For those of you attending the University of Nevada, Reno.

If you haven't already heard, the president of the ASUN,* Eli Reilly, has proposed a "stimulus package" for UNR. The idea is for $200,000 to be spent over two years that "will create 50 new student jobs on campus." If this isn't the definition of blindingly moronic, then I don't know what is.

In fact, if this is considered a "good idea" or is actually thought, by anybody, at any time, for any reason to be an effective way to "stimulate" UNR in a positive way, then I am afraid that everything I've ever known, loved, or cared for in humanity is circling the drain.

In the face of "budget cuts" and a "recession" someone's fearless leader (not mine), Eli Reilly, has seen fit to inflate the budget 10% what it was last year. When START said that cutting the budget of certain programs was going to be necessary and that if elected they would be scrupulous about it, they were screamed out of whatever room they were in. Laughed at, picked on, and called ridiculous, for proposing such a ridiculous idea. And yet with Reilly's cuts of $12,500 from Flipside, $3,000 from homecoming, $4,000 from Insight, and $50,000 from club support, this course of action is applauded and indeed deemed responsible.

Wait, what? you might ask. Didn't I just say the budget is 10% greater, and yet there are all these cuts? What's up? Well you'll be glad to know that among the increases were: senate wages (go figure...), executive wages (go figure...), professional salaries (seeing a trend?), professional and classified salaries (seriously?), ASUN advertising, Campus Escort, the Leadership Program, and Diversity inititives.

That's right. Stuff that doesn't actually help the majority of students in any conceivable way. No money for tutoring, no help centers, no counseling, nothing.

Complaints of slash and burn cutting (with a heavy dose of favoritism) aside, what about this "stimulus package." Well, 50 lucky students are going to get jobs working for the ASUN or some other department on campus. Fifty make work jobs paid for by people with actual jobs, actually working their way through college. These jobs that Reilly hopes to create don't exist now because it doesn't pay for them to exist now. Put another way, the reason there aren't the 50 jobs he hopes to create out of thin air already existing now is because it is not worth it by the people who would employ them to allow them to work for them. As an example, say there are 20 of you working at the Panda Express (mmm...) on campus. Why aren't there 25? Because the people paying you will lose money.

The solution, at least in the eyes of someone's economically ignorant leader? Have student fees pay for those 5 extra workers! According to the "package" the department will only pay for 25% of the student's salary while the University picks up the 75% slack. Now, Panda Express only needs to value those 5 new employees at 1/4 of what they value their other employees. But, the 1/4 valuable workers will still be paid the same amount! (or close to it) Who exactly is this fair to?

Not the workers who get paid what they're effectively worth (and not 4 times as much).
Not the majority of students whom this money is being taken away from (~$16.50 per person).
Not the people excluded from the jobs (since there is no way to effectively measure marginal costs for employment in this case).
Not even to the students who get these jobs! Preferential treatment is still unfair even if we like it.

Why do it then? Why not just give every student $16.50 in Advantage Cash or only for the Bookstore and stimulate the University that way? Who gets the jobs? Which jobs are they? Why those jobs? Why not other jobs? Why? Why?

Why?

Because we have a student government. Like all governments it does not, cannot, know the best way to achieve ends. The person in charge* ($8,800) is a History major, the speaker of the Senate ($7,000) is an "International Affairs" major, and of the two newly elected College of Business senators ($870 each) only one is an actual Economics major, though (so far as I know), he had nothing to do with the budget or this "package": these people do not know what they are doing with money. Even if they were all Ecomonics geniuses, they still wouldn't know how to properly spend other people's money better than they do. You can't know how to do that. And this is one of the major failings of government (next to it being illegitimate and ever-more-tyrannical).

So give it back. Give us back our money. It's not yours and it's not yours to give to 50 other people in some misguided attempt to "stimulate" the University. Isn't it enough that the four people mentioned above have already taken $17,540 from us by themselves? Must they take even more in the name of others? There is nothing worse than a benevolent thief, he knows of no crime greater than that of honest ownership.

And let us, as a final note, never forget that lesson near and dear to us all:

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Hey guys, I hope you all got your tax returns filled today, if not here is some motivation to get them in promptly from Reason.tv.



Also check out "W-2 WTF?!?!: Tax Facts to Make Your Head Explode!"

As many of you know, Barry Belmont (the current president of UNR SFL) has been recently advocating libertarian ideology in the published campus newspaper: The Nevada Sagebrush. After giving his most recent lecture on anarcho-capitalism at a meeting, the group and Barry himself have been receiving staunch and ignorant opposition from another Sagebrush writer, Lee Hampton. From Lee's original article, to Barry's response, Lee Hampton has once again released an article attempting to "disprove" the ideas of Austrian Economics. His blatant disregard of sound economics in his poorly constructed rebuttal has inspired a man by the name Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio in Toronto to post a 25 minute long youtube response to Lee. I encourage you to watch this video for it is quite hilarious and so good.

