Sex Out Loud right near the Pro-Life Action League; UW Atheists neighbors the Campus Ministry; Stop the War Coalition a well-deserved stone's throw from the College Republicans; Socialists right across from the economics club. All this could be found at the student organizational fair Wednesday, and it all made for some entertaining sights and sounds.
The Students for Creative Anachronism (think people who want to relive medieval times without the war, famine, scurvy or manual labor) sang a fun old song on stage while a pro-life friend of mine in the College Democrats had a rousing discussion with the Republican manning the Pro-Life Action League table. I myself admired a real human brain in a jar of formaldehyde from the neurosurgery club, right next to the skydivers.
Which club should you join? The choice is simple: Join them all, and reap their benefits to the fullest. Why? Because it's the only way you'll ever enjoy the seg fee money you had to kick in.
The conservative economist Milton Friedman, someone I otherwise disagree with, had a comical illustration of free speech in an authoritarian system through a series of government subsidies to ideological organizations, an official ministry for dissent, if you will, that ultimately rewards radicalism.
Ironically enough, when radicals are paid to dissent against the government, there will be a steady stream of willing radicals ready to work for the government by way of criticizing it. This was by no means intended as a criticism of any real policy, and it is an extremist strawman of an argument used against more real-life cases of government intervention in the economy, but strangely enough, ASM is beginning to mirror it closely, except in being less open and more stifling.
A funny case of this is the Seg Fee Defenders, a group dedicated to espousing the continuation of the seg fee system as it stands. They hold rallies and fairs, put up signs on Bascom Hill and pass out pamphlets explaining to us why the system is good. How is this grassroots organization paid for? Through seg fees! Some grassroots.
If all the ideological groups of our campus were suddenly stripped of the cash that the ordinary students they harass were forced to contribute, how many would survive?
The College Republicans use no such money; my own College Democrats don't make use of it. The UW Greens live off the money. The guy at the Pro-Life Action League table told me they operated without funding for quite a while, only getting a pittance after Southworth forced ASM to have a semblance of support for free speech, and could probably go without once more.
I'm sure there are many ideological groups that, in the absence of a subsidy, could get along with true grassroots support, but without the artificial stacked deck we have right now, things would probably be more peaceful.
Indeed, part of what makes activism admirable is that one must risk something and sacrifice time and resources. When the revenue stream is guaranteed from ASM coffers, with no risk entailed, there is no real virtue to it. The College Republicans are more of a democratic grassroots organization than the MCSC, if only due to the nature of the funding.
Other groups will reply that students must be charged this extra tuition in the form of seg fee money in order to pursue their good, progressive goals, but the guy at Pro-Life Action League probably thinks his money for making big photocopies of gruesome photos is an even more noble cause, and there is no objective way to tell either group who is wrong. At any rate, tuition increases can be called progressive, discriminatory funding can be called upholding free speech and up can be called down; but in the end such words will always ring hollow, never deserving any credence from an objective, attentive population.
