrations of real world politics would be a massive understatement. Here I present it to you unaltered. Please do enjoy the future of Nevada politics:

What a Concept…

Barry Belmont — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 19:18:31 +0000

The ASUN recently announced (though it was long rumored) that the final funding period for clubs would not be observed as the organization had run out of club funding. And in typical WTF GOVERNMENT? style logic, the commissioners in charge seem to glean over the point entirely, managing to not only not take away the key economic lesson (that public funds will always be at the mercy of the Tragedy of the Commons) but exasperating it more so (by seeking to impose penalties on those clubs that don’t spend the entirety of their allocation).

I’m going to repeat that because it really needs to land for effect: Nathan Demuth, HeadHoncho of ASUN Clubbiwubbs said that “The fact that clubs don’t always spend all the money they are awarded often confounds accurate balance predictions.” And hence, “New penalties for clubs that don’t spend allocated funds will be imposed in the future.”

He seems unable to recognize that the problem is with the way clubs are funded, not with the fact that they don’t spend all their money. In fact, not spending all of their funds can only, only be seen as a good thing. It means more money in the bank, less wasted, more frugality. But with this new penalty to be levied on clubs in conjunction with the fact that late funding periods may not be held at all, you will see clubs hitting the funding hard, fast, and most importantly, recklessly. When punished for not spending money, it is only inevitable that people will spend and spend and spend.

Oh ASUN, when will you ever learn? Perhaps this recent comment from the Sagebrush website will give you the advice you need in starkly barren terms:

Abolish ASUN: The Uncut Interviews 2

John Russell — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 17:29:20 +0000

Interview by Allie Amato. Interviewee: John Russell

What is it that your organization does?
- The Abolish ASUN movement is the brainchild of the UNR Students for Liberty. We are a student-driven group on campus totally dedicated to promoting, supporting, and defending the principles of individual rights, voluntary trade, and peace.

Why does your organization want to abolish the ASUN?
- We do not actually care about the ASUN in the slightest. We only use the ASUN as a model for how real governments work in order to illustrate the absurdity of government institutions as a whole. By showing the inherent flaws of the state, we encourage the average student to question the legitimacy of government. I encourage you to check out the many other efforts the UNR Students for Liberty have done to illustrate the problems of government institutions by means of ASUN:

Tragedy of the Trojes: http://unrforliberty.com/2010/10/public-goods-are-bad-tragedy-of-the-trojes.html
Putting America Back to Work: http://unrforliberty.com/2011/02/2451.html
$3,400 Worth of Catered Meals for Our Meetings: http://unrforliberty.com/2011/02/a-typical-meeting-setup-for-the-unr-students-for-liberty.html

All of these events can easily be compared to things which occur naturally when an institution collects and funds itself through violence, theft, and coercion (ie: taxation).

- I should also note that our abolishment efforts have earned national recognition: http://unrforliberty.com/2011/02/abolish-asun-international-event-of-the-year.html

It was even mentioned at the CPAC convention:
http://unrforliberty.com/2011/02/abolish-asun-at-cpac.html

How would this effect or help campus if they are abolished?
- Instead of hundreds of dollars being taken from individuals to be spent by other people who think they know how to spend other people’s money better than they do, people would be free to spend the money on things that they enjoy. This can only result a better allocation of resources (you know.. instead of having $3,400 worth of catered meals for the past 4 semesters like what we’ve enjoyed). Some students could put the saved money into their clubs; others, textbooks or even alcohol. This is analogous to the benefits society would experience if the state (taxation) were abolished.

What is your job in your organization?
- I am the founder of the UNR Students for Liberty and am currently the president of the Abolish ASUN Club.

How long have you been trying to get this petition on the spring voting ballots?
- The ASUN has made the ability of our petition actually getting on the ballot nearly impossible due to serious conflicts of interest. Our experiment has shown that a democracy cannot eliminate itself. We have been doing this since the last election cycle.

Abolish ASUN: The Uncut Interviews 1

Barry Belmont — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 18:10:12 +0000

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.

