For those of you who don”t know, I play piano. One of the things that my piano teachers have told me is that repetition is a great way to remember a piece. Apparently, TCU politicians have taken this to heart. Every year, somebody running for student government tells me how they want to improve programs at the university.
While I admire their efforts, one has to wonder if it’s all futile. For our answer, let’s turn to everyone’s favorite buzz kill: economics.
Have you ever wondered how your pencil got in your hand? “Because I picked it up,” you sarcastically think to yourself. What I mean is, how did it go from being a tree, some rubber and metal to a pencil?
If you think about it, the process took thousands of people to bring you that pencil. It took people to mine the metal, make the rubber, drive the pencil to the store and countless others to sell you that pencil at a small cost.
A bigger question is how the heck did that all happen? Was there some pencil-making czar who told everyone where to go to get the pencil to some college student?
Absolutely not. Instead, because those people were trying to make a living, the pencil got into your hands without anyone ordering it forward.
The biggest obstacle, however, is knowing how many pencils everyone wants. Maybe some people want more than others. Maybe some want none at all. The market figures out the number of pencils through self-regulation.
Programs at the university are different through. Basically, we all pay a certain amount for a small amount of people to decide how to spend it for us. Sometimes we benefit ÃÂ8212; I personally like the free s’mores. Other times, we get stuff we don’t want 8212; I’m still wondering who in the world Lady Antebellum is.
The point is, it’s really hard to spend people’s money on other people because you have no idea what everyone wants. You will always please some people and upset others.
When TCU SGA candidates talk about getting better programs, I’m usually pretty skeptical. It’s good to be sensitive to student demands but we should understand that if we have this system in place, inevitably we get stuff we don’t want sometimes.
Michael Lauck is a junior economics major from Houston.
