UNR Students for Liberty

2Mar10 Love us or hate us, you can’t say we aren’t tryingPosted By: Mary Hunton

There has been a bit of an uproar concerning our latest shenanigan. If I thought the Abolish ASUN festival was getting us enough attention as it was, making our Abolish ASUN petition public to the wonderful world of the internet was the icing on top of the cake. By announcing the festival we got a lot of oohs and ahhs. By announcing the petition I’ve noticed a different trend. People seem to either really support us or really oppose us. For those who support us–thank you! I’m glad you see where we’re coming from. For those who don’t–thank you, too! By being so avidly against our cause you are inadvertently raising more awareness about it.

Regardless, this blog post isn’t meant to defend our position. There really isn’t much I need to say that hasn’t been said already. We know where we stand and why we do. Mostly this blog post is to point out that, no matter how much people may disagree with what we are doing, at least we are doing something. Believing in a cause one thing–acting on it is quite another.

From the comments on a variety of different venues (Facebook, The Nevada Sagebrush, email, our own site), I’ve come to the conclusion that most people don’t understand what we’re trying to do. After all, we are just a bunch of “self-glorifying dumbasses” (damn, you pinned us spot on, you anonymous Sagebrush commenter, you). Clearly we haven’t thought any of this through…

But we have. If we hadn’t, this festival and this petition wouldn’t even be happening. If we didn’t think about these things, we’d be sitting back and doing nothing. We’d be the students who bitched and moaned and expected problems to fix themselves. Well guess what? Problems don’t fix themselves. We’ve done everything from suggest changes to the club commission to try to get into office. Neither of these tactics was effective. So what’s left?

When something is broken and you can’t fix it, maybe you’d be best served to just throw it away and start fresh.

On that note, The Nevada Sagebrush has been kind enough to feature us again, this time not for the festival, but for the petition. You can read it here.

Cheers!

2Mar10 Official ASUN Publicists Understand Need for AbolishmentPosted By: John Russell

Because our Abolish ASUN Festival is a Tier 1 sponsored event, it was mandated to have our event publicized by ASUN’s official event publicists – Inkblot. Below is a picture of the flier in one of the official kiosks. It is heartening to see the very same institution we want to abolish understands why they must be abolished. Be sure to spot these on the TVs around campus as well!

Even ASUN President Eli Reilly understands the need:

Comments Posted by John Russell in Abolish ASUN

2Mar10 Abolish ASUN, Explanation Pt. 1Posted By: Barry Belmont

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.

Comments Posted by Barry Belmont in Abolish ASUN

1Mar10 ASUN President Eli Reilly Supports AbolishmentPosted By: John Russell

Okay, perhaps the title is a bit sensational, but this is comical nonetheless:

Comments Posted by John Russell in Abolish ASUN

1Mar10 Sign the Petition – Abolish ASUNPosted By: John Russell

It is time to stop playing eye for an eye with the already blind. The ASUN wastes over $600 of your money during your college career. It is time for us to come together as a unified student body to say “enough” and take back our college experience. Let us say that it was this petition and your signature that we finally eliminated the waste of the ASUN. Let us say that on this day we changed ourselves and our university for the better.

Watch the video, sign the petition, and abolish the ASUN.
http://abolishasun.com

Comments Posted by John Russell in Abolish ASUN

28Feb10 Five Monkeys, Or; How Government Policies Are MaintainedPosted By: Barry Belmont

Comments Posted by Barry Belmont in Irrational, The State
Tagged Evolution, Five Monkeys

26Feb10 ISFLC, 3. The Guy From MichiganPosted By: Barry Belmont

Jonathan Slemrod, in addition to being the President of University of Michigan College Libertarians, is also the Editor-at-Large of the conservative and libertarian journal on his campus, The Michigan Review. Below is his boiling down of the conference to a tight, nice, and neat paragraph.

The third annual Students for Liberty Conference was a valuable experience for students to discuss what works and what doesn’t when it comes to promoting freedom on campus. I am encouraged that the student movement is not discounting the role that elected officials and the political process can play in protecting individual liberty. Indeed, the influence of Congressman Ron Paul, as well as enthusiasm surrounding former Governor Gary Johnson’s speech, was readily apparent. Since Congress is not going to slow down on its mission to experiment with our health care system, ration cheap sources of energy, and waste money in the name of “stimulus,” students need to know how to push back on campus, but also in the halls of Congress.

Comments Posted by Barry Belmont in SFL
Tagged ISFLC, Jonathon Slemrod

25Feb10 Property: A PreludePosted By: Barry Belmont

It seems that we so-called libertarians have a few questions we need to answer. One of the biggest dilemmas highlighted at our previous meeting, Intellectual Property Rights, was apparently how to define “property” and how “intellectual property” is akin to this “property.” A rather sad minority of us really grasped what property should mean. In point of fact, much of the club wanted to resort to what Wikipedia had to say on the issue. This is a pathetic and lackluster way to establish the essence of property.

