The Drug War: A Rant

By: G.T. Johnson

If you happened to miss John Stossel’s lecture a couple weeks ago, you missed more than a few hundred college kids trying to one-up each other’s witty moustache comments. Mr. Stossel delivered a refreshingly logical speech on liberty that all college students need to hear, especially those caught in the near indistinguishable blathering of the two major political parties, such as my friend whom I sat with. My buddy is a die-hard Republican whose contempt for the left rivals Anakin Skywalker’s feelings towards Sand People. He attended the lecture under the impression that Stossel was the ideal “anti-liberal” because of his support of the free market. When Stossel spoke in favor of the legalization of drugs, my pal probably felt a bit like the Asian boy in Gran Torino when Clint Eastwood said no to retaliation against the local gang.

As Mr. Stossel understands, it’s hard to believe in freedom when you are against a man’s right to consume a plant. I’m pretty sure plant consumption is about as basic to human instinct as singing along to Don’t Stop Believing. Now don’t think I’m some irresponsible anarchist hippie who drops acid as much as Britney Spears drops her baby; I have less experience with drugs than Tim Tebow has with books (that aren’t the Bible). However, my belief in freedom is not going to diminish just because some of my classmates want to find a way to make Jimmy Fallon’s talk show funny. On top of that, it doesn’t take a night at a Phish concert to realize that the War on Drugs has less been successful than Matt Damon’s attempts to be taken seriously since the release of Team America.

I’m guessing that right about now most would agree that it sure would be nice to get back the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been taxed out of our paychecks in order to do nothing more than create a black market far more dangerous than a Bob Knight locker room after a loss, filled with bears. Look, I understand that some people do destroy their lives in pursuit of a perpetual high. Honestly though, even if you took away all the drugs in the world people would still destroy their lives in pursuit of pleasure and catharsis, and probably in much freakier ways involving sleep deprivation and Hannah Montana that I would rather not think about.

I can’t fail to mention that the costs of this war are increasing faster than the number of “Carrie Prejean sex tape” Google searches. Our elected officials have tied our country up like Ann Darrow in this expensive and bogus excuse of a “war”, but I very much envy her situation because the inevitable repercussions of our increasing spending and debt are going to make King Kong seem about as menacing as our football team’s defense. I’ll end my rant there; I hope I didn’t offend anyone.

If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Break It

By Andrea Castillo

George W. Bush famously expressed his intention to “abandon free market principles in order to save the free market” during his dismal period as a lame duck one whole year ago. Since then, the government has undergone some substantial changes which are not just limited to the obvious change of administrations, but also include a renewed commitment to intervene in the workings of the economy. Both presidential candidates in the 2008 election campaigned with sweeping promises of government initiatives to rectify the economic problems that plagued our markets. Whether realized through summer, tax-free gas holidays, a la John McCain, or through President Obama’s broader and potent federal, spending-stimulus program, during the election debate both sides of the aisle generally agreed that some kind of government intervention and stimulation were necessary to revitalize the economy.

It doesn’t take much time or effort for an individual to put faith in the convenient solution of allowing our ever-large government to roll up its sleeves and save us from our own greed and ineptitude. As busy college students, many of which may not be familiar with complicated economic concepts, we routinely hear Ivy-League-certified economists and official-sounding government administrators prattle on and on about how many jobs the stimulus is saving, how robust our GDP appears to be, how the financial markets are rising, and how many green industries are being funded. However, we rarely stop to consider what this “stimulus” even is and why anyone could possibly oppose it.

In order to understand opposition to the stimulus, we should look to the past. Way back in 1850, French philosopher Frédéric Bastiat provided us with a remarkable illustration of an embarrassingly obvious economic concept that somehow manages to elude many legislators today. In his essay “That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen,” Bastiat details an account of a shopkeeper and his son in a small town. The diligent shopkeeper’s son is unruly and bored, so one day he gathers stones and throws them against the side of the family shop. As could be expected, one of the stones hits the front window and shatters it. The shopkeeper, although irked with his boy, shakes his head at the prospect of having to purchase a new window. At this point, a small crowd gathers around the scene of the accident and begins chattering among themselves, as crowds typically do. They shake their heads at the carelessness of the rebellious youth, but they still manage to remark about how fortunate it is that little boys destroy windows, because if they didn’t, window-makers would surely go out of business.

