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Comment by imjustsaying | Hacker News Reader

I didn't expect this from Reason, a libertarian magazine.

Libertarians tend to support free and voluntary association. The college is not stopping these students from voluntarily hiking together. The college is simply saying: we don't want to get eaten alive by the potential liability if you hike together with our organization's name attached.

If anything, you'd think Reason would applaud the college for not strapping the non-hiking student with the increased insurance costs of allowing the hiking group to continue.

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You're missing that the Student Activities Fee or equivalent at most American universities is not voluntary. Students pay it (often several hundred dollars or more) on top of tuition and other fees, and have only limited or indirect control of where the fee goes. Here, the administration is giving a flat "no" rather than seeking a way to make things work (insurance or a satellite phone for the club).

That paternalism infantilizes the adult students and encourages a childlike mindset of seeking safety in exchange for submission to an authority and its power over you rather than an independent minded, solve-it-yourself, get-up-and-go ethos more conducive to a free society.

Libertarians often retort that the fees are not really involuntary, you can either go to the college or not. I think this has more to do with libertarians are often finding themselves taking sides in the culture war for some reason.

Culture is tremendously important.

And it's not a contradiction for libertarians to advocate for a particular kind of culture which they (and I) might believe is more conducive to a free society (or to advocate against a particular kind of culture which might threaten the survival of individual rights). That's your 'some reason' for libertarian participation in the culture war---the belief that, with respect to liberty, some kinds of culture are invigorating and others are corrosive---and we (libertarians) don't come down uniformly on the left or right, or even uniformly with each other.

I do so all the time, and as long as I'm not employing violence in my advocacy, I don't see a conflict with my moral and political principles.

In the context of being in college, the fee is usually either mandatory or required to participate in any activity at all, whether it's the bible study that reserves rooms and gets no money from student government, the film series that spends like mad bringing in 35mm and 70mm prints, or something in between. At best, that's an extremely poor gradient of control over your own money and a consequence of centralizing control of funds in a way that many libertarians would likely oppose.

Why is it your business what a college decides to make their culture? Isn't it your choice to go to that college or not? Where is the libertarian logic for imposing your own beliefs on others?

Trying to persuade people that certain things are good and others are bad by publishing articles doesn't violate anybody's rights within most moral and ethical frameworks typically regarded as libertarian.

Beyond that sort of strictly purpose-driven reasoning, there are tendencies for certain attitudes and preferences to overlap. I've found that libertarians tend to like going outside.

With regard to culture though, I think a culture of being less fearful tends to be conducive to the political viability of libertarian policies. There's a trend, as the world becomes safer for people to treat risks that were previously regarded as reasonable, or that were simply unavoidable, as unreasonable. I hope that walking outdoors where there isn't a cell signal doesn't start to be widely regarded as an unreasonable risk.

Re: Student Activities Fee, the current fee at PSU is $258, including $60.26 for student activities. Some of that is student organization insurance, the bulk of it is allocated to activities by UPAC, the University Park Allocation Committee. And IIRC a $50 default budget for any organization.

I used to be the treasurer for the Urban Gaming Club and got them UPAC funding for "Nerf capture the flag" events run on Friday/Saturday nights in the student union building. We had inflatable paintball bunkers and maybe 10 loaner blasters, most of the recurring attendees brought their own. Fun times.

EDIT: link for reference http://www.studentfee.psu.edu/university-park/up-how-the-fee...

Completely forgot to finish my thought, which is that a few hundred dollars for an emergency beacon is a pretty small deal and I can't imagine UPAC would decline it. They could probably get several.

With the $54.13 per student and an undergraduate population of roughly 46,000 on main campus, UPAC is allocating a budget of nearly $2.5 million per year.

https://www.rei.com/product/843146/ for example. Buoyant, waterproof, and transmits a GPS location (some don't, and are only triangulated to a few km by the receiving satellites). Costs $270.

On the other hand, if Risk Management is concerned about financial risk rather than student safety, calling search and rescue may not be cheap. But the risk of needing this seems _very_ small. In the club's 98 year history has it ever happened?

For actual student safety issues I would bet the top three are sports, drinking, and street crossings (especially Atherton).

http://www.collegian.psu.edu/news/crime_courts/article_9f27f...

>Josef Blunschi , a Ph.D. student and part-time university employee, was crossing the intersection of East Park Avenue and McKee Street around 6:50 p.m. when he was struck by a vehicle travelling westbound toward Atherton Street, police said.

>Three other pedestrians have been killed crossing streets on the north side of campus in the last 20 months, State College Police Chief Thomas King said at a press conference on Thursday.

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