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07-03-2015
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31
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Kendama
Delteria Manager
Join Date: Feb 2012
Location: USA
Posts: 2,474
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07-03-2015
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32
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Kuz
Registered User
Join Date: Mar 2014
Posts: 888
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Canada>America. -I'm not even from Canada. |
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07-03-2015
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33
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Imprint
Registered User
Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Chicago, IL
Posts: 1,992
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07-04-2015
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34
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Kendama
Delteria Manager
Join Date: Feb 2012
Location: USA
Posts: 2,474
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USA is not perfect and we have had so many issues and mistakes. Canada has had a rather peaceful time. The USA has done so many great things though for this to go completely undisputed. For one, at least, the USA takes SO much more responsibility that Canada does. And well basically Canada can sit by their alliance and proximity with the USA while USA does all the foreign stuff and Canada can make their own insides prosper. Do you truly think all the foreign engagements the US has done is detrimental to the world? I would like to see an educated argument but I won't find that here. :p just wondering I like canada but I don't see why others wouldn't respect what the USA does. Looking for potentially dangerous nuclear weapons, fights terrorist organizations headstrong, helps natural disasters, trains foreign countries armies, ect |
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07-04-2015
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35
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Imprint
Registered User
Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Chicago, IL
Posts: 1,992
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07-04-2015
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36
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MattKan
the KattMan
Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: United States
Posts: 4,204
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Communist* don't be afraid to use the real world. Communists be wanting to distract us from family values and destroy America
2. Everybody includes the United States 3. The United States owns the Internet # u lose don't insult America |
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07-04-2015
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37
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Sardon
Deus Vult
Join Date: Oct 2014
Location: Le Canada
Posts: 3,811
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Communism ftw Communism is a better order. |
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07-04-2015
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38
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MattKan
the KattMan
Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: United States
Posts: 4,204
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reasons y ur wrong Spoiler
***Mechanics*** Self-Correcting Capitalism creates the conditions for reflexivity – no risk of runaway consumerism Cudd 10 – Dean of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy @ KU Anne Cudd, “Capitalism for and Against: A Feminist Debate,” pg. 124 Finally, capitalism promotes innovation, and as a path to technical innovation, science. Science offers a means for critical analysis of beliefs, and hence a way to uncover and debunk false consciousness.15 In the quest for a creative, innovative workforce, ideal firms seek out highly educated individuals and individuals from widely varying backgrounds. If a society is to support such innovation, it will need to support the education of individuals from all walks of life in order to maximize the potential for finding the uniquely creative individuals who will invent new technologies and new forms of life. But a necessary byproduct of such broadly distributed education will be the creation of critical thinking individuals who question the fetishes of the current generation. In this way, capitalism creates the conditions for trenchant critiques of capitalist fetishes. Self-Correcting – Consumer Induced Change Capitalism is self-correcting – consumer-induced responsibility and regulations effectively limit plundering Hollender and Breen 10 – * Founder of the American Sustainable Business Council, a progressive alternative to the Chamber of Commerce, **Editorial Director of the Fast Company Jeffrey Hollender, Bill Breen, “The Responsibility Revolution: How the Next Generation of Businesses will Win,” pg. xix The responsibility revolution is about more than cutting carbon, reducing energy use, monitoring factories, or donating to charities. It’s about reimagining companies from within: innovating new ways of working, instilling a new logic of competing, identifying new possibilities for leading, and redefining the very purpose of business. Consequently, we’ve drawn on the best thinking not only from the corporate responsibility arena, but also from the realms of strategy, leadership, and management. Others, to whom we are indebted, have developed some of this book’s core principles. (We will acknowledge them as we present their ideas.) Our intent is to show how an emerging breed of business revolutionaries is turning theory into practice and building organizations that grow revenue by contributing to the greater good. This is a book about change, but it seeks to help companies change on the inside—change their priorities, the way they organize, how they compete, and the way they interact with the world. We fully concede that many companies, perhaps even most companies, won’t willingly alter their behavior. But they will change nonetheless, and it won’t be because they’ve suddenly seen the light. It will be because massive numbers of consumers, a spreading swarm of competitors, values-driven employees, and even that laggard indicator, the federal government, makes them change. Change is under way. The responsibility revolution spreads. Perhaps you’ve seen the insurrection begin to roil your industry, and you’re determined to get out in front of it. If so, welcome to the cause. Corporations are revolutionizing towards socially conscious innovation – solves their impact Hollender and Breen 10 – * Founder of the American Sustainable Business Council, a progressive alternative to the Chamber of Commerce, **Editorial Director of the Fast Company Jeffrey Hollender, Bill Breen, “The Responsibility Revolution: How the Next Generation of Businesses will Win,” pg. 2-3 To the conventional-minded, putting values before profit is an upside-down way to build strategy—and an all-downside way to spur sales. It sounds extreme, even anarchic. Perhaps Triodos Bank’s resilience and results might give skeptics cause to reset their think- ing. For this Dutch bank signals that ‘‘corporate responsibility’’3 (CR) may well be undergoing a period of unprecedented ‘‘punctuated equilibrium’’—the controversial theory promulgated by the renowned paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould.4 He posited that evolution proceeds mostly slowly, but not always steadily—that it is sometimes inter- rupted by sudden, rapid transitions, in which species decline and are supplanted by entirely new forms. Triodos Bank’s consistently positive performance, which grows out of its mission-first approach to investing, is but one more prominent piece of evidence that corporate responsibility is entering a period of dramatic, accelerated change in its own evolution. What new shapes CR is about to take on, we are just now beginning to understand. But we know this much—corporate responsibility is undergoing a change that’s as revolutionary as it is evolutionary. Consider the evidence: An emerging breed of values-driven companies—some new, some well established—is building a better form of capitalism. A new generation of values-driven leaders has kicked over the alpha capitalists’ argument that ‘‘the only business of business is business.’’ Old-guard notions about ‘‘culpability’’ and ‘‘accountability’’ are being subsumed by the vanguard’s requirement to act authentically and transparently. Bloodless buzzwords like ‘‘corporate responsibility’’ and ‘‘eco- efficiency’’ are being supplanted by a new vocabulary—‘‘corporate consciousness,’’ ‘‘resource intelligence,’’ ‘‘social innovation’’ — that aspires to capture our real-world experiences. Above all, tomorrow’s bellwether organizations are moving beyond the moralist’s dictum to be less polluting, less wasteful, ‘‘less bad.’’ They are striving to meet the innovator’s imposing imperative to be all nourishing, all replenishing, ‘‘all good.’’ This moment of punctuated, accelerated change affects all of us in business. It will determine how tomorrow’s companies organize, strategize, and compete. It will reveal new leaders and expose the phonies and purveyors of greenwash. It will redefine business’s obligations to society and reconfigure the sources of growth and competitive advantage. And it will require us not only to anticipate the end of corporate responsibility as we’ve known it, but also to imagine the whole new models that will replace it. Corporate enlightenment proves capitalism is self-correcting -consumer demand shapes corporate response -NGOs are forcing companies to form a socially positive role -Katrina proves – corporations can serve as first-responders in catastrophe Hollender and Breen 10 – * Founder of the American Sustainable Business Council, a progressive alternative to the Chamber of Commerce, **Editorial Director of the Fast Company Jeffrey Hollender, Bill Breen, “The Responsibility Revolution: How the Next Generation of Businesses will Win,” pg. 5-6 Why is this different from the drumbeat for corporate accountability that started at the beginning of the decade, after the Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco debacles? • Companies, in the wake of such scandals, must now work harder to protect their reputations. • Global brands, which are battling to crack markets all over the world, are now expected to perform a social role. Customers, thanks to the Internet, now have more power than ever before—the power to scrutinize companies’ activities and to organize boycotts at the slightest sign of misbehavior. • The body politic, seared by Ponzi schemes and the meltdown in financial markets, is punishing ‘‘bad companies’’ and demanding that all companies ‘‘do good.’’ • Employees now expect companies to adopt a purpose that’s bigger than profit—a key factor in the competition for A+ talent. • Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are growing exponentially and are relentlessly pushing companies to contribute to society. • Stakeholders are pressuring institutional investors to adopt strong principles of governance and a responsible investing strategy. People across the political spectrum are concluding that despite the U.S.’s government bailouts of Wall Street and the U.S. car industry, business is still fast enough and nimble enough to innovate solutions to some of the world’s thorniest problems. Two proof points among thousands: Unilever’s pledge to certify as sustainable all of its Lipton tea bags sold globally, which promises to lift one million African tea growers out of poverty.11 Or recall the U.S. federal government’s feeble response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. Wal-Mart, with its world- class logistical operation—along with the help of countless individual volunteers and non-profits—proved to be the real first responder. More than anything, climate change is forcing business and society itself to rethink everything, from transportation to energy sources to geo-politics to cities. When the oil baron T. Boone Pickens attacked the United States’ petroleum-based economy as a risk to national security, it was clear that minds have changed. Formerly fringe notions that business should be environmentally and socially sustainable have moved to the mainstream—and the business landscape has been fundamentally transformed. Uniqueness Life expectancy increasing – related to capitalist spread Richards 9 – PhD in Philosophy @ Princeton Jay Richards, PhD with honors in Philosophy and Theology from Princeton, “Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem,” pg. 200 Long-term trends in life expectancy—surely an important indicator of environmental health—are good, not bad. Those trends are the result of human innovations made possible by societies that enjoy political and economic freedom. Life expectancy has gone up worldwide in the last fifty years, even in poor countries. The trends go down only in countries with widespread war and extremely corrupt and despotic governments.29 Before listing its litany of traditional complaints, even the United Nations admitted as much. Its unreported 2007 document titled “State of the Future” began: “People around the world are becoming healthier, wealthier, better educated, more peaceful, more connected, and they are living longer.”30 The document even goes so far as to admit that these improvements are the fruit of free trade and technology. Prefer Our Evidence – Correlation for Causality Prefer our evidence – they conflate bad human decision making with capitalism Richards 9 – PhD in Philosophy @ Princeton Jay Richards, PhD with honors in Philosophy and Theology from Princeton, “Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem,” pg. 164 Too many critics confuse the free market with the bad choices free people make. Rod Dreher, for instance, chastises fellow conservatives, saying, “We look down on the liberal libertine who asserts the moral primacy of sexual free choice, but some- how miss that the free market we so uncritically accepts exalts personal fulfillment through individual choice as the summit of human existence.”9 Perhaps they miss that fact because it’s not a fact. The free market doesn’t exalt anything. Human beings exalt and denounce things like sexual free choice. Human beings might exalt “individual choice as the summit of human exis- tence,” but a system of free exchange doesn’t do that. In a free economy, sinful entrepreneurs may entice customers with pornography, and sinful customers may buy it. But having free choices in the market doesn’t dictate what people will choose. That’s the whole point of freedom: it always involves costs—that is, trade-offs. To choose one path is to foreclose the opposite path. Even God accepted trade-offs. He chose to create a world with free beings, one that allowed those beings to turn against him. And they did. But their freedom didn’t cause them to choose the bad. It just allowed them to. So, too, with a free economy. Critics notice all the vice present in free societies. But it is only in free societies that we can fully exercise our virtue. Charity is charity, for instance, only if it’s not coerced. Besides, there’s no evidence that state control of the economy makes a citizenry more virtuous. Every social ill in modern- day America, from widespread abortion and alcoholism to family breakdown, was much worse in statist and communist countries. Their attempt to blame corporate exploitation on capitalism is misinformed – they mistake greed and corruption for the best economic system Vance 5 – PhD in Economics Laurence M. Vance, adjunct instructor in accounting at Pensacola Junior College, Mises, http://mises.org/story/1887 The all-too familiar circle of the government regulating an industry, creating a "crisis," and then intervening even more to solve the crisis, thus making things worse, is no where more apparent than DiLorenzo's examples from the energy industry. The book concludes with a look at "the never-ending war on capitalism" by government intervention, regulations, agencies, and bureaucrats. DiLorenzo also includes university professors, politicians, and lawyers in his indictment. "American universities devote an inordinate amount of time and resources to teach potential business leaders not how to be capitalists but how to be corporate bureaucrats." Politicians "view businesses as cash cows to be plundered for the benefit of their own political careers." "Lawyers now have incentives to spend their lives digging up cases and evidence against corporations because some consumers stupidly misused their products." DiLorenzo also briefly reviews three anticapitalist but best-selling books: Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, and Michael Moore's Stupid White Men and Downsize This! He finds that the capitalism attacked in these books is not capitalism at all, it is socialism, mercantilism, interventionism, and assorted anticapitalist myths. Although these "reviews" are an added bonus to the book, they would be even better if they were lengthened and made into a series of appendices. ***Impact Debate*** Cap Good – Value to Life Cap is key to value to life Cudd 10 – Dean of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy @ KU Anne Cudd, “Capitalism for and Against: A Feminist Debate,” pg. 49 The average quality of life for humans, particularly for women and children, has improved in the past hundred years, and many of the advances are causally related to capitalism. There are three categories of objective improvement of quality of life: material, moral, and political. Material Improvements Include physical changes in life and work, such as changes in the amount and strenuousness of physical labor, the availability of food, clean water, and decent shelter the degree of violence suffered, as well as the disease burden. By moral advances I mean the degree to which human individuals are treated in a dignified and decent manner, as worthy of respect in their own right, and as responsible, autonomous self-owners. By political advances I mean the degree to which individuals have a voice in the government of their communities and nations. These three categories encompass the objective list of interests that I claim all humans have. While it is not possible to quantify or measure each of these categories, I can make some generalizations about the progress m quality of life over the past century. For virtually every interest, the quality of life has improved under capitalism. Cap Good – Value to Life – Freedom Freedom is key to value to life Brooks 8 – Professor of Public Affairs, Government and Business @ Syracuse Arthur Brooks, Professor of Public Affairs, Government and Business @ Syracuse, 2008, “Free People Are Happy People,” City Journal, Lexis A large body of social-science research over the past decade has been devoted to studying happiness. In general, researchers rely on self-reported measurements of happiness--which, according to considerable work by psychologists, statisticians, and neuroscientists, are actually quite accurate and comparable among individuals. (This has been shown by comparing people's survey responses to psychological evaluations, surveys of family members, and even tests of brain activity.) And over the past three decades, the nationwide General Social Survey (GSS)--undertaken approximately every two years by researchers at the National Opinion Research Center--has been one of the only repeated surveys to ask people about their happiness and has therefore been used in many happiness studies. In 2000, the GSS also asked adult Americans about their attitudes about freedom. About 70 percent of the respondents said that they were "completely free" or "very free," and another 25 percent said that they were "moderately free." Further, about 70 percent thought that Americans in general were completely or very free. Perhaps such results are not surprising in the United States. But the GSS also revealed that people who said that they felt completely or very free were twice as likely to say that they were very happy about their lives as those who felt only a moderate degree of freedom, not much, or none at all. Even when holding income, sex, education, race, religion, politics, and family status constant, we find that people who felt free were about 18 percentage points more likely than others to say that they were very happy. Graphs by Alberto Mena Freedom and happiness are highly correlated, then; even more significant, several studies have shown that freedom causes happiness. In a famous 1976 experiment, psychologists in Connecticut gave residents on one floor of a nursing home the freedom to decide which night of the week would be "movie night," as well as the freedom to choose and care for the plants on their floor. On another floor of the same nursing home, residents did not receive these choices and responsibilities. The first group of residents--no healthier or happier than the second when the experiment began--quickly showed greater alertness, more activity, and better mood. A year and a half later, they were still doing better, and even dying at half the rate of the residents on the other floor. Many subsequent studies replicated the experiment in different settings, including foreign ones. One 2003 study of German senior citizens asked participants to keep diaries recording their activities and moods. The researchers found that a low level of perceived personal freedom strongly predicted depression; they went on to suggest enhanced freedom for nursing-home residents as an efficient way to improve their quality of life. Economic freedom is key to happiness Brooks 8 – Professor of Public Affairs, Government and Business @ Syracuse Arthur Brooks, Professor of Public Affairs, Government and Business @ Syracuse, 2008, “Free People Are Happy People,” City Journal, Lexis You might be tempted to ascribe this correlation to the unhappy poor who favor government intervention to improve their lot. But a look at entire nations, it's important to note, shows that freer economies mean happier populations in general. In 2002, the International Social Survey Programme measured happiness in nearly three dozen countries. In the same year, as in every year since 1995, the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation compiled the Index of Economic Freedom, scoring nations on such criteria as the freedom to operate a business, trade with other nations, ease of investment, property rights, and level of business corruption. The result was an aggregate score from 0 to 100, where 100 meant maximum freedom. Near the top, scoring around 80, were most of the Anglophone countries; most Western European countries scored in the 65-75 range; formerly Communist countries and developing nations were lower; and at the bottom sat North Korea. If you apply these data to the International Social Survey Programme's nations, you will find that a 1-percentage-point increase in economic freedom is associated with a 2-point rise in the percentage of the population who say that they are completely happy or very happy. Cap Good – War Capitalism solves war Cudd 10 – Dean of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy @ KU Anne Cudd, “Capitalism for and Against: A Feminist Debate,” Google Book Does capitalism cause more wars? This has long been an argument of socialists against capitalism, but it seems a flimsy one. First, it is clear that the communist experiments of the twentieth century were every bit as militaristic and capable of aggressive wars as the capitalist ones. Second, it is commonly asserted, and I think Professor Holmstrom would agree, that democratic nations do not wage war against each other. But democratic countries tend toward capitalism, since that seems to be what people choose when given the chance. As with slavery, the logic of capitalism tells against war, in general, as that wipes out potential trading partners. Capitalist competition is a positive-sum game, not a zero or negative sum. I agree wholeheartedly with Professor Holmstrom's assertion that security is than broader military security; the security of persons and property generally is the necessary condition for capitalist development. Imperial wars pre-date capitalism by centuries, war is illogical under capitalism because it destroys wealth MacKenzie 3 – PhD in Economics D.W. MacKenzie, PhD in Economics, “Does Capitalism Require War?” 4-7-2003 http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1201 Perhaps the oddest aspect of these various, but similar, claims is that their proponents appeal so often to historical examples. They often claim that history shows how capitalism is imperialistic and warlike or at least benefits from war. Capitalism supposedly needs a boost from some war spending from time to time, and history shows this. Robert Higgs demonstrated that the wartime prosperity during the Second World War was illusory[i]. This should come to no surprise to those who lived through the deprivations of wartime rationing. We do not need wars for prosperity, but does capitalism breed war and imperialism anyway? History is rife with examples of imperialism. The Romans, Alexander, and many others of the ancient world waged imperialistic wars. The Incan Empire