At first glance, the analysis offered by the crowd might seem reasonable and just. After all, the shopkeeper’s loss is the window-maker’s gain. This is a natural and easily observed relationship between buyer and seller with which we are all familiar. However, the moment that someone suggests that we ought to purposefully destroy windows in order to keep the window-makers in business, that person has fallen into the fallacy of the broken window. Of course the window-making guild would be pleased with this kind of thought-process, but what of the other industries? If the boy had never broken the window, the shopkeeper would have spent that money elsewhere. Perhaps the store needed a new employee to help stock on the weekends, which would have given another individual a steady source of income which would be spent on various other items. The shopkeeper might have invested in a new street sign to attract customers, which would have given a fine commission to the local sign-maker. Maybe the shopkeeper wanted to treat himself to a fancy, new pair of shoes, which would have kept the cobbler busy with a new order. However, the fallacy of the broken window led the town to consider only the short-term and obvious benefits to the window-making industry while ignoring the complex market transactions that would have occurred without any destructive intervention.

We can apply this simple illustration to many complicated modern government “solutions” that are presented as one-size-fits-all quick-fixes. Most recently we can see the broken-window fallacy in the popular cash-for-clunkers program, which provided cash incentives for the owners of inefficient cars to buy new cars in order to provide support to the ailing auto industry. (The old cars were later destroyed.) Sure, the stimulus plan and cash-for-clunkers may have created a few jobs in the short-term and it may make certain industries appear as if they are thriving and prosperous. However, it is important to note that such artificial growth will be unsustainable after the government funds run out and will have sapped business from other industries that individuals might have patronized instead. There is little that we can do to stop these programs now; however, it might do us all a bit of good to give credence to the wisdom those who have gone before us have left for us to consider. Just like the shopkeeper had to admonish his son about throwing stones, so must we challenge the conventional “wisdom” of our legislators who often promote short-term fixes to long-term problems.

Your Money Spent Wisely

By Thomas Laughlin

As students get a rare, first-hand experience of rising costs, in the form of rising tuition and fees, during a recession, one might wonder where that extra money goes. In fact, your fees primarily go to the University as a whole to pay for a variety of things and people. However, not all of those vaguely-named fees are allocated appropriately and responsibly.

The Activities and Services Fee is one of those fees that has a name that, while concise, doesn’t really provide much information as to how that $9.97 per credit hour ($10.47 next year) obtained from every undergraduate and graduate student is spent. While the fee is, after all, the student bodies’ money to be used on activities and services like the Leach Center, Homecoming, etc., it is also being used as a direct source of funding for some less conspicuous purchases.

Going over the Excel spreadsheets available on the Student Government Association website, one can peruse all of the different expenditures made by various agencies, RSOs, and the like. Among the hundreds of recent expenditures, there are the routine expenses for the myriad events held by different organizations all over campus. This is why the A&S Fee was created. Upon further inspection there are some more noticeable big-ticket items that aren’t for any student organization event or expense.

In just the last few months since the beginning of this academic year, the heads of your student legislative and executive branches have spent over $2000 to send a couple students to a conference in Polk County, $2148 for food at an SGA awareness event, and an astonishing $9000 for towels that you may or may not have received during the FSU vs. USF home game this season. On top of these examples there are tens of thousands of dollars that have been allocated by the SGA Senate for food costs and facility rentals of various groups.

The items stated above are just a few examples of the outrageous, reckless, and unchecked use of the students’ money for some desires of a relatively small group of individuals. Unlike the convoluted and bureaucratic process student organizations must go through to acquire funding, the heads of the SGA didn’t have to jump through as many hoops to get your money. And when they see the opportunity to take more of your money, they do. According to Bobby Seifter, a junior here at FSU and former Student Senate President, we have “a certain lifestyle” to maintain on this campus – even if it comes at the expense of the average student. For an itemized list of SGA expenses please see the SGA Budgets tab: http://sga.fsu.edu/