Let’s Get Radical – Powerpoint Presentation

John Russell — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 15:25:00 +0000

Here is the powerpoint to the presentation Barry and I gave at the 2011 International Students for Liberty Conference. We hope this may help others become more effective on their college campus. I am going to continue to scour the internet looking for a recording of our presentation and will post it if I find it. Enjoy!

Let’s Get Radical

Anecdotes from the Abolishment 2

Barry Belmont — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 02:49:15 +0000

I’ve noticed this troll “Chris” who seems to only comment upon Abolish ASUN stuff that the Nevada Sagebrush presents (see here and here for instance). This time he’s at it again with this delightful exchange with some anonymous poster:

One would think that after all this time, the poor fellow would figure out that it is indeed “the game” he should play, and not the adept (and cocky) player who excels at it. Just because we’re good at what we do — showing the inherent inefficiencies and hand binding policies intrinsic to all organizations based upon arbitrary rules — and just because that happens to irk you a bit does not in anyway mean we’ll stop.

The point of the Abolish ASUN movement is to plant the seed in the minds of those who hear about it with the idea that all governments must necessarily be wasteful. If you bothered to come to either the Festival or the Carnival or merely listened to the whispers around campus after they happened, yuo would immediately notice that the complacency many people felt about government before the events was irrevocably changed afterward. This is because one can’t look upon a pony bought with coerced funds and take the institution as seriously as they used to.

Unfortunately the world we were born into is a tad sick, and until this fever called government passes, we’re just going to keep applying the medicine…

ABOLISH ASUN: International Event of the Year

UNR Student For Liberty — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 01:33:22 +0000

The Students for Liberty has named our original Abolish ASUN Festival its Event of the Year at its recent International Conference. This is an amazing honor and we will be sure to bring you more news, stories, and videos about how the whole conference went down in the coming week, but suffice it to say for now: we’re awesome, they’re awesome, liberty’s great, and the world’s getting better.

We want to thank everyone who helped make it happen (you know who you are [ahem, Abby]) as well as all of those who voted for us to win. It is important to note, however, that there were many great groups and events this year that helped spread The Good Word to more people than ever before, and they all deserve a great deal of admiration.

So again, thank you Big Papa Students for Liberty, all the groups in attendance, and especially all the governmental institutions that make it childishly easy to ruthlessly tear apart with sound arguments, logical conclusions, and mountains upon mountains of their own ineptitude.

(We're in the very back row to the right standing on our chairs)

Abolish ASUN at CPAC

Barry Belmont — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 17:51:25 +0000

Who would have ever thought that our rackety ol’ club’s work would breach the hallowed halls of CPAC? Well it turns out that while being interviewed by PJTV, Blayne Bennett, the Communications Manager for the Students for Liberty (the Big Pappa institution which we base ourself around), discussed our Abolish ASUN event last year. Perhaps the thing I like more than her description of our event is the interviewer’s response to it.

I can’t seem to embed the video quite yet (but some of the top minds on the internet are working on it), but if you follow this link you can watch the five minute interview to your heart’s content.

Get owned PJTV. Next time just give us an embed tag to use.

Abolish ASUN…for the Kids

UNR Student For Liberty — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 01:47:47 +0000

How can you say ‘No’ to an abolishment that has this?

Anecdotes from the Abolishment

Barry Belmont — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 01:12:09 +0000

So today’s Abolish ASUN carnival was fairly successful. We demonstrated what government spending looks like, saw spontaneous order form from free individuals, and generally demolished Statist argument (much to admiration of onlookers, while those arguing in favor of the institution clearly backpeddled from position to position).

But I wanted to share some various anecdotes of what occurred and what each represents.

The Gluttonous Former Senator

A former senator of the ASUN stood in line and grabbed two whole boxes of pizza (while others around him gladly only took two or less slices of pizza). When I pointed out that we would donate the remaining food to a homeless shelter he merely looked up, smiled the shit-eating-est of smiles, and said “I paid my student fees, did they?” He grabbed three more boxes and waddled himself away.

The moral: 1. Coercive institutions can have some serious schmucks for employees (employees, I might add, that can’t be fired), 2. When resources are pooled, there is no incentive have ‘left-overs.’ 3. When people are forced to pay into a system, they tend to lose their humanitarian streak.