and the empire of Ancient China stand as examples of the universal character of imperialism. Who could possibly claim that imperialism grew out of the prosperity of these ancient civilizations? Imperialism precedes modern industrial capitalism by many centuries. Uneven wealth distribution or underconsumption under capitalism obviously did not cause these instances of imperialism. Of course, this fact does not prove that modern capitalism lacks its own imperialistic tendencies. The notion that income gets underspent or maldistributed lies at the heart of most claims that capitalism either needs or produces imperialistic wars. As J.B. Say argued, supply creates its own demand through payments to factors of production. Demand Side economists Hobson and Keynes argued that there would be too little consumption and too little investment for continuous full employment. We save too much to have peace and prosperity. The difficulty we face is not in oversaving, but in underestimating the workings of markets and the desires of consumers. Doomsayers have been downplaying consumer demand for ages. As demand side economist J.K. Galbraith claimed, we live in an affluent society, where most private demands have been met. Of course, Hobson made the same claim much earlier. Earlier and stranger still, mercantilists claimed that 'wasteful acts' such as tea drinking, gathering at alehouses, taking snuff, and the wearing of ribbons were unnecessary luxuries that detracted from productive endeavors. The prognostications of esteemed opponents of capitalism have consistently failed to predict consumer demand. Today, consumers consume at levels that few long ago could have imagined possible. There is no reason to doubt that consumers will continue to press for ever higher levels of consumption. Though it is only a movie, Brewster's Millions illustrates how creative people can be at spending money. People who do actually inherit, win, or earn large sums of money have little trouble spending it. Indeed, wealthy individuals usually have more trouble holding on to their fortunes than in finding ways to spend them. We are never going to run out of ways to spend money. Many of the complaints about capitalism center on how people save too much. One should remember that there really is no such thing as saving. Consumers defer consumption to the future only. As economist Eugen Böhm-Bawerk demonstrated, people save according to time preference. Savings diverts resources into capital formation. This increases future production. Interest enhanced savings then can purchase these goods as some consumers cease to defer their consumption. Keynes' claim that animal spirits drive investment has no rational basis. Consumer preferences are the basis for investment. Investors forecast future consumer demand. Interest rates convey knowledge of these demands. The intertemporal coordination of production through capital markets and interest rates is not a simple matter. But Keynes' marginal propensities to save and Hobson's concentration of wealth arguments fail to account for the real determinants of production through time. Say's Law of Markets holds precisely because people always want a better life for themselves and those close to them. Falling interest rates deter saving and increase investment. Rising interest rates induce saving and deter investment. This simple logic of supply and demand derives from a quite basic notion of self interest. Keynes denied that the world worked this way. Instead, he claimed that bond holders hoard money outside of the banking system, investment periodically collapses from 'the dark forces of time and uncertainty, and consumers save income in a mechanical fashion according to marginal propensities to save. None of these propositions hold up to scrutiny, either deductive or empirical. Speculators do not hoard cash outside of banks. To do this means a loss of interest on assets. People do move assets from one part of the financial system to another. This does not cause deficient aggregate demand. Most money exists in the banking system, and is always available for lending. In fact, the advent of e-banking makes such a practice even less sensible. Why hoard cash when you can move money around with your computer? It is common knowledge that people save for homes, education, and other expensive items, not because they have some innate urge to squirrel some portion of their income away. This renders half of the market for credit rational. Investors do in fact calculate rates of return on investment. This is not a simple matter. Investment entails some speculation. Long term investment projects entail some uncertainty, but investors who want to actually reap profits will estimate the returns on investment using the best available data. Keynes feared that the dark forces of time and uncertainty could scare investors. This possibility, he thought, called for government intervention. However, government intervention (especially warfare) generally serves to increase uncertainty. Private markets have enough uncertainties without throwing politics into the fray. The vagaries of political intervention serve only to darken an already uncertain future. Capital markets are best left to capitalists. Nor is capital not extracted surplus value. It comes not from exploitation. It is simply a matter of people valuing their future wellbeing. Capitalists will hire workers up to the point where the discounted marginal product of their labor equals the wage rate. To do otherwise would mean a loss of potential profit. Since workers earn the marginal product of labor and capital derives from deferred consumption, Marxist arguments about reserve armies of the unemployed and surplus extraction fail. It is quite odd to worry about capitalists oversaving when many complain about how the savings rate in the U.S. is too low. Why does the U.S., as the world's 'greatest capitalist/imperialist power', attract so much foreign investment? Many Americans worry about America's international accounts. Fears about foreigners buying up America are unfounded, but not because this does not happen. America does have a relatively low national savings rate. It does attract much foreign investment, precisely because it has relatively secure property rights. Indeed, much of the third world suffers from too little investment. The claims of Marxists, and Hobson, directly contradict the historical record. Sound theory tells us that it should. The Marxist claim that capitalists must find investments overseas fails miserably. Larry Kudlow has put his own spin on the false connection between capitalism and war. We need the War as shock therapy to get the economy on its feet. Kudlow also endorses massive airline subsidies as a means of restoring economic prosperity. Kudlow and Krugman both endorse the alleged destructive creation of warfare and terrorism. Kudlow has rechristened the Broken Window fallacy the Broken Window principle. Kudlow claims that may lose money and wealth in one way, but we gain it back many time over when the rebuilding is done. Kudlow and Krugman have quite an affinity for deficits. Krugman sees debt as a sponge to absorb excess saving. Kudlow see debt as a short term nuisance that we can dispel by maximizing growth. One would think that such famous economists would realize that competition does work to achieve the goal of optimum growth based on time preference, but this is not the case. While these economists have expressed their belief in writing, they could do more. If the destruction of assets leads to increased prosperity, then they should teach this principle by example. Kudlow and Krugman could, for instance, help build the economy by demolishing their own private homes. This would have the immediate effect of stimulating demand for demolition experts, and the longer term affect of stimulating the demand for construction workers. They can create additional wealth by financing the reconstruction of their homes through debt. By borrowing funds, they draw idle resources into use and stimulate financial activity. Of course, they would both initially lose wealth in one way. But if their thinking is sound, they will gain it back many times over as they rebuild. The truth is that their beliefs are fallacious. Bastiat demonstrated the absurdity of destructive creation in his original explanation of the opportunity costs from repairing broken windows. Kudlow is quite clear about his intentions. He wants to grow the economy to finance the war. As Kudlow told some students, "The trick here is to grow the economy and let the economic growth raise the revenue for the war effort"[ii]. Kudlow also praises the Reagan Administration for growing the economy to fund national defense. Here Kudlow's attempts to give economic advice cease completely. His argument here is not that capitalism needs a shot in the arm. It is that resources should be redirected towards ends that he sees fit. Kudlow is a war hawk who, obviously, cannot fund this or any war personally. He instead favors using the state to tax others to fund what he wants, but cannot afford. He seems to think that his values matter more than any other's. Why should anyone else agree with this? Kudlow tarnishes the image of laissez faire economics by parading his faulty reasoning and his claims that his wants should reign supreme as a pro-market stance. Unfortunately, it is sometimes necessary to defend capitalism from alleged advocates of liberty, who employ false dogmas in pursuit of their own militaristic desires. Capitalism neither requires nor promotes imperialist expansion. Capitalism did not create imperialism or warfare. Warlike societies predate societies with secure private property. The idea that inequity or underspending give rise to militarism lacks any rational basis. Imperialistic tendencies exist due to ethnic and nationalistic bigotries, and the want for power. Prosperity depends upon our ability to prevent destructive acts. The dogma of destructive creation fails as a silver lining to the cloud of warfare. Destructive acts entail real costs that diminish available opportunities. The idea that we need to find work for idle hands in capitalism at best leads to a kind of Sisyphus economy where unproductive industries garner subsidies from productive people. At worst, it serves as a supporting argument for war. The more recent versions of the false charges against capitalism do nothing to invalidate two simple facts. Capitalism generates prosperity by creating new products. War inflicts poverty by destroying existing wealth. There is no sound reason to think otherwise. Empirical studies prove—global capitalism solves war Gartzke 5 – Professor of Political Science Erik Gartzke, associate professor of political science at Columbia University and author of a study on economic freedom and peace contained in the 2005 Economic Freedom of the World Report, “Future Depends on Capitalizing on Capitalist Peace,” 10/18, Windsor Star, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5133 With terrorism achieving "global reach" and conflict raging in Africa and the Middle East, you may have missed a startling fact - we are living in remarkably peaceable times. For six decades, developed nations have not fought each other. France and the United States may chafe, but the resulting conflict pitted french fries against "freedom fries," rather than French soldiers against U.S. "freedom fighters." Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac had a nasty spat over the EU, but the English aren't going to storm Calais any time soon. The present peace is unusual. Historically, powerful nations are the most war prone. The conventional wisdom is that democracy fosters peace but this claim fails scrutiny. It is based on statistical studies that show democracies typically don't fight other democracies. Yet, the same studies show that democratic nations go to war about as much as other nations overall. And more recent research makes clear that only the affluent democracies are less likely to fight each other. Poor democracies behave much like non-democracies when it comes to war and lesser forms of conflict. A more powerful explanation is emerging from newer, and older, empirical research - the "capitalist peace." As predicted by Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Norman Angell and others, nations with high levels of economic freedom not only fight each other less, they go to war less often, period. Economic freedom is a measure of the depth of free market institutions or, put another way, of capitalism. The "democratic peace" is a mirage created by the overlap between economic and political freedom. Democracy and economic freedom typically co-exist. Thus, if economic freedom causes peace, then statistically democracy will also appear to cause peace. When democracy and economic freedom are both included in a statistical model, the results reveal that economic freedom is considerably more potent in encouraging peace than democracy, 50 times more potent, in fact, according to my own research. Economic freedom is highly statistically significant (at the one-per-cent level). Democracy does not have a measurable impact, while nations with very low levels of economic freedom are 14 times more prone to conflict than those with very high levels. But, why would free markets cause peace? Capitalism is not only an immense generator of prosperity; it is also a revolutionary source of economic, social and political change. Wealth no longer arises primarily through land or control of natural resources. New Kind of Wealth Prosperity in modern societies is created by market competition and the efficient production that arises from it. This new kind of wealth is hard for nations to "steal" through conquest. In days of old, when the English did occasionally storm Calais, nobles dreamed of wealth and power in conquered lands, while visions of booty danced in the heads of peasant soldiers. Victory in war meant new property. In a free market economy, war destroys immense wealth for victor and loser alike. Even if capital stock is restored, efficient production requires property rights and free decisions by market participants that are difficult or impossible to co-ordinate to the victor's advantage. The Iraqi war, despite Iraq's immense oil wealth, will not be a money-maker for the United States. Economic freedom is not a guarantee of peace. Other factors, like ideology or the perceived need for self-defence, can still result in violence. But, where economic freedom has taken hold, it has made war less likely. Research on the capitalist peace has profound implications in today's world. Emerging democracies, which have not stabilized the institutions of economic freedom, appear to be at least as warlike - perhaps more so - than emerging dictatorships. Yet, the United States and other western nations are putting immense resources into democratization even in nations that lack functioning free markets. This is in part based on the faulty premise of a "democratic peace." It may also in part be due to public perception. Everyone approves of democracy, but "capitalism" is often a dirty word. However, in recent decades, an increasing number of people have rediscovered the economic virtues of the "invisible hand" of free markets. We now have an additional benefit of economic freedom - international peace. The actual presence of peace in much of the world sets this era apart from others. The empirical basis for optimistic claims - about either democracy or capitalism - can be tested and refined. The way forward is to capitalize on the capitalist peace, to deepen its roots and extend it to more countries through expanding markets, development, and a common sense of international purpose. The risk today is that faulty analysis and anti-market activists may distract the developed nations from this historic opportunity. Cap Good – War – Deters Nationalism Anti-globalization leads to nationalism – causes military conflict Norberg 3 – MA in History Johan Norberg, Fellow at Timbro and CATO, MA with a focus in economics and philosophy, In Defense of Global Capitalism, pg. 288 Globalization brings with it a number of effects upon which it is easy to cast suspicion—old economic forms disrupted, interests undermined, cultures challenged, and traditional power centers eroded. When boundaries become less important, people, goods, and capital move more freely—but so too can crime, fanaticism, and disease. Advocates of globalization have to show that greater freedom and greater opportunities counterbalance such problems. They must point to possible ways of dealing with them, perhaps more effectively than before. Otherwise, there is a serious risk that anti-globalist ideas will take root in the Western world, in which case a downturn or a trivial tariff war, for example, could evoke a powerful protectionist reaction. After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the United States switched to a drastic policy of protectionism; thereafter all it exported for many years was depression. Other governments responded in kind, and world trade collapsed, diminishing by two-thirds in just three years. A national crisis led to worldwide depression. The return of protectionism today would mean stagnation in the affluent world and deeper poverty in the developing countries. At worst, it would once again lead to conflict, to countries regarding each other as enemies. When governments turn in upon themselves, regarding what is foreign as a threat rather than an opportunity, the simplest and coarsest forms of nationalism will gain ground. Cap Good – War – Alt War Alternatives to Capitalism end in war and genocide Rummel 4 – Professor of Political Science Rudolph Rummel, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii, The Killing Machine that is Marxism, Online Of all religions, secular and otherwise, that of Marxism has been by far the bloodiest – bloodier than the Catholic Inquisition, the various Catholic crusades, and the Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants. In practice, Marxism has meant bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal prison camps and murderous forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and fraudulent show trials, outright mass murder and genocide. In total, Marxist regimes murdered nearly 110 million people from 1917 to 1987. For perspective on this incredible toll, note that all domestic and foreign wars during the 20th century killed around 35 million. That is, when Marxists control states, Marxism is more deadly then all the wars of the 20th century, including World Wars I and II, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars. And what did Marxism, this greatest of human social experiments, achieve for its poor citizens, at this most bloody cost in lives? Nothing positive. It left in its wake an economic, environmental, social and cultural disaster. The Khmer Rouge – (Cambodian communists) who ruled Cambodia for four years – provide insight into why Marxists believed it necessary and moral to massacre so many of their fellow humans. Their Marxism was married to absolute power. They believed without a shred of doubt that they knew the truth, that they would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness, and that to realize this utopia, they had to mercilessly tear down the old feudal or capitalist order and Buddhist culture, and then totally rebuild a communist society. Nothing could be allowed to stand in the way of this achievement. Government – the Communist Party – was above any law. All other institutions, religions, cultural norms, traditions and sentiments were expendable. The Marxists saw the construction of this utopia as a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism and inequality – and, as in a real war, noncombatants would unfortunately get caught in the battle. There would be necessary enemy casualties: the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, "wreckers," intellectuals, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, the rich and landlords. As in a war, millions might die, but these deaths would be justified by the end, as in the defeat of Hitler in World War II. To the ruling Marxists, the goal of a communist utopia was enough to justify all the deaths. The irony is that in practice, even after decades of total control, Marxism did not improve the lot of the average person, but usually made living conditions worse than before the revolution. It is not by chance that the world's greatest famines have happened within the Soviet Union (about 5 million dead from 1921-23 and 7 million from 1932-3, including 2 million outside Ukraine) and communist China (about 30 million dead from 1959-61). Overall, in the last century almost 55 million people died in various Marxist famines and associated epidemics – a little over 10 million of them were intentionally starved to death, and the rest died as an unintended result of Marxist collectivization and agricultural policies. What is astonishing is that this "currency" of death by Marxism is not thousands or even hundreds of thousands, but millions of deaths. This is almost incomprehensible – it is as though the whole population of the American New England and Middle Atlantic States, or California and Texas, had been wiped out. And that around 35 million people escaped Marxist countries as refugees was an unequaled vote against Marxist utopian pretensions. Its equivalent would be everyone fleeing California, emptying it of all human beings. There is a supremely important lesson for human life and welfare to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology: No one can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power a government has to impose the beliefs of an ideological or religious elite, or decree the whims of a dictator, the more likely human lives and welfare will be sacrificed. As a government's power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all corners of culture and society, the more likely it is to kill its own citizens. Cap Good – War – Transition Wars U.S. transition from cap sparks great power wars and omnicide Nyquist 5 J.R. renowned expert in geopolitics and international relations, WorldNetDaily contributing editor, “The Political Consequences of a Financial Crash,” February 4, www.financialsense.com/stormw...2005/0204.html Should the United States experience a severe economic contraction during the second term of President Bush, the American people will likely support politicians who advocate further restrictions and controls on our market economy – guaranteeing its strangulation and the steady pauperization of the country. In Congress today, Sen. Edward Kennedy supports nearly all the economic dogmas listed above. It is easy to see, therefore, that the coming economic contraction, due in part to a policy of massive credit expansion, will have serious political consequences for the Republican Party (to the benefit of the Democrats). Furthermore, an economic contraction will encourage the formation of anti-capitalist majorities and a turning away from the free market system. The danger here is not merely economic. The political left openly favors the collapse of America’s strategic position abroad. The withdrawal of the United States from the Middle East, the Far East and Europe would catastrophically impact an international system that presently allows 6 billion people to live on the earth’s surface in relative peace. Should anti-capitalist dogmas overwhelm the global market and trading system that evolved under American leadership, the planet’s economy would contract and untold millions would die of starvation. Nationalistic totalitarianism, fueled by a politics of blame, would once again bring war to Asia and Europe. But this time the war would be waged with mass destruction weapons and the United States would be blamed because it is the center of global capitalism. Furthermore, if the anti-capitalist party gains power in Washington, we can expect to see policies of appeasement and unilateral disarmament enacted. American appeasement and disarmament, in this context, would be an admission of guilt before the court of world opinion. Russia and China, above all, would exploit this admission to justify aggressive wars, invasions and mass destruction attacks. A future financial crash, therefore, must be prevented at all costs. But we cannot do this. As one observer recently lamented, “We drank the poison and now we must die.” So would a global transition Kothari 82 – Professor of Political Science Professor of political science at the University of Delhi, Towards a Just Social Order, p. 571 Attempts at global economic reform could also lead to a world racked by increasing turbulence, a greater sense of insecurity among the major of powers – and hence to a further tightening of the structures of domination and domestic repression – producing in their wake an intensification of the old arms race and militarization of regimes, encouraging regional conflagrations and setting the stage for eventual global holocaust. Cap Good – Failed States Globalization and open trade solve failed states Gurr 2k – Professor of Government and Polics Ted Robert Gurr et al, Director, Minorities at Risk Project; Distinguished University Professor, Department of Government & Politics at the University of Maryland, 9-30-2000, State Failure Task Force Report: Phase III