As I will be giving a lecture March 25 which will rely heavily upon the idea of property rights (the lecture itself is about Austrian Economics), I feel it is necessary to give just a taste of what is to come. Consider briefly the necessity of these things for the existence of property:

1. Land – By this it is meant that property must come from some natural resource. You can replace this term with “raw material” or “malleable good” or whatever should so happen to suit your fancy. The idea behind it is basically that in order to be property it needs to be “something” which can be manipulated, controlled, etc. In other words property must be some combination of your “land” with your

2. Labor – Simple and easy bullet point of most theories of property. This is the idea that one must do something to Something in order to claim that Something as their own. Hardly anyone would say by simply walking across an open field that it belongs to you, but if one were to tiller and enrich the soil, well, then, maybe that field might become yours. But only if this mixture of land and labor has

3. Excludability – This seems to be the big one that no one quite pinned down. Tons of other ideas were bandied about from “intrinsic value” to “reasonable use” to “intent to profit” at our Intellectual Property Rights meeting, but each of these misses the key point. In order for someone to claim dominion over something — for instance, our tilled field — it must be possible to exclude others from it. If this condition isn’t satisfied, then something cannot be owned. We can put a fence around our field, hence it is excludable, thus it is able to be owned.

But can anyone really be excluded from using the alphabet or the positive integers or Newton’s second law? No. But by the same logic can anyone be excluded from the idea of the steam engine or the chemical formulation of aspirin? There is no Platonic ideal that people can claim dominion over. No one owns the idea of the iPod: people simply own iPods and the means to make iPods. This is because the information — what is “intellectual property” but a claim over information? — exists and is nonexcludable. Newton couldn’t claim to own his laws because his laws, as information, are unownable.

Maybe this’ll help.

Probably not.

Comments Posted by Barry Belmont in Libertarianism
Tagged intellectual property rights, property

25Feb10 ISFLC, 2. The Girl With Pretty EyesPosted By: Barry Belmont

So, I’ve wanted to record the experiences of those involved in the International Students for Liberty Conference. This is in an attempt to unify the disparate libertarian groups from around the country that attended that conference. A few people have responded thus far and they all have important perspectives to add.

The first account I want to relate is from Stacy Litz from the Student Liberty Front (hence forth known as The Greatest Club in the World) from Drexel University. I met her only briefly, but she left a fairly distinct impression (and a fairly wicked awesome business card) with me. As a co-leader of The Greatest Club in the World, she is an important leader in the growing youth-oriented libertarian field. She wrote this on her blog and has given me permission to reprint it here.

Please do enjoy.

WOW. The past two weekends have been very busy, and it’s now time to settle down (for a second or two) and relax.

At the ISFLC, SLF brought home the award for GROUP OF THE YEAR! This was amazing — all that hard work finally earned us some serious recognition! And some major competition for next year!

The ISFLC was well worth the countless hours spent planning to get 17 or so members out there, with great opportunities for education, networking, finding internships/scholarships, and more.

The next weekend, a few SLF members attended CPAC, which was interesting, to say the least.

Students For Liberty’s (SFL) co-founder and President, Alexander McCobin, sparked what has become a controversy this weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference when he thanked the event’s organizers for allowing conservative gay-rights group GOProud to co-sponsor the conference.“I would like to thank the American Conservative Union for inviting me to speak,” said McCobin. “This panel is titled, ‘Saving Freedom Across America.’ And so, in the name of freedom, I would like to also thank the American Conservative Union for welcoming GOProud as a co-sponsor of this event. […] The typical student’s response is to be socially tolerant and fiscally responsible. Students today recognize that freedom does not come in pieces. It is a single concept that we must defend at all times.”

While there were some initial boos, McCobin’s statements were greeted with widespread applause from the audience. The real controversy began soon afterward when another panelist, Ryan Sorba, rose to condemn CPAC for its open-mindedness toward GOProud and to attack homosexuals, which led to him being resoundingly booed off stage before completing his remarks. Full videos of the two speeches, including views of the audience’s reaction, can be found at www.StudentsForLiberty.org.

I would definitely check out those videos. While CPAC was full of true liberty lovers, there were definitely many opponents who made their views well known. All that I can say is that I hope our presence at the conference converted some into believing in true, principled liberty.

Comments Posted by Barry Belmont in SFL
Tagged ISFLC, Stacy Litz

25Feb10 Debbie Downer and People of WalmartPosted By: John Russell