LETTER: Let students choose news
Editor,
USA Today, the Salt Lake Tribune, and the Herald Journal all for just a $5 student fee? I’d love it. It’s a bargain for an avid newspaper reader like myself. Still, I strongly oppose using student fees to provide these newspapers to students for “free.” Economically, environmentally and morally, it just does not make sense.
Any first-year econ student knows that people are better off when they decide how to spend their own money. The logic is simple: An ad hoc committee created by ASUSU cannot know how much and/or what kind of newspaper, if any, each of 20,000 students really wants better than each of those students does. The only way to make sure that students get the newspapers they want at a cost that is worth it to them is to let them choose how to spend their own money. Making students pay involuntarily with an additional student fee, and having ASUSU spend that money for them, only ensures that the wrong number of newspapers will be purchased at the wrong price. This is a problem with student fees in general.
Consider also that $5 per student totals hundreds of thousands of dollars. If we are going to collectively spend that kind of money, do we want to spend it on newspapers that already really are free online at www.sltrib.com, www.hjnews.com, and www.usatoday.com?
There is also an environmental argument. We can see what overconsumption of “free” newspapers leads to just by looking around. The Utah Statesman is strewn about campus and stuffed in overflowing recycle bins. This translates into wasted trees. If we adopt the newspaper proposal, much larger newspapers like USA Today will be treated like The Statesman.
On a moral note, I don’t want the newspaper that I enjoy to be involuntarily paid for in part by other students. It’s like taking money from them to buy my newspaper, and that clearly isn’t right. (This is another problem with student fees in general.) If ASUSU has the best interests of the entire student body in mind, it will not approve the newspaper proposal.
Cory Davidson