Findings, http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/stfai...rt%20Final.pdf Assessing the Impact of Trade Openness The Task Force has examined a wide range of economic variables and their association with state failure including: inflation rates; total and per capita investment; levels of government taxation, debt, and spending; flows of foreign aid and rates of GDP growth. None of these, however, has proven to be significantly associated with state failure in models that also include indicators of a country’s quality of life (as measured by infant mortality or GDP per capita relative to world medians) and regime type. The one persistent exception, for a wide variety of global, regional, and failure-type analyses, is a country’s openness to international trade, measured as the value of a country’s imports plus exports as a percentage of GDP. Higher trade openness is strongly associated with a significantly lower risk of state failure. Depending on the region or type of failure, countries with levels of trade openness below the global median were two to two-and-one-half times as likely to experience state failure as countries with above-median levels of trade openness. Why should low trade openness go hand in hand with a higher risk of state failure? Several economists pointed out to the Task Force that trade openness is generally related to population; countries with larger populations generally supply more of their own needs, and their imports and exports therefore tend to be smaller relative to their domestic economy. Economists also maintain that countries at higher levels of development benefit more from trade and thus are likely to have higher levels of trade. However, we found that even when controlling for both population size and population density, and for levels of development, the effect of trade openness on state failure was still significant. The impact of trade openness worked the same way whether looking at the entire world or only at a sample of countries generally less disposed to trade, such as those of Sub-Saharan Africa. We found that trade openness was generally unrelated to other economic and trade variables, such as the concentration of a country’s exports, or of its trading partners, or its GDP per capita. A growing body of social-science research links trade openness to a host of other virtues, including faster economic growth, strengthened democracy, and improved environmental performance. These virtues, in turn, are widely thought to be associated with political stability. In this story, trade openness helps to produce political and economic outcomes that reduce the risk of state failure. Trade leads to faster growth and more democracy, both of which encourage political stability. Failed States comparatively outweigh nuclear war Yoo 5 – Professor of Law John, Professor of Law, University of California at Berkeley School of Law, Failed States, Int’l Colloquium, Online Failed states pose perhaps the most dangerous threat to both American national security and international peace and stability. Failed states have served as the incubator of international terrorist groups, such as the al Qaeda organization that attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, or as trans-shipments points for illicit drugs, human trafficking, or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction technologies. In Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, and the former Yugoslavia, failed states have produced the catastrophic human rights disasters. Since the end of World War II, far more lives have been lost due to internal wars than international armed conflicts, and many of the former have occurred in failed states. Military intervention in response, often led by the United States and its allies, incurs high costs in terms of money, material, and lives. Finding a comprehensive and effective solution to these challenges of terrorism, human rights violations, or poverty and lack of economic development requires some answers to the problem of failed states Cap Good – Hunger Only the free market can prevent starvation Hospers 7 – Professor of Philosophy John, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at USC, Libertarianism: A Political Philosophy for Tomorrow, Published Originally in 1971, pg. 278-279 If this happens, many among us will tell us that we are guilty, that we should try to equalize incomes all over the world, that the others are starving because we are too stingy. And if we act on their advice, we will finally starve ourselves in a vain attempt to keep them from starving. The whole thing would be fruitless unless we can come to grips with the cause of their starvation-the coercive statist economies under which these populations live, the forced collectivism by which a man who would gladly work hard to support his wife and family becomes discouraged at having to share the benefits with 200 million others, in which matters of life and death are left to bureaucrats as incapable of handling them as a childwould be in calculating the trajectories of spaceships as now done by computer. The fate of these people could be avoided if they could have free-market economies; but most of the vic- tims of the suffering and death will not even know that their fates are avoidable. Only a capitalistic economy could solve their problems, and many of them "have never been permitted to learn about capitalism. Just as a capitalist economy is "an incredible bread ma- chine, "19 providing amply for the needs of millions, so the so- cialist economy, in the face of a burgeoning population, is a guaranteed starvation machine which needs only time to per- fect its deadly work. Why do you suppose that Soviet Russia permits the 3 percent of its land area to remain privately owned? Because the garden and agricultural plots of this 3 percent produce 48 percent of Russia's foodstuffs, and its leaders well know that without it Russia would starve. But the danger does not end there: the danger is that by the end of the century we ourselves may have faUen victim to the same kind of starvation machine that is already afflicting them. Once our citizens no longer question the policies of centralized control, deficit spending, inflation, and social insecurity which they now appear to favor, even the strong economic reserve generated by a century and a half of economic freedom will at last break down. And if this happens, it is we who will turn on our television sets and watch the starvation of our own people. Our own formulas for disaster will have come back to haunt us, but by that time it will be too late. By the time catastrophe strikes, a military dictator will probably take over the country, with "sweeping emergency powers," and for those of us who remain alive, our heritage of liberty will have vanished.In the face of all this, student groups in the United States are almost all fiercely opposed to capitalism. Of the dozens of confusions and fallacies about the nature and functioning of afree market. they fall victim to one after another; no slogan is too false for them to repeat as if it were an obvious truth. What account will they give of their present views if mass starvation stalks the world? Perhaps, one suspects, it was what some of them wanted all along; the poverty of millions means little to those with an in- satiable appetite for power. The vast majority of them, of course, desire no such terrifying outcome; they are simply mis- guided idealists who know nothing about how production can be generated to fulfill human needs. Totally ignorant of the role of liberty in economic matters, they chant any slogans they bear as long as they have a humanitarian ring. But in the end they will be simply cannon-fodder, to be used by their leaders as long as they are useful, and then thrown on the trash-heap when the time for power comes. Cap Good – Gender Equality Cap is key to gender equality -if patriarchy exists under capitalism, it acts as a nonintersecting system that would exist under alternative economic systems as well Cudd 10 – Dean of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy @ KU Anne Cudd, “Capitalism for and Against: A Feminist Debate,” pg. 22 It should be clear from the definition that patriarchy is a, at least partially, parallel (i.e., nonintersecting) system to any economic system, such as capitalism or socialism. Patriarchy does not preclude the existence of either socialism or capitalism. It remains to be shown, however, that capitalism does not entail patriarchy, and, more to the point, that capitalism provides no better home for patriarchy than does socialism. On the face of it, there seems to be no reason to think that capitalism would encourage patriarchy, since patriarchy constrains individuals from acting in ways- a capitalist system encourages or emphasizes. That is because patriarchy is a communal or collectivist system, emphasizing the needs of the kin group or at least the patriarch over those of the individuals in the group. Capitalism is, perhaps notoriously among feminists, an individualist system, at least in theory. State guided or oligarchic capitalism varies from the theory, however, in emphasizing the needs of the state or the oligarchic family. So developing or pseudo-capitalism can give patriarchy a home when there is a great deal of government interference. Socialism, on the other hand, focuses on the communal group, and thus is similarly liable to be co-opted for patriarchal ends. Patriarchy is compatible with many, perhaps all, traditional cultures, though. Part of my argument, thus, will be to show that capitalism offers women a way out of patriarchal, traditional culture. Women’s equality is necessary to end escalating violence and ethnic cleansing -turns their ethics/VTL impact Amnesty International 98 October 1, pg. http://news.amnesty.org/library/Inde...pen&of=ENG-347 These human rights violations happened in every region of the world, but they are united by a common thread. Discrimination. They were largely motivated by prejudice. Because of their gender, sexual orientation, faith, race or ethnicity, the victims were viewed as being inferior, as being less than human, and were therefore seen as having no human rights. Discrimination is a root cause of human rights violations. By dehumanizing people, it paves the way for the worst atrocities. In every region, nationalist, ethnic, religious and racial conflicts have led to genocidal or widespread killing of people solely because of who they are. Whole groups of people are branded "the other" by virtue of their identity. Bonds of solidarity and community are severed along identity lines. "Difference" is manipulated to encourage division and hatred. "Differences", which should be celebrated and encouraged to enrich all our lives and cultures become "reasons" which some political and religious leaders use to vilify those they see as weak and scapegoat those least able to defend themselves. By so doing they create a climate where human rights violations are legitimized and ordinary people suffer the most terrible consequences. Cap Good – Overall Equality Cap leads to tech advances that make equality achievable Cudd 10 – Dean of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy @ KU Anne Cudd, “Capitalism for and Against: A Feminist Debate,” pg. 51-52 Technological advances have not only lowered the paid working day, but have also improved the convenience and comfort of daily life. This may be true for women even more than for men, because women are typically responsible for domestic work. The invention and proliferation of household appliances has reduced the total amount of time needed to maintain a clean, healthy home, launder clothing, and prepare food. In the United States, the amount of time spent by all women declined from 46.8 to 29.3 hours per week during the twentieth century.61 To some extent this understates the improvement in the quality of life, however. Homes are now larger than before, making them more comfortable and allowing greater privacy and space for leisure for individual household members. Also, women have consistently over time reported cleaning as their least favorite activity, and cooking and childcare as their most favorite domestic activities. Over this time period the proportion of time in these favored activities has increased. Capitalism can be credited with the technological improvements that have led to these improvements in women's quality of life. But capitalism has also increased women's opportunity cost of working in the home, and thus creates incentives for both men and women to reduce the time women spend on household chores. Evidence for this point is that women who arc not employed spend a much greater time doing unpaid domestic work than women who arc employed. Unemployed women in Britain spend up to three times more hours cleaning and two times more preparing food as employed women.65 Thus, capitalism has improved the quality of home life, making it cleaner, more comfortable, and less time consuming to maintain and reproduce. The past 150 years have brought enormous moral advances, if one takes the moral test of a society to be the degree to which individuals are treated with dignity and respect, regardless of their attributed status, that is, sex, race, ethnicity, or their religious, sexual, or gender identification. This is an admittedly liberal standard for moral progress; this treatise will have little to offer those who hold that collectives are of greater moral importance than individuals. In this time period legal slavery has ended throughout the world (with the exception of Mauritania, a traditionalist country). Legal racial apartheid and legal caste systems have ended. It is now commonplace to question the morality of racism, sexism, and even homophobia in much of the world. In the most developed capitalist economies, discrimination or segregation requires justification, and although those evils continue there are legal remedies in these countries for challenging them and demanding reparation. Cap Good - Overpopulation Capitalism solves overpop – creates conditions for sustainable health conditions that discourage mass procreation Cudd 10 – Dean of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy @ KU Anne Cudd, “Capitalism for and Against: A Feminist Debate,” pg. 38-39 Easterlin rejects the idea that economic growth has been largely responsible for the health transition, and he tests a version of this hypothesis, the "McKeown hypothesis," which claims that the causal factor generating the health transition is specifically better nutrition from greater wealth and income," Easterlin argues that if this hypothesis holds, then we should observe a tight connection between rising levels of income and rising life expectancy. There should be a short time lag between them, and the time lag should be approximately the same. But the data do not show this, rather they show that in England and Wales it took several decades for life expectancy gains to be made, while in Sweden, for example, the gains came very quickly with the rising income that indicated the advent of capitalism in that country. Does this show what Easterlin wants to show, namely, that economic growth is not causally responsible for the historical health transition has now been accomplished in much of the world? I think not. There are other relevant differences between the cases. England was highly urbanized, which created conditions for increased spread of infectious diseases, as Easterlin recognizes. But this means that there was a higher bar for the wealth effect to overcome, it does not mean that there was no wealth effect. Thus, I think his rejection of the McKeown hypothesis is premature. Furthermore, the fact that Sweden's transition to capitalism came later gave it an advantage in the sense that it could learn from techniques adopted in England to improve health. Easterlin's alternative hypothesis is that the introduction of smallpox vaccines accounted for the progress in life expectancy in both cases. But there are two things to note about this alternative that are relevant here. First, even if this is the main cause of the health transition, the wide availability of smallpox vaccines - their production and distribution, communication about their use and effectiveness, and the responsiveness of public health agents to the desire of citizens for them - must at least in part be due to the conditions created by capitalism, including greater wealth and income, higher levels of education, and increasing legal and public infrastructure. According to Jonathan Tucker, "a key breakthrough in the control smallpox in industrialized countries was the invention of the Icebox, which made it possible to refrigerate smallpox vaccine and thereby preserve its potency for long periods."4' Second, citing smallpox vaccines alone ignores another major contributor to female life expectancy (the statistics he uses in his argument): falling fertility rates. Capitalism, 1 will argue, played a major role in encouraging and facilitating lower fertility rates, which in turn increased maternal and infant survival rates. Extinction Otten 1 Edward Otten, Professor of Emergency Medicine and Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati, 2000-2001, http://www.ecology.org/biod/population/human_pop1.html The exponential growth of the human population, making humans the dominant species on the planet, is having a grave impact on biodiversity. This destruction of species by humans will eventually lead to a destruction of the human species through natural selection. While human beings have had an effect for the last 50,000 years, it has only been since the industrial revolution that the impact has been global rather than regional. This global impact is taking place through five primary processes: over harvesting, alien species introduction, pollution, habitat fragmentation, and outright habit destruction. Cap Good – Environment Capitalism empirically shields the environment – eight reasons – wealth, democracy, tech development, trade, market adjusting to scarcity, regulation of externalities, easy compliance, private property Norberg 3 – MA in History Johan Norberg, Fellow at Timbro, MA with a focus in economics and philosophy, In Defense of Global Capitalism, p. 225-237 All over the world, economic progress and growth are moving hand in hand with intensified environmental protection. Four researchers who studied these connections found “a very strong, positive association between our [environmental] indicators and the level of economic development.” A country that is very poor is too preoccupied with lifting itself out of poverty to bother about the environment at all. Countries usually begin protecting their natural resources when they can afford to do so. When they grow richer, they start to regulate effluent emissions, and when they have still more resources they also begin regulating air quality. 19 A number of factors cause environment protection to increase with wealth and development. Environmental quality is unlikely to be a top priority for people who barely know where their next meal is coming from. Abating misery and subduing the pangs of hunger takes precedence over conservation. When our standard of living rises we start attaching importance to the environment and obtaining resources to improve it. Such was the case earlier in western Europe, and so it is in the developing countries today. Progress of this kind, however, requires that people live in democracies where they are able and allowed to mobilize opinion; otherwise, their preferences will have no impact. Environmental destruction is worst in dictatorships. But it is the fact of prosperity no less than a sense of responsibility that makes environmental protection easier in a wealthy society. A wealthier country can afford to tackle environmental problems; it can develop environmentally friendly technologies—wastewater and exhaust emission control, for example—and begin to rectify past mistakes. Global environmental development resembles not so much a race for the bottom as a race to the top, what we might call a “California effect.” The state of California's Clean Air Acts, first introduced in the 1970s and tightened since, were stringent emissions regulations that made rigorous demands on car manufacturers. Many prophets of doom predicted that firms and factories would move to other states, and California would soon be obliged to repeal its regulations. But instead the opposite happened: other states gradually tightened up their environmental stipulations. Because car companies needed the wealthy California market, manufacturers all over the United States were forced to develop new techniques for reducing emissions. Having done so, they could more easily comply with the exacting requirements of other states, whereupon those states again ratcheted up their requirements. Anti-globalists usually claim that the profit motive and free trade together cause businesses to entrap politicians in a race for the bottom. The California effect implies the opposite: free trade enables politicians to pull profit-hungry corporations along with them in a race to the top. This phenomenon occurs because compliance with environmental rules accounts for a very small proportion of most companies' expenditures. What firms are primarily after is a good business environment—a liberal economy and a skilled workforce— not a bad natural environment. A review of research in this field shows that there are no clear indications of national environmental rules leading to a diminution of exports or to fewer companies locating in the countries that pass the rules. 20 This finding undermines both the arguments put forward by companies against environmental regulations and those advanced by environmentalists maintaining that globalization has to be restrained for environmental reasons. Incipient signs of the California effect's race to the top are present all over the world, because globalization has caused different countries to absorb new techniques more rapidly, and the new techniques are generally far gentler on the environment. Researchers have investigated steel manufacturing in 50 different countries and concluded that countries with more open economies took the lead in introducing cleaner technology. Production in those countries generated almost 20 percent less emissions than the same production in closed countries. This process is being driven by multinational corporations because they have a lot to gain from uniform production with uniform technology. Because they are restructured more rapidly, they have more modern machinery. And they prefer assimilating the latest, most environmentally friendly technology immediately to retrofitting it, at great expense, when environmental regulations are tightened up. Brazil, Mexico, and China—the three biggest recipients of foreign investment—have followed a very clear pattern: the more investments they get, the better control they gain over air pollution. The worst forms of air pollution have diminished in their cities during the period of globalization. When Western companies start up in developing countries, their production is considerably more environment-friendly than the native production, and they are more willing to comply with environmental legislation, not least because they have brand images and reputations to protect. Only 30 percent of Indonesian companies comply with the country's environmental regulations, whereas no fewer than 80 percent of the multinationals do so. One out of every 10 foreign companies maintained a standard clearly superior to that of the regulations. This development would go faster if economies were more open and, in particular, if the governments of the world were to phase out the incomprehensible tariffs on environmentally friendly technology. 21 Sometimes one hears it said that, for environmental reasons, the poor countries of the South must not be allowed to grow as affluent as our countries in the North. For example, in a compilation of essays on Environmentally Significant Consumption published by the National Academy of Sciences, we find anthropologist Richard Wilk fretting that: If everyone develops a desire for the Western high-consumption lifestyle, the relentless growth in consumption, energy use, waste, and emissions may be disastrous. 22 But studies show this to be colossal misapprehension. On the contrary, it is in the developing countries that we find the gravest, most harmful environmental problems. In our affluent part of the world, more and more people are mindful of environmental problems such as endangered green areas. Every day in the developing countries, more than 6,000 people die from air pollution when using wood, dung, and agricultural waste in their homes as heating and cooking fuel. UNDP estimates that no fewer than 2.2 million people die every year from polluted indoor air. This result is already “disastrous” and far more destructive than atmospheric pollution and industrial emissions. Tying people down to that level of development means condemning millions to premature death every year. It is not true that pollution in the modern sense increases with growth. Instead, pollution follows an inverted U-curve. When growth in a very poor country gathers speed and the chimneys begin belching smoke, the environment suffers. But when prosperity has risen high enough, the environmental indicators show an improvement instead: emissions are reduced, and air and water show progressively lower concentrations of pollutants. The cities with the worst problems are not Stockholm, New York, and Zürich, but rather Beijing, Mexico City, and New Delhi. In addition to the factors already mentioned, this is also due to the economic structure changing from raw-material-intensive to knowledge-intensive production. In a modern economy, heavy, dirty industry is to a great extent superseded by service enterprises. Banks, consulting firms, and information technology corporations do not have the same environmental impact as old factories. According to one survey of available environmental data, the turning point generally comes before a country's per capita GDP has reached $8,000. At $10,000, the researchers found a positive connection between increased growth and better air and water quality. 