After one of our more rip-roaring meetings about Left wing politics (in which we went into great length about abortion), I started thinking about all of the points presented. There were many great arguments for both “pro-life” and "pro-choice.” Personally, I tried to defend the idea of “evictionism” wherein a lady is allowed to evict a baby from her womb, so long as she tries her best not to kill it. I am still unsure of how plausible this solution is and I will continue to think it through. But...I stumbled upon something for which I haven’t thought of a satisfactory answer to and I hope one of you might be able to help me.

I offer this thought experiment for your consideration.

A lady has been pregnant for four months. She planned to get pregnant with her loving husband who he has been nothing but supportive. However, recently she has become depressed. She has thought long and hard about it and she has decided that she would like to kill herself. She knows if she kills herself the baby will not survive. Is she allowed to go through with it?

I believe this thought experiment highlights a dilemma for us libertarians. We believe the idea that the “right to life” is congruent with the “right to death.” That is, if one is allowed to do with their life what they wish, then ending it is as justifiable a measure as any other. (Now, there is some debate as to whether this is entirely true, but, for most of us, we would say that a person has a right to kill themself.)

So, is the mother allowed to take her life knowing that she will take the life of another (we are, for the sake of argument, holding that life begins at the very moment sperm touches egg)? One obvious answer is no, she hasn’t that right. It would be comparable to saying a suicide bomber is justified in detonating in a marketplace. Suicide is ok, murder is not.

The rebuttal, however, is: well, what right do any of us have to force the mother to live? Can we say, justifiably, that we may violate the right to life of one person in order to uphold the right to life of another? I do not believe we can in this case. We cannot agree to this because what it requires is that a third party (who is not in danger of someone violating their right to life and who the two parties concerned have not agreed to let arbitrate the dispute) deciding whose life is more important. Clearly allowing this third party to decide is a violation of both the mother’s and the fetus’s right to life.

What if the mother “evicts” the fetus before she kills herself. She tells her husband to take her to the hospital where the doctors will do everything in their power to save the life of the unborn child. Being only four months old, however, the child has little chance of surviving without the mother’s womb. Is this justified? May she now kill herself?

I think she may. If she does everything in her power to let the child live and yet (due to the inabilities of modern medical techniques or what have you) the child dies, I do not think she could be held culpable for murder any more than a poor mother would for letting her child die by not being able to afford vaccinations. Thus, simply by “evicting” the fetus, the mother is not responsible for murder, even if she knows the child may die.

And I believe this stems from the fact that the “right to life” is simply a form of the “right to property.” Consider a life without a body, without any material property at all: to what extent could this be called a life? If you are religious you may believe that there exists a soul and perhaps that soul has no material property and that may exist, yes—I can grant you that. But, then, in what sense can one “kill” a soul? Without delving into theological complexities, I think we can agree that life as it exists on earth for us right now is, at base, at least tied intractably with physical material—that is, property.

Therefore, the right to life is a facet of property rights. Well, if this is the case, then isn’t the developing fetus responsible for a greater violation of rights than the mother? Even conceding that both the mother and the fetus are violating each other’s right to life in equal proportion (once again, who’s to decide it would be unequal?), isn’t the fetus also violating the property rights of the mother? Surely the womb of a woman is hers. The mother isn’t violating the property rights of the fetus. The fetus has no “right” to live in a womb any more than I do. The fetus has a right to life, yes, but it has no right to usurp property.

If we are just chalking up who has violated the least amount of rights, it can clearly be seen that it is the mother who has done the least amount of rights violations and has had her rights violated the most. We must hold then that it is the mother who we must support in her decision as the more justified. If a pregnant lady wants to kill herself, I think she must be allowed. And if a pregnant lady is allowed to kill herself, I do not see why she cannot simply evict someone from her womb without having to resort to suicide and homicide to do it.

Or am I completely wrong?

About two weeks ago the local paper The Nevada Sagebrush had an article criticizing my Anarcho-Capitalism lecture entitled "Libertarianism: Rearing its Ugly Head with Faith in 'Free Market.'" Figuring this deserved a response, I wrote one and it was published in the Sagebrush.

It can be read at the above link as well as below. But on the Sagebrush site there have been numerous back-and-forths with those that (for some reason) didn't like the article. You can have your two cents there or here. Please do enjoy.


