Some time with young people

This week, my friend Charles and I had a great opportunity to speak to two classes at the St. Paul Conservatory for Performing Arts, in St. Paul. We were invited by the teacher, Art Delgado, to speak on libertarianism and the Libertarian Party. Art also invited other “third” parties. We had an hour and a half with each class, which gave us time to get into a wide variety of issue discussions.

I always enjoy speaking with young people. They ask hard questions, and are naturally confused by the variety of responses they hear, but they listen and obviously think about what they’re hearing. Most political issues are quite complex, and often it requires a good knowledge of history to understand them. Young people (and I was no exception) have a belief that things can just be “made right”, if we can decide what result should be sought. A good example came up during our discussion… why our Constitution didn’t eliminate slavery. Despite a majority of those writing the Constitution wanting to eliminate slavery, it didn’t happen. In order to understand why, one has to understand clearly what conditions existed at the time. If slaves had been declared freed, and given the vote, the Southern states, with far more slaves, would have taken political control of the new government. Having a greater voting population, they would have had more representatives in Congress. Had that happened, it’s unlikely that real freedom would have come to slaves… slavery might have actually been entrenched in spite of being declared gone.

I spoke some about health care, which is another current issue, and one that is terribly misrepresented by those who push for a government solution. As with most big problems (like the mortgage crisis), government created the health care problem by forcibly pushing group insurance and by over-regulating it, taking away options and driving up the costs. It’s hard for someone who doesn’t remember what health care was like 40 years ago to understand why government cannot fix it (unless it gets out of it altogether). Politicians never blame themselves, so they scapegoat insurance companies, drug companies, doctors, and hospitals… and continue to claim that they can fix the mess.

An hour and a half is not time enough to deal with such issues, but, hopefully, we gave students enough information to make them curious enough to seek more.