23 That is roughly the level of prosperity of Argentina, South Korea, or Slovenia. In the United States, per capita GDP is about $36,300. Here as well, the environment has consistently improved since the 1970s, quite contrary to the picture one gets from the media. In the 1970s there was constant reference to smog in American cities, and rightly so: the air was judged to be unhealthy for 100–300 days a year. Today it is unhealthy for fewer than 10 days a year, with the exception of Los Angeles. There, the figure is roughly 80 days, but even that represents a 50 percent reduction in 10 years. 24 The same trend is noticeable in the rest of the affluent world—for example, in Tokyo, where, a few decades ago, doomsayers believed that oxygen masks would in the future have to be worn all around the city because of the bad air. Apart from its other positive effects on the developing countries, such as ameliorating hunger and sparing people the horror of watching their children die, prosperity beyond a certain critical point can improve the environment. What is more, this turning point is now occurring progressively earlier in the developing countries, because they can learn from more affluent countries' mistakes and use their superior technology. For example, air quality in the enormous cities of China, which are the most heavily polluted in the world, has steadied since the mid-1980s and in several cases has slowly improved. This improvement has coincided with uniquely rapid growth. Some years ago, the Danish statistician and Greenpeace member Bjørn Lomborg, with about 10 of his students, compiled statistics and facts about the world's environmental problems. To his astonishment, he found that what he himself had regarded as self-evident, the steady deterioration of the global environment, did not agree at all with official empirical data. He found instead that air pollution is diminishing, refuse problems are diminishing, resources are not running out, more people are eating their fill, and people are living longer. Lomborg gathered publicly available data from as many fields as he could find and published them in the book The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. The picture that emerges there is an important corrective to the general prophesies of doom that can so easily be imbibed from newspaper headlines. Lomborg shows that air pollution and emissions have been declining in the developed world during recent decades. Heavy metal emissions have been heavily reduced; nitrogen oxides have diminished by almost 30 percent and sulfur emissions by about 80 percent. Pollution and emission problems are still growing in the poor developing countries, but at every level of growth annual particle density has diminished by 2 percent in only 14 years. In the developed world, phosphorus emissions into the seas have declined drastically, and E. coli bacteria concentrations in coastal waters have plummeted, enabling closed swimming areas to reopen. Lomborg shows that, instead of large-scale deforestation, the world's forest acreage increased from 40.24 million to 43.04 million square kilometers between 1950 and 1994. He finds that there has never been any large-scale tree death caused by acid rain. The oft-quoted, but erroneous statement about 40,000 species going extinct every year is traced by Lomborg to its source—a 20-year-old estimate that has been circulating in environmentalist circles ever since. Lomborg thinks it is closer to 1,500 species a year, and possibly a bit more than that. The documented cases of extinction during the past 400 years total just over a thousand species, of which about 95 percent are insects, bacteria, and viruses. As for the problem of garbage, the next hundred years worth of Danish refuse could be accommodated in a 33-meter-deep pit with an area of three square kilometers, even without recycling. In addition, Lomborg illustrates how increased prosperity and improved technology can solve the problems that lie ahead of us. All the fresh water consumed in the world today could be produced by a single desalination plant, powered by solar cells and occupying 0.4 percent of the Sahara Desert. It is a mistake, then, to believe that growth automatically ruins the environment. And claims that we would need this or that number of planets for the whole world to attain a Western standard of consumption—those “ecological footprint” calculations—are equally untruthful. Such a claim is usually made by environmentalists, and it is concerned, not so much with emissions and pollution, as with resources running out if everyone were to live as we do in the affluent world. Clearly, certain of the raw materials we use today, in presentday quantities, would not suffice for the whole world if everyone consumed the same things. But that information is just about as interesting as if a prosperous Stone Age man were to say that, if everyone attained his level of consumption, there would not be enough stone, salt, and furs to go around. Raw material consumption is not static. With more and more people achieving a high level of prosperity, we start looking for ways of using other raw materials. Humanity is constantly improving technology so as to get at raw materials that were previously inaccessible, and we are attaining a level of prosperity that makes this possible. New innovations make it possible for old raw materials to be put to better use and for garbage to be turned into new raw materials. A century and a half ago, oil was just something black and sticky that people preferred not to step in and definitely did not want to find beneath their land. But our interest in finding better energy sources led to methods being devised for using oil, and today it is one of our prime resources. Sand has never been all that exciting or precious, but today it is a vital raw material in the most powerful technology of our age, the computer. In the form of silicon—which makes up a quarter of the earth's crust— it is a key component in computer chips. There is a simple market mechanism that averts shortages. If a certain raw material comes to be in short supply, its price goes up. This makes everyone more interested in economizing on that resource, in finding more of it, in reusing it, and in trying to find substitutes for it. The trend over the last few decades of falling raw material prices is clear. Metals have never been as cheap as they are today. Prices are falling, which suggests that demand does not exceed supply. In relation to wages, that is, in terms of how long we must work to earn the price of a raw material, natural resources today are half as expensive as they were 50 years ago and one-fifth as expensive as they were a hundred years ago. In 1900 the price of electricity was eight times higher, the price of coal seven times higher, and the price of oil five times higher than today. 25 The risk of shortage is declining all the time, because new finds and more efficient use keep augmenting the available reserves. In a world where technology never stops developing, static calculations are uninteresting, and wrong. By simple mathematics, Lomborg establishes that if we have a raw material with a hundred years' use remaining, a 1 percent annual increase in demand, and a 2 percent increase in recycling and/or efficiency, that resource will never be exhausted. If shortages do occur, then with the right technology most substances can be recycled. One-third of the world's steel production, for example, is being reused already. Technological advance can outstrip the depletion of resources. Not many years ago, everyone was convinced of the impossibility of the whole Chinese population having telephones, because that would require several hundred million telephone operators. But the supply of manpower did not run out; technology developed instead. Then it was declared that nationwide telephony for China was physically impossible because all the world's copper wouldn't suffice for installing heavy gauge telephone lines all over the country. Before that had time to become a problem, fiber optics and satellites began to supersede copper wire. The price of copper, a commodity that people believed would run out, has fallen continuously and is now only about a tenth of what it was 200 years ago. People in most ages have worried about important raw materials becoming exhausted. But on the few occasions when this has happened, it has generally affected isolated, poor places, not open, affluent ones. To claim that people in Africa, who are dying by the thousand every day from supremely real shortages, must not be allowed to become as prosperous as we in the West because we can find theoretical risks of shortages occurring is both stupid and unjust. The environmental question will not resolve itself. Proper rules are needed for the protection of water, soil, and air from destruction. Systems of emissions fees are needed to give polluters an interest in not damaging the environment for others. Many environmental issues also require international regulations and agreements, which confront us with entirely new challenges. Carbon dioxide emissions, for example, tend to increase rather than diminish when a country grows more affluent. When talking about the market and the environment, it is important to realize that efforts in this quarter will be facilitated by a freer, growing economy capable of using the best solutions, from both a natural and a human viewpoint. In order to meet those challenges, it is better to have resources and advanced science than not to have them. Very often, environmental improvements are due to the very capitalism so often blamed for the problems. The introduction of private property creates owners with long-term interests. Landowners must see to it that there is good soil or forest there tomorrow as well, because otherwise they will have no income later on, whether they continue using the land or intend to sell it. If the property is collective or government-owned, no one has any such long-term interest. On the contrary, everyone then has an interest in using up the resources quickly before someone else does. It was because they were common lands that the rain forests of the Amazon began to be rapidly exploited in the 1960s and 1970s and are still being rapidly exploited today. Only about a 10th of forests are recognized by the governments as privately owned, even though in practice Indians possess and inhabit large parts of them. It is the absence of definite fishing rights that causes (heavily subsidized) fishing fleets to try to vacuum the oceans of fish before someone else does. No wonder, then, that the most large-scale destruction of environment in history has occurred in the communist dictatorships, where all ownership was collective. A few years ago, a satellite image was taken of the borders of the Sahara, where the desert was spreading. Everywhere, the land was parched yellow, after nomads had overexploited the common lands and then moved on. But in the midst of this desert environment could be seen a small patch of green. This proved to be an area of privately owned land where the owners of the farm prevented overexploitation and engaged in cattle farming that was profitable in the long term. 26 Trade and freight are sometimes criticized for destroying the environment, but the problem can be rectified with more efficient transport and purification techniques, as well as emissions fees to make the cost of pollution visible through pricing. The biggest environmental problems are associated with production and consumption, and there trade can make a positive contribution, even aside from the general effect it has on growth. Trade leads to a country's resources being used as efficiently as possible. Goods are produced in the places where production entails least expense and least wear and tear on the environment. That is why the amount of raw materials needed to make a given product keeps diminishing as productive efficiency improves. With modern production processes, 97 percent less metal is needed for a soft drink can than 30 years ago, partly because of the use of lighter aluminum. A car today contains only half as much metal as a car of 30 years ago. Therefore, it is better for production to take place where the technology exists, instead of each country trying to have production of its own, with all the consumption of resources that would entail. It is more environmentally friendly for a cold northern country to import meat from temperate countries than to waste resources on concentrated feed and the construction and heating of cattle pens for the purpose of native meat production. Cap Good – Environment Private property is key to environmental protection – government has zero incentive to protect public lands Stroup and Shaw 9 – Professor of Economics Richard and Jane, Professor of Economics at Montana State University, Senior Associate at the Political Economy Research Center, An Environment Without Property Rights, http://www.independent.org/publicati...cle.asp?id=196 To understand why, it is helpful to look at the reasons why private property rights protect the environment. There are several:3 1. Owners have incentives to use resources productively and to conserve where possible. Owners can obtain financial rewards from using resources productively and they have a strong incentive to reduce costs by conserving on their use of each resource. In the pursuit of profits, business firms have a strongincentive to implement new resource-saving technologies. Such incentives were absent in the Eastern bloc under socialism. Consider the Trabant, the people’s car produced in East Germany between 1959 and 1989.4 (Production stopped shortly after the Berlin Wall came down.) The Trabant provided basic transportation and was easy to fix. But it was slow (top speed 66 mph), noisy, it had no discernible handling, it spewed a plume of oil and gray exhaust smoke, and it didn’t have a gas gauge. The exhaust was so noxious that West Germans were not allowed to own Trabants. When the magazine Car and Driver brought one to the United States, the EPA refused to let it be driven on public streets. The Trabant was so bad partly because its design was basically the same as it had been when the car was first manufactured in 1959. The latest model, the 601, had been introduced in 1964, and was essentially unchanged 25 years later. Manufacturers could not reap a profit from making a better car, so they had no incentive to adopt new, cleaner technology that would give better performance. Indeed, because factories were government-owned, there was little incentive to produce any cars at all in East Germany. So few automobiles were available that people waited an average of 13 years to get their Trabant. 2. Private ownership of property provides an incentive for good care that is lacking under government control. If a resource is well cared for, it will be more valuable and add more to the personal wealth of its owner. If the owner allows the resource to deteriorate or be harmed by pollution, he or she personally bears the cost of that negligence in the form of a decline in the value of the resource. Throughout the Soviet Union under Communism, resources were routinely wasted. In fact, the emphasis was on using up resources, not on producing them—for a good reason. Central planners often measured the use of inputs to determine whether a factory or other entity was carrying out the central plan. For example, Ann-Mari Satre Ahlander reports that despite the low per capita production of agricultural crops, the use of fertilizers and herbicides was high.5 That is because using them was a sign that work was being done, even though excessive use of these chemicals could have harmful effects. A story is told about a part of Estonia where the underground water is flammable because vast quantities of aviation fuel were dumped into the ground and they seeped into the water. The fuel was assigned to a nearby Soviet military station to be used for flying practice missions. To make sure that the pilots had flown the required number of hours, the military superiors monitored the amount of fuel the pilots used. When the pilots did not want to fly the required hours, they falsified their reports. To evade detection, they got rid of the fuel by dumping it onto the ground.6 3. A resource owner has legal rights against anyone who would harm the resource. The private owner of a resource has more than just the incentive to preserve the value of that resource. Private property rights also provide the owner with legal rights against anyone (usually including a government agency) who invades—physically or by pollution—and harms the resource. The private owner of a forest or a farm will not sit idly by if someone is cutting down trees without permission or invading the property with hazardous pollutants, and lawsuits can be used to protect those rights. A private owner could probably have stopped the dumping of aviation fuel on the Estonian farmland mentioned above. But in the Eastern bloc, such protection was absent. Peter J. Hill reports that in Bulgaria heavy metals in irrigation water lowered crop yields on Bulgarian farms. The industrial sources of the metals were known, but the farmers had no recourse. Without a system of redress through the courts, says Hill, the farmers had no actionable claim against those causing the problems.7 4. Property rights provide long-term incentives for maximizing the value of a resource, even for owners whose personal outlook is short-term. If using a tract of land for the construction of a toxic waste dump reduces its future productivity, its value falls today, reducing the owner’s wealth. That happens because land’s current worth reflects the net present value of its future services—the revenue from production or services received directly from the land, minus the costs required to generate the revenues (and both discounted to present value terms). Lake Baikal is the largest and deepest freshwater lake on Earth. Once known for its purity, it is now heavily polluted because Soviet planners decided to build paper mills at its edge and failed to reduce the emission of pollutants into the water. According to one source, the effluent is discharged directly into the lake and has created a polluted area 23 miles wide.8 Clearly,the value of the lake and its surrounding land has been seriously diminished by pollution. In a society of private ownership, the owner of lake property would envision a place that would attract tourists and homebuyers. Such an owner would have a strong incentive to maintain the value of this property by preventing its deterioration. But government planners had no incentive to protect it. Cap Good – Economy Capitalism is key to growth Norberg 3 – MA in History Johan Norberg, Fellow at Timbro and CATO, MA with a focus in economics and philosophy, In Defense of Global Capitalism, pg. 64 The growth of world prosperity is not a “miracle” or any of the other mystifying terms we customarily apply to countries that have succeeded economically and socially. Schools are not built, nor are incomes generated, by sheer luck, like a bolt from the blue. These things happen when people begin to think along new lines and work hard to bring their ideas to fruition. But people do that everywhere, and there is no reason why certain people in certain places during certain periods in history should be intrinsically smarter or more capable than others. What makes the difference is whether the environment permits and encourages ideas and work, or instead puts obstacles in their way. That depends on whether people are free to explore their way ahead, to own property, to invest for the long term, to conclude private agreements, and to trade with others. In short, it depends on whether or not the countries have capitalism. In the affluent world we have had capitalism in one form or another for a couple of centuries. That is how the countries of the West became “the affluent world.” Capitalism has given people both the liberty and the incentive to create, produce, and trade, thereby generating prosperity. Capitalism ends poverty and promotes growth Norberg 3 – MA in History Johan Norberg, Fellow at Timbro and CATO, MA with a focus in economics and philosophy, In Defense of Global Capitalism, pg. 64 Johan Norberg shows that the diffusion of capitalism in the last decades has lowered poverty rates and created opportunities for individuals all over the world. Living standards and life expectancy has risen fast in most places. World hunger, infant mortality, and inequality have diminished. This is because of an economic and technological development that is the result of free market policies. The poor countries that have liberalized their economies have shown impressive results, while those that have not are stuck in deep misery. Therefore, we need more capitalism and globalization if we want a better world, not less. Capitalism is key to wealth generation Gilpin 2k – Professor of Politics Robert Gilpin, Professor of politics and international affairs, Princeton University, The challenge of global capitalism: the world economy in the 21st century, p. 3 Capitalism is the most successful wealth-creating economic system that the world has ever known; no other system, as the distinguished economist Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, has benefited “the common people” as much. Capitalism, he observed, creates wealth through advancing continuously to ever higher levels of productivity and technological sophistication; this process requires that the “old” be destroyed before the “new” can take over. Technological progress, the ultimate driving force of capitalism, requires the continuous discarding of obsolete factories, economic sectors, and even human skills. The system rewards the adaptable and the efficient; it punishes the redundant and the less productive. Only capitalism generates upward economic mobility Vance 5 – PhD in Economics Laurence M. Vance, adjunct instructor in accounting at Pensacola Junior College, 2005, Mises, Accesssed April 13, 2009, http://mises.org/story/1887 Because it was Marx himself who coined the term, it is no surprise that capitalism has been falsely thought to benefit only capitalists and the rich while exploiting workers and the poor. DiLorenzo dismisses as Marxist propaganda the idea that capitalism is "a zero-sum game in which 'somebody wins, somebody loses.'" Instead, "Capitalism succeeds precisely because free exchange is mutually advantageous." And not only does it succeed, it is "the source of civilizations and human progress." Capitalism has "brought to the masses products and services that were once considered luxuries available only to the rich." Capitalism is not only "the best-known source of upward economic mobility," it "actually reduces income inequalities within a nation." In short, capitalism alleviates poverty, raises living standards, expands economic opportunity, and enables scores of millions to live longer, healthier, and more peaceful lives. Cap Good – Economy – Uniqueness Absolute poverty is decreasing now -wealth accumulation isn’t zero-sum Richards 9 – PhD in Philosophy @ Princeton Jay Richards, PhD with honors in Philosophy and Theology from Princeton, “Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem,” pg. 90-91 To repeat: Even if the gap between rich and poor grows over time, it doesn’t mean that the poor are getting poorer, because the total amount of wealth may have gone up. The relevant issue is whether the lot of the poor improves over time, not how close they are to the richest member of their society.12 From 1947 to 2005, the average income of the richest 20 percent of the U.S. population went up almost every year, from $8,072 in 1947 to $184,500 in 2005 (adjusted for inflation). But this didn’t come at the expense of the poor. On the contrary, the real incomes of the poorest 20 percent also went up almost every year, from $1,584 in 1947 to $25,616 in 2005. And all this happened over a period in which the number of American families doubled, from about 37 million in 1947 to over 77 million in 2005.13 In other words, the total amount of wealth went up. The rich didn’t get richer by making the poor poorer. And this is to say nothing of the fact that many families climbed up the income ladder over time. The poorest 20 percent of the population is not always made up of the same people. Upward mobility is common. The same thing is true internationally. To see this visually, go