What would the nation be like if the Student Government Association was the actual government of our nation?
The presidential debates would be less than 1/100th as popular as they are now, for one thing. There wouldn’t have been 70 million people watching the candidate’s debates, as The Daily Collegian attended the SGA’s presidential and trustee debates and counted about 50 people present, out of a voting body of more than 18,000 eligible voters. Voting would largely be arbitrary and many voters would just decide who they would vote for when they actually went to cast their vote.
The elected officials would be figureheads who couldn’t actually do nearly as much as people they would claim would vocally make remonstrations against. Many student leaders recently were active in protests in opposition for what is to be a $1,500 raise in the student tuition and fees during the next academic year.
Currently, such an objection, if taken before the Student Senate and passed, would merely be noted as the student body’s opinion to the members of the Universities Board, who actually deal with the financial issues that are necessary to keep the school running.
In reality, our government can do much more to persuade certain groups into giving their money, such as having the power to send them to jail. This leads to the next difference: If the Student Government Association ran our nation, they would have what political philosophers now call a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That is, as the government they would have control of military and police forces to enact their will.
The SGA has no such power now.
But if the SGA actually was a government power, we would come to think of it as oppressive to some parts of the population while it was also unduly benefiting certain constituents, namely the people who they knew had and who would probably vote for them again in the future.
At a recent protest of the fee hike in which student leaders participated, Student Trustee Lindsay McCluskey said of the fee increases, ‘We feel that it is an unnecessary fee increase because we know that money is coming in from the federal stimulus package that will hopefully alleviate UMass’ operating budget.’
If the SGA was our government, we would be taking on massive debt that we would not be willing to pay now, specifically to appease the people who were voting for the candidates. Minorities of people would be expected to pay for comforts and hard decisions that we would not be willing to make now.
If a politician focused on getting students to vote for them, many would campaign saying they would try to get perks ‘- like a mortgage on money not yet created. This way, they wouldn’t have to make tough decisions like calling for cuts in school funding of activities, faculty or any of the things which were easier to afford in better financial times.
Large majorities of people would be forced by government power to subsidize the educations of these aristocratic students, while they would rely on other people to pick up the tab at the end of the day. Like slaves, the producers of the wealth would be subject to the whims of politicians who did not want to face the fact that financial crisis’s meant pain.
Like aristocrats, students would see their subsidized education as a right, as they would be to the enslaved producers and taxpayers the aristocrats by virtue of being in a state school, like aristocrats of the sword, and aristocrats of birth. And if it was a nation in which most people were willing to take on huge amounts of debt that they couldn’t and wouldn’t pay, betting that their children would do that for them on threat of the handcuffs and prison, then it wouldn’t be a huge leap of faith to say that many of them wouldn’t be very interested in keeping something as impersonal as their state running by giving all their income after taxes as donations, or through a life given to military or public service.
Unfortunately, that is what our government is.
Huge numbers of undecided and independent voters, who can’t hold a steady conviction, swing many states ‘- making these states primaries so unpredictable that this majority of some of these states’ voters can represent those people who couldn’t care one way more than the other until Election Day. Our government does seek to subsidize the core of its voters, saying that 95 percent of households won’t see a dime in increased taxes.
If we could wait until the first interest payments on the $2 trillion President Barack Obama spent and plans to continue spending on a nationalized health care system and public funding for everyone through college ‘- in his first 50 days in office ‘- then perhaps in 10 years from now, 95 percent of taxpayers would start to see how unrealistic relying on 5 percent of taxpayers to pay 200 percent of our government’s budget last year was.
And when our children are still making the interest payments 30 years from now on government bonds that we sold to Chinese and other more financially responsible bankers, then we will know just how wrong it was to chain them to pay for our indecision and not while not being able to make their own brighter future. That would be the time when we could see that the choice had come between pain now, or chains then.
The decision is here now though, and statements like Trustee Lindsay McCluskey’s, while disheartening, show that unfortunately, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Jon Petersen is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].
