Reading the article on the student government’s budget got me thinking (“Who’s controlling your money?” ODE, Feb. 5, 2007). There is no way that our fee should be even close to this high, if it should exist at all. The problem isn’t that the student government isn’t trying its hardest to use the funds in an efficient manner. The fact that it is a government that is allocating the resources is the problem.
Government spending is inherently flawed. As Milton Friedman put it, “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own.”
If I don’t ride the bus, then it would make no sense for my incidental fee to be used for a bus pass. It is not fair for someone who doesn’t go to the Recreation Center to pay fees for that service. If it is worth it to me to go to the Recreation Center, I should have the choice of paying the fee. The key word here is choice. When I have control over my own resources, in this case the incidental fee, I am free to choose.
Programs are misused when the government pays for them, which leads to waste. These points haven’t even brought up the obvious situations where student funds have been misused. Reports about the infamous Sunriver trip in 2004 just highlight another example of waste. I don’t feel our funds should have to pay for student government to take trips even if they are working. President Axelrod points out that our fees go toward many different programs, including this paper. Maybe if people had to pay a dime for the paper, there would be fewer thrown on the ground.
If the fee is $212 a term, then that means a student will pay more than $2,500 dollars over four years at the University. Will you use $2,500 in services that the ASUO provides by the time you are out of school? No offensive, but we can spend our money on services we value a lot better than this or any other government can.
James Puopolo
University student