to the illuminating if badly named Web site Gapminder (www .gapminder.org). Gapminder converts boring, opaque statistics into intuitive animations. It allows you to see trends. One such animation uses an x/y plot to show the trends in life expectancy and per capita income from about 1974 to 2005. If you can get on the Internet, before you read further go to www.gapminder .org and click on “Gap Minder World, 2006.” Then you can follow along. Words alone don’t do justice to the reality. Every country is represented here on an x/y plot with a color- coded circle. The country’s population determines the size of the circle. (That’s why India and China look like Jupiter and Saturn while most of the other countries look like little moons.) The y-axis (up and down) shows life expectancy. So the higher up a country is on the plot, the higher its average per capita life expectancy. The x-axis (left to right) shows per capita income. The farther a country is to the right on the plot, the higher its per capita income. Now hit “Play,” and watch the circles move through time. Notice the general trend: up and to the right. In other words, per capita income and life expectancy have gone up in many countries in the last thirty years, especially in Europe, Asia, and North America. Total income has increased worldwide.14 Poverty decreasing – life-expectancy increasing – causally related to spread of capitalism Richards 9 – PhD in Philosophy @ Princeton Jay Richards, PhD with honors in Philosophy and Theology from Princeton, “Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem,” pg. 92 In fact, the percentage of people living in absolute poverty has dropped since 1970. In 1970, the world population was 3.7 billion, and 38 percent (1.4 billion) lived below the absolute poverty line (less than one dollar a day). By 1990, with a world population of 5.3 billion, those languishing in absolute poverty dropped to 26 percent (still about 1.4 billion).15 In fact, despite puddleglummish reports to the contrary, worldwide, statistics on infant mortality, life expectancy, and poverty have all improved dramatically in the last few decades.16 Comparing countries, there is one unmistakable trend: countries with the rule of law and economic freedom prosper over time. Countries without these virtues do not. The annual “Index of Economic Freedom” drives this home. In 2007, booming Hong Kong topped the list, while starving, Stalinist North Korea came in dead last.17 Those two facts tell you what you need to know. If every country had free markets and the rule of law, every circle on the Gapminder plot would probably be moving up and to the right. Cap Good – Economy – History on our Side History is on our side – capitalism causes prosperity, prevents hunger, and ensures a longer lifespan Norberg 3 – MA in History Johan Norberg, Fellow at Timbro and CATO, MA with a focus in economics and philosophy, In Defense of Global Capitalism, pg. 77 All experience indicates that it is in liberal regimes that wealth is created and development is sustained. Politics and economics are not exact sciences: we cannot perform laboratory experiments in order to ascertain which systems work and which do not. But the conflict between capitalism and central planning gives us something close. History provides us with several instances of similar populations, with similar preconditions and sharing the same language and norms, subjected to two different systems, one a market economy and the other a centrally controlled command economy. With Germany divided into capitalist West and communist East, people talked of an “economic miracle” in the Western part, while the East fell further and further behind. The same thing happened with capitalist South Korea and communist North Korea. The former was numbered among the Asian tigers, convincing the world that “developing” countries can actually develop. Whereas in the 1960s it was poorer than Angola, today, with the world's thirteenth largest economy, South Korea is almost as affluent as a Western European country. The North Korean economy, by contrast, underwent a total collapse, and the country is now afflicted with mass starvation. One can also see the difference between Taiwan, a market economy that experienced one of the swiftest economic developments in history, and communist mainland China, which suffered starvation and misery until it saw fit to start opening up its markets. 3 The same comparison can be made all over the world. The greater the degree of economic liberalism in a country, the better that country's chances of attaining higher prosperity, faster growth, a higher standard of living, and higher average life expectancy. People in the economically freest countries are nearly 10 times as rich as those in the least free, and they are living more than 20 years longer! Tons of empirical evidence Norberg 3 – MA in History Johan Norberg, Fellow at Timbro and CATO, MA with a focus in economics and philosophy, In Defense of Global Capitalism, pg. 129 The world's output today is 6 times what it was 50 years ago, and world trade is 16 times greater. There is cause to believe that production has been led and driven by trade. Exactly what difference open markets make is hard to tell, but virtually no economist denies that the effect is positive. There are huge quantities of empirical fact to show that free trade creates economic development. One comprehensive and frequently cited study of the effects of trade was conducted by Harvard economists Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner. 7 They examined the trade policies of 117 countries between 1970 and 1989. After controlling for other factors, the study reveals a statistically significant connection between free trade and growth that the authors were unable to find, for example, between education and growth. Growth was between three and six times higher in free trade countries than in protectionist ones. Open developing countries had on average an annual growth rate of 4.49 percent those two decades, while closed developing countries had only 0.69 percent. Open industrialized countries had an annual growth of 2.29 percent, while closed ones experienced only 0.74 percent growth. AT: Labor Exploitation No labor exploitation – cap leads to rising billions Cudd 10 – Dean of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy @ KU Anne Cudd, “Capitalism for and Against: A Feminist Debate,” pg. 78-80 The immiseration objection claims that there is a 'race to the bottom' for labor, in that capital will seek out ever cheaper labor to hire and this will cause laborers to compete by accepting lower and lower wages. The argument depends on the assumption that there is a large supply of unemployed and interchangeable labor that can be tapped at will, and that capital can flow freely to exploit these laborers. These conditions do not hold precisely in practice, though it is at the heart of the feminist objection to capitalism that women and children are often exploited in this way. It is surely true that labor will seek out the best wages available within other constraints that one's way of life imposes. Capital has to compete for labor with other firms, and so the going wage will depend on what other firms exist, as well as on what other options a society offers persons who are unable or unwilling to work for the wages offered. The better the outside option, then the better position labor has to bargain for higher wages. But likewise, the more mobile capital is, the better able it will be to seek out workers in different places whose outside options are worse and demands for wages are lower. Those unemployed laborers who are out there willing to accept the low wages are, after all, presumably better off when they earn the low wages than they were when they earned nothing. So it is not possible to say analytically how this works out; it has to be empirically determined. The real moral question then is this: does capitalism improve the available options to the most vulnerable women and children? One of the key findings of international trade economists is that when a new international firm enters a developing market, wages as a whole rise in the region. ^ This suggests that more capitalist trade and production increases wages. In some cases, governments will intervene to artificially lower wages and raise the level of production in ways that a free market would not support, say by outlawing unions or breaking strikes. Although this no doubt happens in many places in the world, it is the result of political and social oppression by governments, and hardly to be blamed on the capitalist system per se. An analogy would be blaming the political oppression of communist leaders on the socialist economic system. Any economic system will leave open the possibility for unscrupulous but powerful leaders to exploit the system and oppress people. On the other hand, governments may also interact in ways that raise wages, such as by giving the companies tax breaks or other incentives to locate in the country. Whether they govern socialist or capitalist systems, governments need to be responsive to the people; they can create much good or much harm regardless of the economic system they oversee. Cap solves exploitation – if exploitation exists, it’s not a result of impoverishment but of differing talent levels Cudd 10 – Dean of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy @ KU Anne Cudd, “Capitalism for and Against: A Feminist Debate,” pg. 101-102 It will be objected that wealth inequality and poverty are background conditions created by capitalism that cause exploitation. I have already presented a great deal of evidence to suggest that the poverty claim is false. Capitalism makes persons wealthier, not poorer. Virtually no one denies that income and wealth rise in countries when they become more involved in capitalist markets and develop industry and trade. Capitalist markets and firms create opportunities for interactions that improve the wealth of both sides of a trade; otherwise the interaction would not occur, at least not as sanctioned by capitalism, as defined by the private ownership, free and open markets, and free wage labor conditions. Although corrupt government may steal or alter property rights and so impoverish some of its citizens, this is not the fault of capitalism but of corruption! Capitalism does arguably create inequalities, although it does not create them everywhere. But it is certainly an implication of the conditions of capitalism that inequality will occur, provided that there is an initial inequality in resources and no or little social redistribution by government. Since persons differ in their talents and skills, at a minimum there will be inequalities in the resulting income and wealth derived from capitalist interaction. Inequality creates the possibility of exploitation because those who have lesser endowments may be more desperate to make a trade than those with greater endowments. But is this the morally unacceptable form of exploitation? The answer depends on whether the exploitation involves coercion. But it involves coercion only if there is absolute poverty. Thus, it is only the combination of poverty and inequality that create a problematic form of exploitation. Insofar as capitalism helps to remedy poverty, then, it tends to lessen the morally unacceptable forms of exploitation. Capitalism is self-correcting – the transition away from exploitative labor proves Hollender and Breen 10 – * Founder of the American Sustainable Business Council, a progressive alternative to the Chamber of Commerce, **Editorial Director of the Fast Company Jeffrey Hollender, Bill Breen, “The Responsibility Revolution: How the Next Generation of Businesses will Win,” pg. 9 They are recreating their relationships with suppliers. When activists pulled back the curtain on persistent health, safety, and child-labor violations in the overseas factories of some of America’s foremost apparel brands, the targeted companies first reacted with utter predictability: they issued ‘‘codes of conduct’’ for their vendors and dispatched teams of inspectors to expose serial offenders. In its first social-responsibility report, for example, Gap Inc. proudly proclaimed that it had pulled its business from 136 factories that failed to meet its new labor standards. More recently, however, the clothing retailer has come to realize that internal monitoring alone cannot unravel its supply chain’s tangled problems, and simply listing the number of offending factories does not inspire the public’s trust. In 2006, Gap surprised the business world by identifying, on its Web site, its contract factories, so we could see for ourselves what conditions were like. Rather than simply policing their subcontractors, Gap and Nike—working with union and NGO representatives—are partnering with them, to help them become sustainable and desirable places to work. Contract factories that invest in people and treat their workers well tend to improve efficiency (read: lower prices) and product quality, which grows their business—and helps to grow their customers’ business results. AT: Wealth Inequality Wealth inequality isn’t inherently bad – capitalism creates a floor on global poverty Cudd 10 – Dean of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy @ KU Anne Cudd, “Capitalism for and Against: A Feminist Debate,” pg. 81-82 Two objections may be raised to entrepreneurial capitalism: first, that it creates greater inequalities of wealth; and, second, that it leads to instability when firms become obsolete because of new innovations. 1 will address each one in turn. First, it is important to note that although wealth inequalities are very high in entrepreneurial capitalist countries, those countries do not have the highest income inequalities currently. The highest income inequalities, as mentioned earlier, are in very poor countries, such as Namibia or Sierra Leone. Most developed capitalist countries have much lower Gini coefficients. However, among capitalist countries, the highest Gini coefficients are in the United States, Singapore, and Hong Kong, which are among the most friendly places to entrepreneurial activity. Second, wealth inequalities are very great indeed when one takes into account the Bill Gates and J. K Rowlings of the world, but these are very few individuals, whose great wealth hardly makes anyone else worse off. Indeed, if they make philanthropic gestures like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has, they make a great contribution to the well-being of the poor in the world through the use of their wealth. Considering household wealth on average within countries and between countries, it is within countries, that is, within the various economic systems, that wealth inequalities are highest," This suggests that political power, whatever its source, is a large part of the cause of differential income and wealth levels in a society, and insofar as that Is a problem, it requires a political solution. Finally, although wealth inequalities can create social instability, poverty is really the underlying difficulty. If capitalist development provides a solution to poverty, as I have argued, then it attacks the root of many of the problems (poor health, inadequate education, unemployment) that lead to social instability and human misery. Cap solves poverty – any alternative also supports gross inequality, but doesn’t raise the bottom billions Cudd 10 – Dean of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy @ KU Anne Cudd, “Capitalism for and Against: A Feminist Debate,” pg. 87-88 The most important objection against capitalism, however, is that it enables gross inequalities in wealth and income. When these inequalities also entail absolute impoverishment, so that persons do not have the ability to choose between decent ways of life, then this is clearly a failure. But capitalism raises the overall level of material wealth in a society, and so allows for the possibility of addressing such abject poverty. The fact that market interactions lead to inequalities is not, in itself, a denial of freedom. But it does pose the possibility of inequalities in power that can lead to positive and social unfreedoms, and indeed this is borne out in the actual world in many ways. Perhaps the worst sort is where wealth buys political influence in a nominally democratic country. Before leaving the topic of inequality, however, it is important to point out that capitalism is not alone in supporting gross inequalities, but the way in which it does so is acceptable where it is not in other systems. North Korea, a socialist totalitarian system, creates gross inequalities of wealth through political power that controls resources. The leader and his minions live in vast wealth while much of the population teeters on the brink of famine. The communist systems of the Soviet Union and China were also notorious for the vast consumption and indulgence of their leaders compared with the average citizen, and notoriously one had to be a party member in the Soviet Union in order to own a car. Traditional societies are no better; the patriarchs of many such societies are rich while the young and the less powerful labor for far less. But in each of these cases the wealth comes not through productive effort, but rather through political control, and in some cases through inheritance. While the leader of North Korea is in charge simply by virtue of being the son of the previous leader, the richest capitalists in the world were not born to the previous generation of the wealthiest. It is true that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were born to upper-middle-class families, but their vast wealth was earned through innovation, skills, and talents, and not through inheritance. This is not to say that inequality in wealth is not a problem, nor to say that opportunities to achieve great wealth are fairly distributed in capitalism. They are not, and that is a serious moral issue. But it is to say that socialist and traditional societies have at least equally difficult problems to address in terms of inequality in wealth and power. In the final section of my contribution, I will argue that an enlightened capitalism must do better to address inequalities that either amount to absolute poverty or cause political and social inequalities that deny freedom. It is also important to note, however, that inequality that does not rule out good options for life does not seriously interfere with individual positive freedom, in either sense of the term. One need not live in the best of all possible worlds, after all, in order to be free enough to pursue one's own projects. Capitalism is net-better than resource redistribution at solving wealth disparity Norberg 3 – MA in History Johan Norberg, Fellow at Timbro and CATO, MA with a focus in economics and philosophy, In Defense of Global Capitalism, pg. 80-81 Thus, growth is the best cure for poverty. Some economists have spoken of a “trickle-down” effect, meaning that some get rich first, after which parts of this wealth trickle down to the poor as the rich spend and invest. This description may evoke the image of the poor man getting the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table, but this is a completely mistaken picture of the true effect of growth. On the contrary, what happens is that the poor benefit from growth to roughly the same extent and at the same speed as the rich. They benefit immediately from an increase in the value of their labor and from greater purchasing power. No country has ever succeeded in reducing poverty without having long-term growth. Nor is there any case of the opposite, that is, of a country having had long-term, sustainable growth that didn't benefit the poor population. Still more interestingly, there is no instance of a country having had steady levels of growth in the long term without opening up its markets. The World Bank's World Development Report 2000/2001 contained a good deal of rhetoric about growth not being everything and not being sufficient for development—rhetoric influenced, no doubt, by the growth of the anti-globalization movement. But that report's own tables show that the higher a country's growth has been in the past 20 years, the faster it has reduced poverty, infant mortality, and illiteracy. In the countries at the bottom of the growth league, illiteracy had actually increased. It may be that growth in itself is not sufficient to bring good development for everyone, but growth is manifestly necessary. If we have 3 percent growth annually, this means that the economy, our capital, and our incomes double every 23 years. If growth is twice as fast, they double about every 12 years. This growth represents an unparalleled increase in prosperity. By comparison, the effects of even vigorous government income redistribution policies are insignificant—not just insignificant, but downright dangerous, because high taxes to finance these measures can jeopardize growth. If so, great long-term benefits for everyone are sacrificed in favor of small immediate gains for a few. More ev – empirical examples of real incomes for all increasing in capitalism Norberg 3 – MA in History Johan Norberg, Fellow at Timbro and CATO, MA with a focus in economics and philosophy, In Defense of Global Capitalism, pg. 88 Studying equality in 70 countries, the economist G. W. Scully found that incomes were more evenly distributed in countries with a liberal economy, open markets, and property rights. This was, above all, because the middle class had more and the upper class less in free than in unfree economies. The share of national income going to the richest fifth of the population was 25 percent lower in the “freest” economies than in the “least free” economies. The proportion going to the poorest fifth in a society was unaffected by how free the economy was, but their actual incomes were far greater in liberal economies. 16 The lack of capitalism is the cause of wealth disparity – the North-South gap is concretely divided upon liberal and non-liberal economies Norberg 3 – MA in History Johan Norberg, Fellow at Timbro and CATO, MA with a focus in economics and philosophy, In Defense of Global Capitalism, pg. 154 The world's inequality is due to capitalism. Not to capitalism having made certain groups poor, but to its making its practitioners wealthy. The uneven distribution of wealth in the world is due to the uneven distribution of capitalism. Arguments that capitalism is somehow to blame for world poverty are oddly contradictory. Some argue that capital and corporations make their way only into the affluent countries, leaving the poor ones up the proverbial creek. Others maintain that capital and corporations flock to poor countries with low production costs, to the detriment of workers in the developed world. The truth seems to be that they make their way into both. Trade and investment flows in the past two decades have come to be more and more evenly distributed among the economies that are relatively open to the rest of the world. It is the really closed economies that, for obvious reasons, are not getting investments and trade. Moreover, the differences between these groups of countries are increasing. Clearly, instead of globalization marginalizing certain regions, it is the regions that stand back from globalization that become marginalized. 