Monthly Archive

The research group CIRCLE has a new report out on youth involvement in the 2010 elections, and it’s full of fascinating data, but a few demographic stats thing out at me when I read it:

• Among young voters, 14% of the electorate was black this year. (Just 10% of over-thirty voters were.)

• Seven percent of young voters described themselves as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, compared with 4% of over-thirty voters.

• Young Latinos represented 15% of the youth electorate, but only 14% of the young population as a whole.

What does this all mean? Well, for starters, it’s another nail in the coffin of the “only 4.7% of blacks voted” myth that swept Twitter last week. Blacks voted roughly in line with their proportion of the country’s population, and young blacks — the exact demographic that was so upset about the 4.7% stat — were as likely to vote as young whites.

More generally, it means that the generation of voters coming up now is more diverse — and more progressive — than the ones who came before. Young voters saved the Democratic party from an even more dismal November this year, and the party would do well to remember that going forward. The youth vote is a powerful asset to the Dems right now, but it’s not one they can take for granted.

Yesterday University of California officials announced that they intend to seek an 8% increase in student fees for next fall, bringing the cost of in-state, off-campus attendance to more than twelve thousand dollars a year. This new hike comes on the heels of the 32% fee increase, implemented last fall, that sparked massive student protests throughout the state.

As noted here yesterday, in-state tuition, room, and board in the UC system is already several thousand dollars a year more expensive than average out of state costs nationwide, making it cheaper for California students to study in other states than to stay at home.

The proposal will be voted on at a meeting of the UC Board of Regents next week. Expect fireworks.

Tuition, room, and board for out-of-state students at the University of California at Berkeley topped $50,000 this year, the first time that any public university’s costs have broken that barrier.

But Berkeley, which charges out of state students who live on campus a total of $50,649 in fees, isn’t just the most expensive public university in the country — its rates top those of all but 87 of the nation’s more than a thousand private colleges and universities.

Attendance at Berkeley costs $27,770 for in-state students this year. With the average total cost for out-of-state students at American public colleges and universities standing at $23,526 this year, that means that California’s home-state students are paying more to attend Berkeley than they would to attend a typical state institution at out-of-state rates.

Oh, and Berkeley fees are slated to rise another eight percent next year.

Andrew Shirvell, the Michigan Assistant Attorney General who waged an ongoing campaign of homophobic slander against an openly gay student government leader, has been fired.

Shirvell was a political ally of Attorney General Mike Cox, and had even served as Cox’s campaign manager in a past election. But today Cox said in a statement that Shirvell had “repeatedly violated office policies, engaged in borderline stalking behavior, and inappropriately used state resources” in his harassment of Michigan State student assembly president Chris Armstrong. In addition, Cox said, Shirvell had “lied … several times” to AG staff investigating his conduct.

Cox stood by Shirvell when the Michigan Daily first wrote of his bizarre behavior, but placed him on disciplinary suspension when the story broke in the national media.

There’s a lot to like about libertarianism. The idea that people should, in general, be left alone to make their own decisions and control their own destinies is a righteous and important one. But there’s a narrowness of focus in a lot of libertarian argumentation that I find incredibly frustrating.

Take this piece from the libertarian magazine Reason. In it, Steve Chapman claims that by regulating Happy Meals and trying to tax soda, politicians in San Francisco and New York are acting as “food police” — telling us what we can and can’t eat.

The reality is, though, that none of the politicians Chapman slams are trying to ban anything. The San Francisco law doesn’t stop parents from buying their kids fries or burgers, it just regulates which foods can be bundled with toys. And the New York proposal wouldn’t halt sales of sodas, it’d just tax them a bit more.

In today’s United States, attempts to actually ban products on moral grounds are thankfully quite rare. But by framing regulatory schemes like these as contests between free choice and state nannyism, libertarians often obscure the real dynamics at play in business-consumer relationships, and let insidious governmental acts off the hook.

Consider, for example, the recent New York Times exposé of the federal government’s role in promoting the sale of unhealthy, cheese-laden fast food. Under a paradigm of consumer choice, such bizarre schemes are unobjectionable — the feds are merely helping certain products make it to the market, where folks have the option of buying them or not.

But we make choices based on the options we’re presented with, and the choices we make are shaped by others’ decisions about what to offer us. If we’re presented with the opportunity to buy a traditional Happy Meal, we’re more likely to choose that particular set of menu items than we are if we’re left to pick and choose from an a la carte menu. If the price of Coke goes up, we’re likely to buy less of it. And if some government employee develops and promulgates a more artery-clogging pizza, then we’ll be presented with that as an option in the marketplace, and some of us will select it.

The war of autonomous consumer vs freedom-hating government is a classic libertarian construct, but as a rhetorical device it obscures as much as it illuminates. None of us constructs our world from an unbounded sea of possibility. Each of us lives an existence mediated by bureaucratic, corporate, and social forces, and those forces interrelate in ways far more complex than the “market vs government” strawman suggests.