A Libertarian Conversation
By Barry Belmont

To be justified in believing in any philosophy means to follow its premises to their logical conclusion. For libertarians there are, at base, two undeniable tenets: 1) the right of self-ownership and 2) all interactions between people (self-owners) must be voluntary.

In short, the entirety of libertarianism can be summed up as “you can do whatever you want, just keep your mitts to yourself.”

In a recent article, Nevada Sagebrush writer Lee Hampton attacked libertarian ideas, claiming they hinge “upon a blind, fanatical and theological faith in ‘free markets’” and that libertarians are somehow bad for doing this.

While the words “blind” and “fanatical” are inflammatory and used for offhand dismissals rather than legitimate criticisms, it can rightly be said that we libertarians do have faith in the free market. Free markets are nothing short of the sum total of all free and voluntary human interactions.

If you can’t have faith in this, then what hope is there of ever improving the human condition?

Some might say that the hope lies in governments and that governments must step in to change individual human behavior for the better. But to believe the government is something different from the same individuals who compose markets is absurd. Who are these angels so full of benevolence? The government is composed of the exact same people as those who make up free markets with one important difference: They have no incentive to do anything well because they can use force.

On free markets, how much a service benefits society correlates to the amount of money gained. This is why Apple and Google do so well and why Paint-a-Pet stores generally go out of business. Where Apple and Google make their money by directly serving customers, governments get the same amount of money no matter how poorly they do their job.

In fact, the converse can be seen: The more poorly a government does its job (that is, by allowing crime rates to rise, causing economic strife, etc.) the more money it gets in the name of “solving” the problem.

In essence, advocating for free markets is advocating for personal responsibility, triumphing personal liberty and holding that though there are some greedy, mean and bad people, the vast majority of people are good. Sure, there might be an Enron or an AIG fiasco on the free and open market, but these singular bad instances are overwhelmed by billions of everyday cooperative interactions.

Think of how much cooperation went in to making what you are reading: I wrote this article, an editor edited it, someone placed it in the newspaper, the paper in your hand was made from trees which were transported vast distances by trucks and planes, the ink had to be manufactured, printers had to place it on the page and so on. Thus, faith in free markets is simply a faith in free individuals.

This is what the University of Nevada, Reno Students for Liberty believe and support.

To learn more, or to read the full version of my lecture “Anarcho-Capitalism II: Justice & Defense,” visit www.UNRforLiberty.com.

As we all file our income taxes, I thought this would be much needed motivation.

Us.

In case you didn't hear already (Mike's yell when this was first announced, in fact, woke many of the dead in local cemeteries) the UNR Students for Liberty was announced by the ASUN as THE CLUB OF THE YEAR.

Somehow the club so full of misanthropes, the club that ran the Nobody 08 campaign, started START, hosted "Surviving a Police Encounter," and in general were the bane of many people's existence was named THE CLUB OF THE YEAR by the very institution that despises it (and which, to a certain extent, we despise in return).

Another post will follow listing some of the reasons why we are best, why we are so great, so awesome, so totally smug and (now) justified...so stayed tuned for that. But I just really wanted to let you all know as soon as possible that we are:

THE CLUB OF THE YEAR

Many times throughout the course of political discussion, arguments and debates quickly digress into intense and emotionally filled combative yelling contests generally between two or three different viewpoints upon any given subject. We feel that this is due to a lack of deeper understanding of opposing viewpoints. Instead of rationally attempting to understand where the other is coming from, it is often times seen as a personal attack on family/friend/hero derived values. We hope to dive beneath the current political issues and instead arrive at a deeper, more philosophical understanding as to why people differ in their political values.

This is why, for the next two meetings, the UNR Students for Liberty will be hosting a two part series where we will be having open meetings to discuss different political philosophies. This Thursday, we will begin by cordially inviting organizations typically seen as “Left Wing” or “Liberal” in nature to understand their philosophy and try to mutually determine each other’s stance. Following this, we will invite “Right Wing” or “Conservative” organizations to the discussion. Through this, we hope it will not only increase understanding between “us” and “them”, but also create open lines of communication with on-campus political groups (since it is nearly non-existent as of now). This will be a discussion mostly of personal political beliefs and to compare and contrast the views of other political viewpoints. This will not be a debate, but merely a time to find mutual understanding.

Everyone is welcome and encouraged to come learn more about these two camps. So if you consider yourself a “conservative”, we welcome you to come to the “Left Wing” meeting and vice versa. We hope to unite understanding between all campus organizations.
Knowing is half the battle. See you there!

The Left – Thursday, April 9 at 7:00PM in JCSU 317  RSVP
The Right – Thursday, April 23 at 7:00PM in JCSU 423 RSVP