1 Cap Good – Disease Wealth accumulation solves disease -key to life expectancy for infants Cudd 10 – Dean of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy @ KU Anne Cudd, “Capitalism for and Against: A Feminist Debate,” pg. 60-61 A common misperception in the literature on development and health outcomes is that if a positive public health outcome can now be achieved without accumulation of wealth and capital, then such development, and capitalism in particular, could not be causally responsible for improvements in health.75 But this follows neither for the historical nor the contemporary case. I have just argued the historical case. Consider two contemporary examples of lifesaving and life improving medical advances. The development of anti-retroviral drugs to combat AIDS has been incredibly expensive, although today the drugs themselves are not expensive to make and they are being distributed in many developing countries for very low prices. These drugs are saving many lives. But dearly they would not exist at all were it not for the massive investments in capital and scientific expertise in academic settings in developed capitalist countries. Capitalism provided the wealth accumulation that made this possible, even while it was the collective action of government allocating funds for development of the drugs and global health organizations that made possible their delivery to poor, mainly noncapitalist countries. Another biomedical advance that promises to save or improve the health of many premature infants is the development of the actifier. Premature infants often have trouble learning to suckle, a task that requires a great deal of coordination of sucking, swallowing, and breathing muscles. The actificr is a simple, cheap device that provides instant feedback to the infant that teaches it to suckle properly, often in just a few sessions. Learning this coordination of muscles is the first step that infants need to take to bootstrap cognitive skills necessary for a successful and rich human life. It also allows infants to breastfeed, which is especially crucial in places where water quality is questionable and assaults against a child's immune system are likely to be many. This device will no doubt save many lives at low cost in developing countries. But Its development has required a massive investment in science - the main developer of the device has a million dollar laboratory and many postdocs who work for him. And this accounting leaves out the many mis-steps and wrong turns that less successful innovations have taken. Any one successful biomedical device or drug comes from a large number of trials and errors, most of which are costly but never recover their cost directly. Cap solves disease -smallpox example Cudd 10 – Dean of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy @ KU Anne Cudd, “Capitalism for and Against: A Feminist Debate,” pg. 38-39 Easterlin rejects the idea that economic growth has been largely responsible for the health transition, and he tests a version of this hypothesis, the "McKeown hypothesis," which claims that the causal factor generating the health transition is specifically better nutrition from greater wealth and income," Easterlin argues that if this hypothesis holds, then we should observe a tight connection between rising levels of income and rising life expectancy. There should be a short time lag between them, and the time lag should be approximately the same. But the data do not show this, rather they show that in England and Wales it took several decades for life expectancy gains to be made, while in Sweden, for example, the gains came very quickly with the rising income that indicated the advent of capitalism in that country. Does this show what Easterlin wants to show, namely, that economic growth is not causally responsible for the historical health transition has now been accomplished in much of the world? I think not. There are other relevant differences between the cases. England was highly urbanized, which created conditions for increased spread of infectious diseases, as Easterlin recognizes. But this means that there was a higher bar for the wealth effect to overcome, it does not mean that there was no wealth effect. Thus, I think his rejection of the McKeown hypothesis is premature. Furthermore, the fact that Sweden's transition to capitalism came later gave it an advantage in the sense that it could learn from techniques adopted in England to improve health. Easterlin's alternative hypothesis is that the introduction of smallpox vaccines accounted for the progress in life expectancy in both cases. But there are two things to note about this alternative that are relevant here. First, even if this is the main cause of the health transition, the wide availability of smallpox vaccines - their production and distribution, communication about their use and effectiveness, and the responsiveness of public health agents to the desire of citizens for them - must at least in part be due to the conditions created by capitalism, including greater wealth and income, higher levels of education, and increasing legal and public infrastructure According to Jonathan Tucker, "a key breakthrough in the control smallpox in industrialized countries was the invention of the Icebox, which made it possible to refrigerate smallpox vaccine and thereby preserve its potency for long periods."4' Second, citing smallpox vaccines alone ignores another major contributor to female life expectancy (the statistic s he uses in his argument): falling fertility rates. Capitalism, 1 will argue, played a major role in encouraging and facilitating lower fertility rates, which in turn increased maternal and infant survival rates. Cap Good – Disease – Public Health Cap solves disease – key to building a public health infrastructure -solves vaccines, infrastructure and basic health needs Cudd 10 – Dean of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy @ KU Anne Cudd, “Capitalism for and Against: A Feminist Debate,” pg. 40-41 For instance, among the major impediments to public health in the nineteenth century were dunghills and open sewers, which bred and spread (particularly by means of the flies that fed on them) infectious diseases. Dunghills consisted of both animal and human manure, and they were maintained as a source of fertilizer by people who sold and carted the manure to fields and gardens. As cities grew with increasing industrialization, so did the dunghills. Getting rid of the dunghills required not only the building of latrines or sewers, but also reducing the source of dung where possible. In the mid-nineteenth century trains began the transition away from horse transportation, but this was not concluded until well into the twentieth century when the bicycle and the automobile became common. The United Kingdom experienced a boom in railway lines between 1830 and 1840. By 1843, most major cities, towns, and villages in Britain were connected by rail.''4 This was but one of the many developments needed to rid cities of their dunghills - they could not just disappear when it was realized that they were a health problem, let alone a horrendous stench! Building latrines that avoided waterways, and later building closed sewers, removing garbage from cities, and building health clinics all likewise required massive capital investments requiring antecedent wealth accumulation. Easterlin cites the development of networks of local boards of health that could inspect and regulate the food and milk supply, and bacteriological laboratories for testing, as well as the production and distribution of vaccines, as all very important for the health transition. These too require great expenditures of wealth on the part of societies, especially considering the opportunity costs of building the public health workforce. People had to be well off enough to have the education and the time to work on these activities that were not aimed at basic provision of food, shelter, and clothing. Thus, an accumulation of wealth, which in this era was made possible by capitalism, was required for the health transition, regardless of the fact that it had to be governments that channeled this wealth in order to bring about the health transition. Cap Good – Disease – Med Advances Cap is key to biomedical advances – solves disease -this is a good answer to “cap frivolous medical investment” i.e. Viagra, allergy medicine, etc. Cudd 10 – Dean of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy @ KU Anne Cudd, “Capitalism for and Against: A Feminist Debate,” pg. 41-42 Likewise scientific advances require much wealth investment. Easterlin argues that scientific innovations do not require capitalist markets, rather they are due to factors internal to the evolution of science. He writes, -It is this sequence in the evolution of basic biomedical science - from epidemiological studies to identification of causes and mechanisms - that principally explains, I believe, the chronology of advances in control of major infectious disease, not demand conditions. But again he does not address the massive wealth accumulations necessary for this advance in biomedical science: the educational infrastructure; the laboratories; and the opportunity cost of spending one's time doing science rather than procuring food and shelter. No doubt government or other collective agents had to play a role in assuring that wealth was invested in these scientific advances, but the wealth had to exist to be so invested. It is no coincidence that biomedical science took great leaps forward during the period just subsequent to the economic takeoff of European and North American societies. At the same time, the health takeoff must in turn have furthered the accumulation of wealth in early capitalism. The two processes - growth of biomedical knowledge and growth of capital accumulation - could not have occurred separately. Furthermore, there is a great deal of positive evidence that capitalist firms invested in biological and chemical research in order to solve some of the pressing health problems of the day, including creating serums for diphtheria and other contagious diseases, and developing vaccines, pain killers, and cures for syphilis.47 Cap Good – Disease – Patents Patents key to long-term innovation that is necessary in cases of mutation Norberg 3 Johan Norberg, Fellow at Timbro and CATO, MA with a focus in economics and philosophy, In Defense of Global Capitalism, p. 187 Companies can do these things because there are affluent markets with customers who can pay well. Those companies can only do what they have resources for; they cannot simply accept expenditure with no earnings. But that is what many people complaining about efforts by pharmaceutical companies to preserve their patents feel they should do. If patents for HIV/AIDS drugs were abolished altogether, far more poor people in the world would be able to afford them, because they could then be reproduced at very low cost. That might give people greater access to a medicine today, but it would drastically reduce availability in the future, because pharmaceutical companies spend huge amounts developing medicines. For every successful drug, there are on average 20 or 30 unsuccessful ones, and producing a new, marketable medicine can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The high prices of the few medicines that can be sold are necessary in order to finance all this research. If patents disappeared, hardly any company would be able to afford the research and development of medicines. If we had not had patents before, there would be no controversy over the price of drugs to treat HIV/AIDS, because then those drugs would never have been invented. Cap Good – Disease – AT: Frivolous Research Capitalism is not the cause of misplaced disease research – rather, economic growth purported by capitalism is key to preventing disease Norberg 3 – MA in History Johan Norberg, Fellow at Timbro and CATO, MA with a focus in economics and philosophy, In Defense of Global Capitalism, p. 186 One common objection to the market economy is that it causes people and enterprises to produce for profit, not for needs. This means, for example, pharmaceutical companies devoting huge resources to research and medicines to do with obesity, baldness, and depression, things that westerners can afford to worry about and pay for, whereas only a fraction is devoted to attempting to cure tropical diseases afflicting the poorest of the world's inhabitants, such as malaria and tuberculosis. This criticism is understandable. The unfairness exists, but capitalism is not to blame for it. Without capitalism and the lure of profit, we shouldn't imagine that everyone would have obtained cures for their illnesses. In fact, far fewer would do so than is now the case. If wealthy people in the West demand help for their problems, their resources can be used to research and eventually solve those problems, which are not necessarily trivial to the people afflicted with them. Capitalism gives companies economic incentives to help us by developing medicines and vaccines. That westerners spend money this way does not make things worse for anyone. This is not money that would otherwise have gone to researching tropical diseases—the pharmaceutical companies simply would not have had these resources otherwise. And, as free trade and the market economy promote greater prosperity in poorer countries, their needs and desires will play a larger role in dictating the purposes of research and production. Empirically, excess profit is used for philanthropy Norberg 3 – MA in History Johan Norberg, Fellow at Timbro and CATO, MA with a focus in economics and philosophy, In Defense of Global Capitalism, p. 187 It is not a problem for the Third World that more and more diseases have been made curable in the Western world. On the contrary, that is something that has proved to be a benefit, and not just because a wealthier world can devote more resources to helping the poor. In many fields, the Third World can inexpensively share in the research financed by wealthy Western customers, sometimes paying nothing for it. The Merck Corporation gave free medicine to a project to combat onchocerciasis (river blindness) in 11 African states. As a result those states have now rid themselves almost completely of a parasite that formerly affected something like a million people, blinding thousands every year. 22 The Monsanto Corporation allows researchers and companies free use of their technique for developing “golden rice,” a strain of rice enriched with iron and beta carotene (pro-vitamin A), which could save a million people annually in the Third World who are dying of vitamin A deficiency diseases. A number of pharmaceutical companies are lowering the prices of inhibitors for HIV/AIDS in poor countries by up to 95 percent, on condition that the patents are preserved so that they can maintain full prices in wealthier countries. Cap Good – Space Cap key to space investment Koschara 97 Fred Koschara FKE Space Program, April 8, 1997, http://www.l5development.com/fkespace/fkespace.shtml Space exploration and colonization holds the potential for fulfillment of all of humanity's rational dreams. However, we are still crippled by the lack of a viable plan for developing the possibilities open to us. The commercial use of space, and the opportunities it represents, are the only methods that will be able to attract the development participation necessary to achieve a suitable level of effort. This is a splendid chance for capitalism to show its mettle and prove its worth: to demonstrate that the profit motive is the most powerful incentive available in modern civilized society. AT: Cap Immoral Cap creates the conditions for a just and moral society Brooks and Wehner 10 - *Professor of business @ Syracuse, **Senior fellow @ EPPC Arthur, Professor of Business and Government @ Syracuse, and, Peter, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, “Human Nature and Capitalism,” 12-11-2010, The American, http://www.american.com/archive/2010...and-capitalism A free market can also better our moral condition—not dramatically and not always, but often enough. It places a premium on thrift, savings, and investment. And capitalism, when functioning properly, penalizes certain kinds of behavior—bribery, corruption, and lawlessness among them—because citizens in a free-market society have a huge stake in discouraging such behavior, which is a poison-tipped dagger aimed straight at the heart of prosperity. In addition, capitalism can act as a civilizing agent. The social critic Irving Kristol argued, correctly in our view, that the early architects of democratic capitalism believed commercial transactions “would themselves constantly refine and enlarge the individual’s sense of his own self-interest, so that in the end the kind of commercial society that was envisaged would be a relatively decent community.”11 Capitalism is comparatively the most ethical system – sparks democracy and opportunity Wilson 95 – Professor of Public Policy James, Professor of Public Policy @ Pepperdine, Capitalism and morality” Public Interest, No. 121, Fall However one judges that debate, it is striking that in 1970 - at a time when socialism still had many defenders, when certain American economists (and the CIA!) were suggesting that the Soviet economy was growing faster than the American, when books were being written explaining how Fidel Castro could achieve by the use of moral incentives" what other nations achieved by employing material ones-kristol and Bell saw that the great test of capitalism would not be economic but moral. Time has proved them right. Except for a handful of American professors, everyone here and abroad now recognizes that capitalism produces greater material abundance for more people than any other economic system ever invented. The evidence is not in dispute. A series of natural experiments were conducted on a scale that every social scientist must envy. Several nations-china, Germany, Korea, and Vietnam - were sawed in two, and capitalism was installed in one part and "socialism" in the other. In every case, the capitalist part out-produced, by a vast margin, the non-capitalist one. Moreover, it has become clear during the last half century that democratic regimes only flourish in capitalist societies. Not every nation with something approximating capitalism is democratic, but every nation that is democratic is, to some significant degree, capitalist. (By "capitalist," I mean that production is chiefly organized on the basis of privately owned enterprises, and exchange takes place primarily through voluntary markets.) If capitalism is an economic success and the necessary (but not sufficient) precondition for democracy, it only remains vulnerable on cultural and moral grounds. That is, of course, why today's radical intellectuals have embraced the more extreme forms of multiculturalism and postmodernism. These doctrines are an attack on the hegemony of bourgeois society and the legitimacy of bourgeois values. The attack takes various forms - denying the existence of any foundation for morality, asserting the incommensurability of cultural forms, rejecting the possibility of textual meaning, or elevating the claims of non-western (or non-white or non-Anglo) traditions. By whatever route it travels, contemporary radicalism ends with a rejection of the moral claims of capitalism. Because morality is meaningless, because capitalism is mere power, or because markets and corporations destroy culture, capitalism is arbitrary, oppressive, or corrupting. Most critics of capitalism, of course, are not radicals. Liberal critics recognize, as postmodernists pretend not to, that, if you are going to offer a moral criticism of capitalism, you had better believe that moral judgments are possible and can be made persuasive. To liberals, the failure of capitalism lies in its production of unjustifiable inequalities of wealth and its reckless destruction of the natural environment. Capitalism may produce material abundance, the argument goes, but at too high a price in human suffering and social injustice. I do not deny that capitalism has costs; every human activity has them. (It was a defender of capitalism, after all, who reminded us that there is no such thing as a free lunch.) For people worried about inequality or environmental degradation, the question is not whether capitalism has consequences but whether its consequences are better or worse than those of some feasible economic alternative. (I stress "feasible" because I tire of hearing critics compare capitalist reality to socialist - or communitarian or cooperative - ideals. When ideals are converted into reality, they tend not to look so ideal.) And, in evaluating consequences, one must reckon up not simply the costs but the costs set against the benefits. In addition, one must count as benefits the tendency of an economic system to produce beliefs and actions that support a prudent concern for mitigating the unreasonable costs of the system. Capitalism and public policy By these tests, practical alternatives to capitalism do not seem very appealing. Inequality is a feature of every modern society, Adam Smith expected that it would be a particular feature of what we call capitalism. Indeed, he began The Wealth of Nations by setting forth a puzzle that he hoped to solve. It was this. in "the savage nations of hunters and fishers" (what we later learned to call euphemistically "native cultures" or "less-developed nations"), everyone works and almost everyone acquires the essentials of human sustenance, but they tend to be "so miserably poor" that they are reduced, on occasion, to killing babies and abandoning the elderly and the infirm. Among prosperous nations, by contrast, many people do not work at all and many more live lives of great luxury, yet the general level of prosperity is so high that even the poorest people are better off than the richest person in a primitive society. His book was an effort to explain why "the system of natural liberty" would produce both prosperity and inequality and to defend as tolerable the inequality that was the inevitable (and perhaps necessary) corollary of prosperity. Smith certainly succeeded in the first task but was less successful in the second, at least to judge by the number of people who believe that inequality can be eliminated without sacrificing prosperity. Many nations have claimed to eliminate market-based inequalities, but they have done so only by creating non-market inequalities - a Soviet nomenklatura, a ruling military elite, an elaborate black market, or a set of non-cash perks. Between unconstrained market inequality and the lesser inequality achieved by some redistribution, there is much to discuss and decide, and so the welfare-state debate proceeds. Participants in this debate sometimes forget that the only societies in which such a debate can have much meaning are those that have produced wealth that can be redistributed and that have acquired a government that will do so democratically - in short, capitalist societies. Similarly with respect to the environment: Only rich (that is, capitalist) nations can afford to worry much about the environment, and only democratic (that is, capitalist) nations have governments that will listen to environmentalists. As with inequality, environmental policies in capitalist systems will vary greatly - from the inconsequential through the prudent to the loony - but they will scarcely exist in non-capitalist ones. If anyone doubted this, they were surely convinced when the Iron Curtain was torn down in 1989, giving the West its first real look at what had been hidden behind the Berlin Wall. Eastern Europe had been turned into a vast toxic waste dump. Vaclav Havel explained why: A government that commands the economy will inevitably command the polity; given a commanding position, a government will distort or destroy the former and corrupt or oppress the latter. To compel people engaged in production and exchange to internalize all of the costs of production and exchange without destroying production and exchange, one must be able to make proposals to people who do not want to hear such proposals, induce action among people who do not want to act, and monitor performance by people who do not like monitors, and do all of this only to the extent that the gains in human welfare are purchased at acceptable costs. No regime will make this result certain, but only democratic capitalist regimes make it at all possible. Capitalism creates what are often called "post-material values" that lead some private parties to make environment-protecting proposals. Capitalism, because it requires private property, sustains a distinction between the public and the private sphere and thereby provides a protected place for people to stand who wish to make controversial proposals. And capitalism permits (but does not require) the emergence of democratic institutions that can (but may not) respond to such proposals. Or to put it simply. environmental action arises out of the demands of journalists, professors, foundation executives, and private-sector activists who, for the most part, would not exist in a non-capitalist regime. Capitalism and the good life Many readers may accept the view that capitalism permits, or possibly even facilitates, the making of desirable public policies but reject the idea that this is because there is anything moral about it. At best, it is amoral, a tool for the achievement of human wants that is neither good nor bad. At worst, it is an immoral system that glorifies greed but, by happy accident, occasionally makes possible popular government and pays the bills of some public-interest lobbies that can get on with the business of doing good. Hardly anyone regards it as moral. People with these views can find much support in The Wealth of Nations. They will recall the famous passage in which Smith points out that it is from the "interest," not the "benevolence," of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner. An "invisible hand" leads him to promote the public good, though this is "no part of his intention." Should they study the book more carefully, they will come across passages predicting the degradation of the human spirit that is likely to occur from the division of labor, the incessant seeking after monopoly benefits and political privilege that will follow from the expansion of manufacturing, and the "low profligacy and vice" that will attend upon the growth of large cities. The average worker employed in repetitive tasks will become "stupid and ignorant," the successful merchant living in a big city will become personally licentious and politically advantaged. Karl Marx, a close student of Smith's writings, had these passages in mind (and, indeed, referred to them) when he drew his picture of the alienation man would suffer as a consequence of private property and capitalism. But Marx (and, in some careless passages, even Smith) had made an error. They had confused the consequences of modernization (that is, of industrialization and urbanization) with the consequences of capitalism. The division of labor can be furthered and large industrial enterprises created by statist regimes as well as by free ones; people will flock to cities to seek opportunities conferred by socialist as well as capitalist economies; a profligate and self-serving elite will spring up to seize the benefits supplied by aristocratic or socialist or authoritarian or free-market systems. Show people the road to wealth, status, or power, and they will rush down that road, many will do some rather unattractive things along the way. Among the feasible systems of political economy, capitalism offers the best possibility for checking some, but not all, of these tendencies toward degradation and depravity. When Smith suggested that the increased division of labor would turn most workers into unhappy copies of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, he thought that only public education could provide a remedy. Because he wrote long before the advent of modern technology, he can be forgiven for not having foreseen the tendency of free markets to substitute capital for labor in ways that relieve many workers of precisely those mindlessly repetitive tasks that Smith supposed would destroy the human spirit. Urbanization is the result of modernity - that is, of the weakening of village ties, the advent of large-scale enterprise, the rise of mass markets, and an improvement in transportation - and modernity may have non-capitalist as well as capitalist sources. Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Moscow have long been among the dozen largest cities in the world, but, until quite recently (and still quite uncertainly), none of these was located in a nation that could be fairly described as capitalist. They were state-dominated economies, either socialist or mercantilist, and Smith would have had no use for any of them. And, being non-capitalist, most of these states were barely democratic (the USSR not at all). Lacking either a truly private sector or a truly democratic regime, reformist and meliorist tendencies designed to counteract the adverse consequences of massive urbanization were not much in evidence. Americans who rightly think that high rates of crime are characteristic of big cities, but wrongly suppose that this is especially true of capitalist cities, need to spend some time in Moscow, Rio, and Mexico City. Capitalism creates privilege; socialism creates privilege; mercantilism creates privilege; primitivism creates privilege. Men and women everywhere will seek advantage, grasp power, and create hierarchies. But to the extent that a society is capitalist, it is more likely than its alternatives to sustain challenges to privilege. These arise from economic rivals, privately financed voluntary associations, and democratically elected power-holders; they operate through market competition, government regulation, legal action, and moral suasion. But they operate clumsily and imperfectly, and, in the routine aspects of ordinary morality, they may not operate well enough. Supply-side ethics solves a race to the bottom Bradley 9 – PhD in Political Economy, M.A. in Economics Robert Bradley, PhD in Political Economy, M.A. in Economics, “Capitalism at Work: Business, Government and Energy,” pg. 319 Capitalism at Work has described how Malthusian and neo-Malthusian thinking has repeatedly led to false alarms and promiscuous calls for government energy planning. This book has advanced the thesis that complex regulation in place of simple-rules capitalism disrupts market processes and corrupts busi- ness incentives. What is perhaps more important, Capitalism at Work has argued that free enterprise is a system that is not only superbly wealth creating but also morally superior to coercion-based alternatives. It is ethical because it is based on the self-love of Adam Smith, the self-help of Samuel Smiles, and the rational self-interest of Ayn Rand. Yet far from being atomistic or amoral, capitalism driven by self-interest is an intensely sociable system; its supply-side ethics rewards society's wealth creators, person by person, thus creating goodwill and empowering philanthropy. From the innumerable parts comes a robust civil society, its individuals dually directed, as it were, by the economic invisible hand of markets and the moral invisible hand of human benevolence. In the post-Enron world, capitalism deserves a second look by even its most trenchant and intransigent critics. AT: Cap Bad – Consumption Capitalism’s focus on consumption provides a unique value to life – just because some consumption is excessive doesn’t mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater Saunders 7 – Professor @ AGM Peter, Adjunct Professor at the Australian Graduate School of Management, Why Capitalism is Good for the Soul, http://www.cis.org.au/POLICY/summer%..._summer07.html But recognising that consumption does not always bring contentment does not mean we have to give up on capitalism. Because capitalism constantly encourages innovation, it is inevitable that many of the items brought to market will be trivial or even trashy, but some will make a genuine contribution to human well-being. We cannot know in advance which will be life-enhancing and which will not, but pointing to discarded piles of trashy commodities does not make a compelling case for turning off the growth machine. Moreover, just because a luxury barbecue won’t satisfy the soul doesn’t mean we would be better off without it. Clive assumes consumption prevents the pursuit of genuine happiness, but commercial relationships do not rule out other, more enduring, forms of association, like friendships, family ties, voluntary activity, or religious worship.(18) Of course buying and selling cannot give us everything we need in life, but most people are well aware of this. Hamilton claims that 75% of us think spending time with friends and family will enhance our lives, while fewer than 40% think more money will do the same. It is difficult to see how capitalism can have turned us into consuming automatons when so many of us still assert the importance of non-materialistic values.(19) AT: Cap Bad – Brutish / Selfish Capitalism promotes interpersonal cooperation, not competition -even simple goods like the ipod rely on inter-company cooperation to produce a final product Richards 9 – PhD in Philosophy @ Princeton Jay Richards, PhD with honors in Philosophy and Theology from Princeton, “Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem,” pg. 80-81 It would take pages and pages for me to describe just a tiny part of the iPod. If we traced the antecedents beyond the com- puter and software companies, however, to the delivery com- panies, mines, patent offices, and power plants, you would find hundreds of millions of people working in seemingly unrelated jobs, speaking dozens of languages, all blissfully unaware that they are, in a small way, making the iPod possible. And yet no one is or even could oversee this whole process, not even Apple Inc. As one commentator put it: Apple “may not make the iPod, but they created it. In the end, that’s what really matters.”27 That’s the free market. We hear a lot about the brutish, competitive nature of capitalism, about winners and losers, survival of the fittest, and all that. Some of us may even have downloaded a podcast on the subject right onto our iPods. We hear far too little about the miracles of free cooperation and interdependence that free markets have made possible, that have helped make things like the iPod possible. Whatever the other vices in the market, we should take no critic seriously who does not first recognize this virtue.28 Capitalism leads to altruism – wealth accumulation is key Richards 9 – PhD in Philosophy @ Princeton Jay Richards, PhD with honors in Philosophy and Theology from Princeton, “Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem,” pg. 123-124 To be sure, plenty of capitalism’s champions appeal to greed, even glory in it. But there’s no evidence that capitalist countries in general, or Americans in particular, are greedier than average. In fact, the truth is just the opposite. A recent British study showed that the United States, which has the fourth-freest economy in the world, is the most generous country when it comes to charitable giving. Americans give about 1.67 percent of our GDP to charities, more than twice the second-ranked United Kingdom (0.73 percent) and Canada (0.72 percent). The French came in dead last in the study, giving just 0.14 percent of their GDP to charity. The study also found an inverse correlation between taxation and giving. The more government confiscates, the less people give. Conversely, the freer the economy, the more people give.27 This makes you wonder how much Americans would give if the government took less from us. It’s nice when statistics confirm common sense. A poor population is in no mood to be generous. When you’re starving, you’re desperate. Anyone who visited the Soviet-bloc countries before the collapse of the Soviet Union experienced this firsthand. In such places, only the very virtuous are generous. If you’re rich, on the other hand, it’s easy to be generous, even if you’re morally mediocre. Besides, prosperity gives you something to be generous with. And when the government confiscates your wealth and claims to be using it to help the less fortunate, the situation not only creates resentment; it creates the illusion that you already gave at the office.28 AT: Cap Bad – Root Cause Capitalism is not the root cause of sexism, racism, inequality, environmental destruction, or conflict Levin 98 – President of Yale Richard Levin, president of Yale, 1998, The Minnesota Review, 48-49, http://www.theminnesotareview.org/jo...ns48/levin.htm As a result of this view of the world, many people on the far right and far left are single-causers; they believe not only that everything the demon does has bad effects in our society, but also that everything bad in our society is caused by this demon. Right-wing extremists hold feminism or secular humanism or ZOG responsible for drugs, crime, floridation, and the decline of "family values," and many leftists—including some appearing in mr—claim that capitalism is the cause of racism and sexism (Cotter 119-21, Lewis 97-98, Young 288-91). This, in turn, leads to the belief that there's a single cure, and only this one cure, for all these social ills: the complete extirpation of the demon that causes them and the complete transformation of society. Thus extremists on both sides tend to be all-or-nothingists, to reject all reforms as "band-aids" that are doomed to fail since they don't get at the source of our problems and so won't further this radical transformation (Neilson/Meyerson 45: 268-69). Many are also millenarians who believe the transformation will be brought about by an apocalyptic clash between the forces of good and evil ending in the permanent defeat of the demon and the creation of a utopia(for fundamentalists this is a literal Armageddon and Second Coming, for militias it's RaHoWa (Racial Holy War) or the uprising of true patriots against our traitorous government foretold in The Turner Diaries with its Hitlerian "final solution," and for Marxists it's the proletarian revolution that, their anthem tells us, will be "the final conflict." Another consequence of their polarization is that partisans at both extremes try to eliminate the intermediate positions between them, often by denying their differences. Neilson and Meyerson say that "we should see liberalism and conservatism as flipsides" (45: 269) and argue that Republicans and Democrats are really the same (47: 242), as does Tom Lewis at greater length (89-90). Similarly, George Wallace, in his racist, third-party campaign, insisted that "there isn't a dime's worth of difference between them." More sinister is their tendency to "disappear" these intermediate positions by equating them with the opposite extreme. McCarthy and his followers attacked Democrats and even liberal Republicans as "pinkos" and "fellow travelers," and Marxist regimes condemned social democrats and even communists who deviated from the party line as fascist counterrevolutionaries who must be liquidated. Some extremists on the academic left employ this tactic against moderates and liberals, although with less lethal results. AT: Cap Bad – Terrorism Wealth levels have no effect on terrorism Becker 5 – Professor of Economics Gary, Nobel Laurete and Professor of Economics @ U Chicago, Terrorism and Poverty:Any Connection?, http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/ar...m_and_p_1.html A former president of the World Trade Organization, the current British Chancellor of the Exchequer, the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church, and many others have claimed without citing any evidence a close connection between poverty and terrorism. Poverty may be related to terrorism, but in ways that are far more indirect and weaker than alleged. Any sizeable effect of poverty on terrorism is not apparent from what is generally known about terrorist activities. The suicide bombers in the 9/11 attack were mainly highly educated Saudis, not poor Moslems from other parts of the Middle East, Asia, or Africa. The Basque region of Spain may not have done well economically in recent decades, but the members of its ETA terrorist organization are generally middle class and reasonably well educated. The same goes for the Baader-Meinhof German terrorists, and many other terrorist groups in different nations. Examples such as these can usually be chosen to support a particular position on most issues, so more complete evidence is necessary to draw any conclusions with confidence. Fortunately, a few studies do systematically analyze the relation between poverty and terrorism. Harvard economist Alberto Abadie has recently studied both terrorism within a country and transnational terrorism for almost 200 nations (NBER Working Paper No. 10859). He estimates the poverty-terror relation after controlling for the degree of political freedom, religious and ethnic heterogeneity, and other variables. He finds little net relation between the degree of terrorism and poverty, where poverty is measured by per capita GDP, the degree of inequality within a country, and a couple of other ways. AT: Cap Bad – Resource Wars Resource shortages don’t lead to war Salehyan 8 Idean, Prof. Pol. Sci. @ North Texas, Journal of Peace Research, “From Climate Change to Conflict? No Consensus Yet”, 45:3, Sage A few caveats are in order here. It is important to note, again, that the most severe effects of climate change are likely to be felt in the future, and the future is inherently uncertain.4 While fundamental shifts in the environment are not inconceivable, our best bet for predicting what is to come is to look at what has transpired in the past. Since it is frequently argued that climate change will lead to resource scarcities and exacerbate inequality, it is possible to draw upon past evidence regarding these factors to develop a sense of how conflicts might unfold given changes in the Earth's atmosphere. Additionally, I do not take issue with the claim that climate change will present considerable challenges for human societies and ecosystems more generally. Humanitarian crises stemming, in part, from climate change have the potential to be severe, and steps must be taken quickly to attenuate such contingencies. Rather, my purpose here is to underscore the point that environmental processes, by themselves, cannot explain why, where, and when fighting will occur; rather, the interaction between environmental and political systems is critical for understanding organized armed violence. First, the deterministic view has poor predictive power as to where and when conflicts will break out. For every potential example of an environmental catastrophe or resource shortfall that leads to violence, there are many more counter-examples in which conflict never occurs. But popular accounts typically do not look at the dogs that do not bark. Darfur is frequently cited as a case where desertification led to food scarcity, water scarcity, and famine, in turn leading to civil war and ethnic cleansing.5 Yet, food scarcity and hunger are problems endemic to many countries - particularly in sub-Saharan Africa - but similar problems elsewhere have not led to large-scale violence. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, food shortages and malnutrition affect more than a third of the population in Malawi, Zambia, the Comoros, North Korea, and Tanzania,6 although none of these countries have experienced fullblown civil war and state Ihilure. Hurricanes, coastal flooding, and droughts - which are all likely to intensify as the climate warms are frequent occurrences which rarely lead to violence. The Asian Tsunami of 2004, although caused by an oceanic earthquake, led to severe loss of life and property, flooding, population displacement, and resource scarcity, but it did not trigger new wars in Southeast Asia. Large-scale migration has the potential to provoke conflict in receiving areas (see Rcuveny, 2007; Salehyan & Gleditsch, 2006), yet most migration flows do not lead to conflict, and, in this regard, social integration and citizenship policies are particularly important (Gleditsch, Nordils & Sale}syan, 2007). In short, resource scarcity, natural disasters, and long-term climatic shifts are ubiquitous, while armed conflict is rare; therefore, environmental conditions, by themselves, cannot predict violent outbreaks. Second, even if local skirmishes over access to resources arise, these do not always escalate to open warfare and state collapse. While interpersonal violence is more or less common and may intensify under resource pressures, sustained armed conflict on a massive scale is difficult to conduct. Meier, Bond & Bond (2007) show that, under certain circumstances, environmental conditions have led to cattle raiding among pasroralists in East Africa, but these conflicts rarely escalate to sustained violence. Martin (2005) presents evidence from Ethiopia that, while a large refligee influx and population pressures led to localized conflict over natural resources, effective resource management regimes were able to ameliorate these tensions. Both of these studies emphasize the role of local dispute-resolution regimes and institutions - not just the response of central governments - in preventing resource conflicts from spinning out of control. Martin's analysis also points to the importance of international organizations, notably the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, in implementing effective policies governing refugee camps. Therefore, local hostilities need not escalate to serious armed conflict and can be managed if there is the political will to do so. No resource wars – tons of other root causes Victor 8 David, professor of law at Stanford Law School, the director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Smoke and Mirrors, http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=16530 MY ARGUMENT is that classic resource wars—hot conflicts driven by a struggle to grab resources—are increasingly rare. Even where resources play a role, they are rarely the root cause of bloodshed. Rather, the root cause usually lies in various failures of governance. That argument—in both its classic form and in its more nuanced incarnation—is hardly a straw man, as Thomas Homer-Dixon asserts. Setting aside hyperbole, the punditry increasingly points to resources as a cause of war. And so do social scientists and policy analysts, even with their more nuanced views. I’ve triggered this debate because conventional wisdom puts too much emphasis on resources as a cause of conflict. Getting the story right has big implications for social scientists trying to unravel cause-and-effect and often even larger implications for public policy. No resource conflict Buckland 7 Benjamin, Research Associate @ Centre for Applied Studies in International Negotiations, “A Climate of War? Stopping the Securitisation of Global Climate Change A contribution to contemporary debates”, June, Scholar Since the 1970s there have been calls for a broader security framework encompassing environmental issues. As early as 1971 Richard Falk was talking about possible links between environment and security, although climate change was not yet in the frame. 4 Falk was followed in the 1980s by scholars such as Essam El Hinnawi, who first introduced the term “environmental refugee”, and in 1987 by the landmark Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, the “Brundtland Report”. 5 Again, not mentioning climate change, the Brundtland Report clearly enunciated links between environmental issues and dangers for human security. These studies form a backdrop to the explosion of interest in the links between the environment and violent conflict that occurred at the end of the Cold War in 1989-91. As national security institutions sought a new raison d’être, scholars like Thomas Homer-Dixon and his Toronto School, Paul Erlich, Rob Swart, and Robert Kaplan gained early traction for their ideas about resource scarcity leading to conflict. 6 Often dubbed Neo-Malthusians, due to the intellectual debt owed to the English economist and clergyman Thomas Malthus who, in 1798, argued that exponential population growth combined with linear growth in food output would eventually lead to conflict, war and epidemic, these thinkers moved beyond food scarcity to add a whole host of environmental issues to those linked with conflict. Talking about supply and demand-induced scarcity as well as inequity (so-called structural scarcity), Homer-Dixon and others were quick to identify the links between their earlier work and the new threat of climate change that was beginning to be enunciated by the regular Assessment Reports of the UN’s influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 7 As Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall – two leading proponents of this school of thought – made clear: “Violence and disruption stemming from the stresses created by abrupt changes in the climate pose a different type of threat than we are accustomed to today. Military confrontation may be triggered by a desperate need for natural resources such as energy, food and water.” 8 These warnings were taken up in-turn by governments and other actors, perhaps most notably by the Pentagon in its above mentioned report of 2003, which sketched an apocalyptic scenario of runaway climate change and war. More recently still, the ongoing conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region has been increasingly mentioned as the first of the future climate change wars. First speculated about by Michael Byers and Nick Dragojlovic in a 2004 editorial in the Human Security Bulletin, this idea has frequently popped up in the popular press ever since. 9 Garnering less publicity were early defectors from the climate change and conflict school described above. Most notable is perhaps the State Failure Taskforce, set up in 1994 by the then United States (US) Vice-President Al Gore to look for environmental and political causes of state failure. Against expectations, the Taskforce found no evidence for a link between environmental degradation and violent conflict, conclusions which are cogent with a number of contemporary and more recent studies. A further blow to the environment and conflict link suggested by the Neo-Malthusian thinkers cited above has come in the form of criticism which directly attacks their research design. Perhaps most persuasive among these attacks is the contention that many of the case studies used to support the Neo-Malthusian argument are selected on the dependent variable, that is to say, they treat only cases in which environmental degradation and conflict are both present. Without more comprehensive data, it is argued, their usefulness is reduced to that of well-researched anecdotes – interesting but hardly predictive of conflict elsewhere. 10 The second major criticism is that Neo-Malthusian models of conflict are underspecified. In other words, they offer little indication as to which variables may or may not be important in triggering or prolonging conflict – they are simply too elaborate to do so. 11 Alternative models and schools of thought (such as that elaborated by the State Failure Taskforce above and the systematic 1998 study of Hague and Ellingsen) emphasise the fact that, while there is consensus on several factors causing conflict, there are many others for which direct causal links simply do not exist. 12 With regard to the former category, factors generally agreed to influence the likelihood of intrastate conflict include: levels of economic development, history of conflict and the existence of either ethnic dominance or ethnic polarisation. In the second category, factors that are likely to increase the risk of conflict but that do not act as independent variables are: political instability, the time elapsed since independence, dependency on natural resources, large population size and rough terrain. 13 Turning to interstate conflict, the factors on which there is general consensus include: geographical proximity, non-democratic regimes, relative power and a history of conflict. 14 What is clear from these two sets of variables is that environmental factors are, at best, of secondary importance. 15 Some scholars even go so far as to suggest that resource scarcity may have precisely the opposite effect from that predicted by proponents of Neo-Malthusianism. An example of this is a recent study Aaron T. Wolf which suggests that shared freshwater resources may in fact lead to greater cooperation between riparian states. 