It turns out that you can use basic economic laws to discern quite a lot. And while we have been saying this for a couple of years now, it is genuinely funny (and disheartening) to see that many people stand befuddled when their favorite quack theory of government is shown to be wrong.
Now, rather than point to the faults of President Obama’s economic fallacies in his recent State of the Union (fallacies which are blind to those who already believe in government), let’s just show a few things that the UNR Students for Liberty said would happen to our own student government, the ASUN.
They say that the student government is the voice of the students, addressing issues that concern students.
We say that an institution whose highest voted senator (who recently resigned, apparently for a job at an Apple Store) garners ~2% of students’ votes has no right to call itself the voice of the students.
They say that our student government can help reduce the budget cuts and make sure students aren’t as severely affected.
We say the budget cuts will continue to happen and student leaders will be powerless to stop it.
They say they are working on ways to keep ASUN fees from getting out of hand by cutting things like the Unity Commission and Flipside, and instituting a flat fee.
We say it’s about damn time.
The problem with government isn’t that its spending is out of control. It’s that its spending must be out of control. Controls are placed by markets, where gross overspending is punished and underspenders rarely prosper. Markets are the things that bring people and incentives together. It is in markets where people learn the value of their time and trade it accordingly with others. How can one even know what their time is worth if they get paid exactly the same for doing a terrible job and for doing an excellent one? Without markets no hope exists for coming to the optimal solution for problems. Not in our student government, nor our government at large.
