Welcome back, or if you’re new here, just welcome.
If you’re a newbie, you’ll soon notice the political atmosphere at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is a little more leftist than you’re used to. I don’t want to exaggerate; contrary to what some would have you believe, most university faculty – at least, most at UNL – are not here to indoctrinate you in the cult of Karl Marx.
But you’ll find that many of them, to the extent that you can figure out their political views, are left-of-center. So will be quite a few of your fellow students.
In a quixotic attempt to immunize you against the prevailing campus wisdom, in this column I’m going to try to convince you why you should swim against the tide and be a libertarian.
Think back to last November when many of you voted for the first time. If national statistics are anything to go by, you probably voted for Barack Obama and his mysteriously missing vice president, Joe Biden.
You then worked your way down the ballot. Those of you in the First Congressional District might have recognized our congressman, Jeff Fortenberry (R), and you saw he had an opponent, Max Yashirin (D). You might have voted for a state senator, though only half of the Unicameral’s seats are on any biennial ballot.
And then you got to vote for the Board of Regents, the Public Power District, the National Resources District, yadda, yadda, yadda. Be truthful now – didn’t you wonder, “Who are these people?” and “Why should I care?”
You might even have felt guilty because, had you voted for any of them, it would have been an uninformed choice. Don’t feel guilty. I follow politics quite intently, and I don’t know most of the candidates on the bottom of the ballot. My interest peters out after the County Commission and Regents’ races.
You had choices, but many of them weren’t meaningful choices. You might not have liked the choice at the top of the ticket – personally, I held my nose before voting for McCain/Palin – but lower down, you didn’t even know enough to dislike your options.
And here’s a secret. No matter whom you voted for, down-ticket, it didn’t matter. We had a hotly-contested Regents race here in Lincoln, and yet, having watched the Regents for years, I am perfectly confident that any candidate, once elected, will vote the way the University of Nebraska wants, 98 percent of the time.
This university is a billion-dollar enterprise. It has experienced, savvy administrators in Varner Hall who spend a lot of time figuring out how to get the Regents to do what they want. The Regents, in contrast, are unpaid part-timers with no independent staff. There’s no contest.
While, nominally, the university is under the democratic control of the people of Nebraska, in reality, it’s a quasi-autonomous nongovernmental organization (first assignment of the semester: look up the term QUANGO). But it’s not unusual; democracy can nudge them in one direction or another, but government and government institutions have immense inertia, and a depressingly large amount of the time, elections don’t matter very much.
Now that I’ve shaken your faith in all that’s holy, let me cheer you up a bit. There’s another way you get to make choices, and you get to make them every day, not every two or four years. You have money. You may not have a lot of money – if you do, congratulations – but still, every day, you get to choose to spend it or save it; and how to save it or how to spend it. You can buy your textbooks new or used (or take a chance and wing it).
You can buy an iPhone or a BlackBerry or just a plain vanilla cell phone. You can have a cinnamon latté or buy Starbucks shares. The choices are endless. More seriously, you can choose which doctor and dentist to go to (or not). You can buy a car from a dozen different companies, and only two of them are owned by the government.
You can live in a dorm or rent an apartment (not more than three of you at once, please; the City of Lincoln doesn’t like that). In fact, you get to make decisions about most of the major issues in your life, and unlike many decisions you make on the first Tuesday in November, they really matter.
In other countries, and at other times, you would not have had so much choice. When I was a kid, in Ireland, you could have one kind of telephone. The government made us wait three months to get one, and it was black. When I lived in Germany, and in England too, I had to pay the government a hefty license fee for my TV, so the government could run their ghastly TV stations. Comedy Central was not an option.
I had to have a license even for my radio, though the only thing I ever listened to was American Forces Network. Here in America, you can choose to drink heavily taxed alcohol or smoke even more heavily taxed tobacco, but you can’t smoke pot.
Governments take away choice in another, subtler, but even more important way. To run all their enterprises, like Lancaster Manor and the United States Postal Service and the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlichrechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (seriously, that’s the main public TV network in Germany), and maybe soon, ObamaCare, they tax you. And when they take your money, you no longer have all those wonderful choices of what to do with it.
You probably don’t pay a lot of taxes right now, except for Social Security (good luck on it being there for you when you’re 65), but in a few years, when your UNL degree turns out to have been a gateway to immense wealth, taxes will take a full half of all you earn. Half of all your choices, in other words, will be taken from you, and in return, every four years they will give you a ballot to mark, perhaps to choose between Chelsea Clinton and Jenna Bush for president.
If you think that’s a lousy trade, then congratulations. You just took the first step to becoming a libertarian.
Dr. Gerard Harbison is a professor of chemistry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
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