16 This conclusion is supported by data from the BAR Project Database which lists 1831 water- related “events” (either conflict or cooperation) between riparian states. Of these, 1228 are examples of cooperation and many of the others are small-scale disputes rather than full-blown armed conflict. While Wolf’s study, and the many criticisms cited above, mean that the expectations of the Neo-Malthusians are largely unsubstantiated, it does not, of course, immediately follow that climate change will not lead to any conflict at all. Indeed, it is quite plausible that some of the more dire climate change scenarios could result in some instances of conflict. 17 As Clionadh Raleigh and Henrik Urdal point out, while it is generally agreed that the resource scarcity and conflict link has been overstated, few would agree that there are no links at all. 18 What is important, and what we argue in this paper, is that claims about climate change leading to conflict are highly speculative. 19 As Raleigh and Urdal again make clear: “There is every reason to be cautious about the links between climate change and conflict. Existing environment and conflict research has simply not produced sufficient evidence to enable us to make anything but highly speculative claims about the effects of climate change and violent conflict”. 20 As we will see in the following sections, it is a dramatic erosion of human security and not the risk of violent conflict that is the real threat of climate change. ***Alternative Debate*** Piecemeal Reform Key Piecemeal reform is the only way to achieve broader social reform Bradley 9 – PhD in Political Economy, M.A. in Economics Robert Bradley, PhD in Political Economy, M.A. in Economics, “Capitalism at Work: Business, Government and Energy,” pg. 103 There are good revolutions and bad ones. There must be continual improvement, or incrementalism, between sea changes. Often, if not quite always, revolution comes by steps, not bounds. Business thinker Jim Collins enriched the Schumpeter-Drucker-Hamel view by noting how good-to-great companies were disciplined change makers whose entrepreneurship was less about revolutionary moments than revolutionary process. In his words: Good-to-great transformations never happened in one fell swoop. There was no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no wrenching revolution. Good to great comes about by a cumulative process—step by step, action by action, decision by decision, turn by turn of the flywheel—that adds up to sustained and spectacular results. Success was “an organic evolutionary process . . . a pattern of buildup leading to breakthrough.” The “doom loop,” noted Collins from his case studies, was “big programs, radical change efforts, dramatic revolutions, chronic restructuring— always looking for a miracle moment or new savior.” Collins saw greatness in disciplined thought and action; failure, in “fads and . . . management hoopla.” There was no silver bullet, no magic, that could substitute for sustained, well- directed effort. Reformism is not a dirty word – action from with-in can be ground-breaking Dixon 1 Summer, Chris, Activist and founding member of Direct Action Network , “Reflections on Privilege, Reformism, and Activism”, Online To bolster his critique of 'reformism,' for instance, he critically cites one of the examples in my essay: demanding authentic we need revolutionary strategy that links diverse, everyday struggles and demands to long-term radical objectives, without sacrificing either. Of course, this isn't to say that every so-called 'progressive' ballot initiative or organizing campaign is necessarily radical or strategic. Reforms are not all created equal. But some can fundamentally shake systems of power, leading to enlarged gains and greater space for further advances. Andre Gorz, in his seminal book Strategy for Labor, refers to these as "non-reformist" or "structural" reforms. He contends, "a struggle for non-reformist reforms--for anti-capitalist reforms--is one which does not base its validity and its right to exist on capitalist needs, criteria, and rationales. A non-reformist reform is determined not in terms of what can be, but what should be." Look to history for examples: the end of slavery, the eight-hour workday, desegregation. All were born from long, hard struggles, and none were endpoints. Yet they all struck at the foundations of power (in these cases, the state, white supremacy, and capitalism), and in the process, they created new prospects for revolutionary change. Now consider contemporary struggles: amnesty for undocumented immigrants, socialized health care, expansive environmental protections, indigenous sovereignty. These and many more are arguably non-reformist reforms as well. None will single-handedly dismantle capitalism or other systems of power, but each has the potential to escalate struggles and sharpen social contradictions. And we shouldn't misinterpret these efforts as simply meliorative incrementalism, making 'adjustments' to a fundamentally flawed system. Anti-Reformism Bad Anti-reformism dooms any movement away from capitalism Burrows 1 Paul Burrows, author and publisher from the SMAC lecture series New Colonist April 2001 http://www.newcolonist.com/altcap.html I think that if we want to build a popular movement, and create an alternative to capitalism, we need to start by asking such questions, and by articulating them in a language that’s real. (Not many people are interested in the subtleties of the “dialectical relationship between base and superstructure.” Get real!) From an organizing perspective alone, we need to recognize that the language we use, the mannerisms, style, and tone we adopt, is at least as important as the substance of our message. We need to have a little humility —we need to be a little less attached to our conclusions, a little more questioning of our assumptions, a little less quick with our judgements and dismissals. Instead of saying everyone else isn’t revolutionary enough (while we sit on our ass waiting for the Revolution; “pure” but alone), we need to look in the bloody mirror. We need to ask ourselves “What are we really doing to create a welcoming movement, a culture of resistance; what are we really doing to foster solidarity; when was the last time I reached out to someone who didn’t already share my politics; when was the last time I actually had an impact on someone?” Instead of saying “those young anarchists don’t know how to build institutions” (and then calling them “reformist” or “parochial” or “bourgeois” when they do), the Old Left needs to recognize that all the same criticisms apply equally to themselves. In addition to saying “talk minus action equals zero,” younger activists need to simultaneously pay more attention to history, theory, and the experiences of veteran activists. Talk minus action is zero, but it’s also true that action minus well-thought-out ideas and principles can be less than zero. It can be damaging to individual people, and it can hinder the growth of a radical movement. Ultimately, we need to be less concerned about the alleged failings and ignorance of others, and more concerned about our own political relevance. The entire Left, progressive, activist community (young and old, socialist or not) needs to build or expand upon its own institutions, and more importantly, the alternatives we create must embody the values we profess to hold. Instead of saying “Anything short of complete ‘Revolution’ is reformist” (and then going home to watch TV), we need to recognize that no revolution begins with the overthrow of the State. The dismantling or seizure of the State is usually a reflection of a deep revolution already occurring at the grassroots, community and workplace level. The Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 didn’t just happen because the Spanish were more “radical” or “committed” than we are. It was the culmination of almost 70 years of organizing, making mistakes, building a popular base. Pre-existing structures and worker organizations made possible a workers’ takeover of much of the Spanish economy (especially in Catalonia). Participation in radical unions, factory committees, and collectives for decades, enabled Spanish workers to develop knowledge of their enterprises, a sense of their own competence, and gave them direct experience with collective organizational principles. The struggle of the Spanish anarchists and communists offers many lessons—not the least of which is that revolution is a long-term agenda. Younger activists especially need to take this seriously, because they tend to think that militancy alone (regardless of popular support) will bring about a fast demise of capitalism. Unrealistic expectations are a fast road to burnout and despair. At the same time, however, observing that the state-capitalist system is powerful, and believing that revolution is a long-term agenda, is not an excuse to stuff our nests, or avoid direct action. As Gramsci pointed out we need to maintain an optimism of will, even if we have a pessimism of mind. In other words, we need to strike a balance between hope and reality—something that is absolutely necessary, if our efforts are to be sustained beyond youthful idealism into the rest of our lives. We need to think hard about the meaning of solidarity. Solidarity is NOT about supporting those who share your precise politics. It’s about supporting those who struggle against injustice—even if their assumptions, methods, politics, and goals differ from our own. Any anarchist who says they won’t support Cuban solidarity efforts, or could care less about the U.S. embargo, because the Cuban revolution is “Statist” and “authoritarian,” is in my opinion, full of ****. (But this doesn’t imply that we should turn a blind eye to human rights violations in Cuba, just because they’re relatively non-existent compared to the rest of Latin America (or Canada for that matter). It doesn’t imply that we should refrain from criticism of Cuba’s economic system from a socialist and working-class perspective, simply because we’re worried about the declining number of post-capitalist experiments to support.) Denouncing interaction with political authority dooms any positve potential of the alternative Grossburg 92 – Professor of COMS @ UNC Lawrence Grossburg, We Gotta Get Outta This Place, 1992, p. 362-364 In their desire to renounce vanguardism, hierarchy and authori¬tarianism, too many intellectuals have also renounced the value of intellectual and political authority. This renunciation of authority is predicated on a theoretical crisis of representation in which the authority of any knowledge is suspect, since all knowledge is historically determined and implicated in hierarchical relations of power. The political reflection of this suspicion is that structures and hierarchy are equated with domination. Intellectuals cannot claim to speak the “truth” of the world, and they cannot speak for or in the name of other people. There are only two strategies available to the critic. First, the ability to describe the reality of people’s experience or position in the world can be given over entirely to the people who are the subjects of the analysis. They are “allowed” to speak for themselves within the intellectual’s discourse. The critic merely inscribes the other’s own sense of their place within and relationship to specific experiences and practices.” Second, the critic analyzes his or her own position self-reflexivly, and its consequences for his or her study (i.e., my history and position have determined the inevitable failure of my authority) but without privileging that posi¬tion. In either case, there is little room for the critic’s own authority. While such a moment of intellectual suspicion is necessary, it goes too far when it assumes that all knowledge claims are unjustified and unjustifiable, leaving the critic to celebrate difference and a radical and pluralist relativism. The fact of contextual determi¬nation does not by itself mean that all knowledge claims are false, nor does it mean that all such claims are equally invalid or useless responses to a particular context. It need not entail relativism. The fact that specific discourses are articulated into relations of power does not mean that these relations are necessary or guaranteed, nor that all knowledges are equally bad—and to be opposed—for even if they are implicated with particular structures of power, there as no reason to assume that all structures of power are equally bad. Such an assumption would entail the futility of political struggle and the end of history. This is the conundrum of the intellectual Left, for you can’t have knowledge without standards and authority. Similarly, although all structures of commonality, norrnality and the sacred may be suspect, social existence itself is impossible without at least the imagination of such possibilities. This “intellectual’s crisis” of representation becomes particularly dangerous when it is projected on everyday life and political struggle, when it is mistakenly identified with a very different crisis of authority. In the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, post-Three Mile Island, post-Challenger, post-Jimmy Bakker world, many if not all of the traditional sources of moral, political and even intellectual authority (including those empowered by the postwar consensus) have col¬lapsed or at least lost a good deal of their aura. There is a deep seated public anxiety that America’s power (moral, political, economic, etc.) is on the wane and that none of the traditional authorities is capable of protecting Americans from the many forces—natural and social—that threaten them. Here we must assent to part of the new conservative argument: Structures of ironic cynicism have become increasingly powerful and do represent a real cultural and political problem. Both ‘crises” involve a struggle to redefine cultural authority. For the former it is a struggle to reestablish the political possibility of theory. For the latter it involves the need to construct politically effective authorities, and to relocate the right of intellectuals to claim such authority without reproducing authoritarian relations. The intellectuals’ crisis is a reflexive and rather self-indulgent struggle against a pessimism which they have largely created for themselves. The conflation of the two glosses over the increasing presence (even as popular figures) of new conservative intellectuals, and the threatening implications of the power of a popular new conservatism. The new conservative alliance has quite intentionally addressed the crisis of authority, often blaming it on the Left’s intellectual crisis of representation (e.g., the attacks on ‘political correctness”), as the occasion for their own efforts to set new authorities in place new positions, new criteria and new statements. Left intellectuals have constructed their own irrelevance, not through their “elitist” language, but through their refusal to find appropriate forms and sites of authority. Authority is not necessarily authoritarian; it need not claim the privilege of an autonomous, sovereign and unified speaking subject. In the face of real historical relations of domination and subordination, political intervention seems to demand, as part of the political responsibility of those empowered to speak, that they speak to—and sometimes for—others. And sometimes that speech must address questions about the relative importance of different struggles and the relative value, even the enabling possibilities of, different structures. Specific Alternative Key Merely criticizing cap is insufficient – the alternative isn’t viable without a specific and workable alternative Grossburg 92 – Professor of COMS @ UNC Lawrence, Communication Studies Professor at UNC, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, pg. 388-389 If it is capitalism that is at stake, our moral opposition to it has to be tempered by the realities of the world and the possibilities of political change. Taking a simple negative relation to it, as if the moral condemn notion of the evil of capitalism are sufficient (granting that it does establish grotesque systems of inequality and oppression) is not likely to establish a viable political agenda. First, it is not at all clear what it would mean to overthrow capitalism in the current situation. Unfortunately, despite our desires, the “masses” are not waiting to be led into revolution, and it is not simply a case of their failure to recognize their own best interests, as if we did. Are we to decide—rather undemocratically, I might add—to overthrow capitalism in spite of their legitimate desires? Second, as much as capitalism is the cause of many of the major threats facing the world, at the moment it may also be one of the few forces of stability, unity and even, within limits, a certain “civility” in the world. The working system is, unfortunately, simply too precarious and the alternative options not all that promising. Finally, the appeal of an as yet unarticulated and even unimagined future, while perhaps powerful as a moral imperative, is simply too weak in the current context to effectively organize people, and too vague to provide any direction. Instead, the Left must think of ways to rearticulate capitalism without either giving up the critique or naively assuming that it can create capitalism with a human heart.” Leaving such images to Hollywood, the Left can organize to change specific axiomatics of capitalism in particular local, regional, national and global contexts. For example, there is good evidence that the ways in which contemporary American corporations have chosen to deal with labor are not necessarily the most effective in terms of capital productivity itself. This does not entail simply championing unions as they have existed, but restructuring unions to meet the new demands of a changing labor force and to work within the new systems of global capitalism. we can recognize and argue that the rich are no longer primarily entrepreneurs being rewarded for taking risks, but managers (CEOs)and financial manipulator, even criminals of various sorts. The expansion of capital as a social utility has given way to its immediate private appropriation. this little reinvestment into capitalism's future. It therefore seems reasonable to limit the ability to privately appropriate wealth In this context we might argue a guaranteed minimum and maximum income, linking such arguments to notions to the value of human life. We might propose to limit investors’ abilities to reap short-term profits by a number of means, including linking executives’ salaries to capital gains and investments rather than profits. Strong-State Bad Socialism fails – history is littered with terrible experiments in strong-state economics Saunders 7 – Professor @ AGM Peter, Adjunct Professor at the Australian Graduate School of Management, Why Capitalism is Good for the Soul, http://www.cis.org.au/POLICY/summer%..._summer07.html The problem for those of us who believe that capitalism offers the best chance we have for leading meaningful and worthwhile lives is that in this debate, the devil has always had the best tunes to play. Capitalism lacks romantic appeal. It does not set the pulse racing in the way that opposing ideologies like socialism, fascism, or environmentalism can. It does not stir the blood, for it identifies no dragons to slay. It offers no grand vision for the future, for in an open market system the future is shaped not by the imposition of utopian blueprints, but by billions of individuals pursuing their own preferences. Capitalism can justifiably boast that it is excellent at delivering the goods, but this fails to impress in countries like Australia that have come to take affluence for granted. It is quite the opposite with socialism. Where capitalism delivers but cannot inspire, socialism inspires despite never having delivered. Socialism’s history is littered with repeated failures and with human misery on a massive scale, yet it still attracts smiles rather than curses from people who never had to live under it.(2) Affluent young Australians who would never dream of patronising an Adolf Hitler bierkeller decked out in swastikas are nevertheless happy to hang out in the Lenin Bar at Sydney’s Circular Quay, sipping chilled vodka cocktails under hammer and sickle flags, indifferent to the twenty million victims of the Soviet regime. Chic westerners are still sporting Che Guevara t-shirts, forty years after the man’s death, and flocking to the cinema to see him on a motor bike, apparently oblivious to their handsome hero’s legacy of firing squads and labour camps.(3) Strong-state alternatives have been tried and failed – every instance has produced destruction on a mass scale Ebeling 93 – Professor of Economics Richard Ebeling, Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics at Hillsdale College, 1993, The Future of Freedom Foundation, The Failure of Socialism and Lessons for America, Part 2, Accessed April 13, 2009, http://www.fff.org/freedom/0493b.asp During the last seventy years, the socialists had their chance to institute their ideal in many countries around the world. And in every case the result has been disastrous. Socialism in practice has produced tyranny, mass murder, poverty, corruption and cultural destruction. The rejection of socialism by the people of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union must be considered the ultimate indictment of the ideology that declared itself to be the liberator of mankind. The socialist ideal contained three ideas at its core: economic central planning; the belief in collective or group rights; and the case for nationalized social services. The application of these three ideas in socialist countries resulted in economic chaos, social conflict and ethnic warfare, and the collapse of all basic services considered essential and desirable for normal and healthy life. Strong state economics ensures totalitarianism and unlimited government coercion Hospers 7 – Professor @ UCS John, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at USC, Libertarianism: A Political Philosophy for Tomorrow, Published Originally in 1971, pg. 249-250 In a free-enterprise society, people who disagree with the government, even those who disagree with the whole system, can still find employment. They can in fact usually earn their living by attacking the existing state of affairs. In a socialist so- ciety, people who disagree with the government can easily be disposed of. In both systems there will always be people who disagree; but with socialism the political leader has the power to shut up the opposition. In Russia what happens is that an economic demand is "created" for a worker in the salt-mines of Siberia. Only in a free-enterprise economy can the individu- al be in a position where his income is independent of the government. In a centrally planned economy, the worker must ultimately lose his freedom to choose his own line of work. For, if no one wants to go to a certain area for a certain type of job and the government determines the wages, the government must force him to go there. It must control the worker along with the work. When we discuss "freedom to choose one's job" we mean freedom in its primary sense, as absence of coercion, not as the power to do something. Someone who wants to be a college professor and isn't, is not necessarily unfree. If nobody is will- ing to buy his services because he is ignorant, he may call him- self "not free to become a professor" but the fact is simply thatothers choose not to avail themselves of his services. He may not get the job he wants, but he is still free because he is uncoecced. But in a socialist system all such choices would be coerced, because of the power of unlimited government. Perhaps the most foolish thing that Marx ever said was that under social- ism the state would eventually wither away. For " ... it is above all under socialism. where the state owns all the means of production, does all the planning and assigns and controls all the jobs, that the state is and must be closest to omnipo- tence .... It is precisely under a socialist state that the least liberty can exist. Under complete socialism, in fact, liberty for the individual is simply impossible. "4 In a free-enterprise economy, of course, all this is different. There, if someone plans to start a business. and his plan is un- wise or short-sighted. he goes bankrupt. No one forces him to start the business, and no one will stop him. Nor can he coerce employees into working for him: he cannot command their services by edict. but only by paying them at least as much as the going wage for the type of work in question. The worker voluntarily chooses to work for him. and consumers voluntari- ly choose to buy his product (if they don't. he goes broke). The manufacturer of the product cannot coerce the consumer. In a free economy, the consumer determines the economic fate of the manufacturer (and with him. his employees). This pro- vides the manufacturer, of course. with a natural motive for providing the best possible product at the lowest possible price, so that his product will outvote that of his competitors in the economic plebiscite of the consumers. Cap Inevitable – Evolutionary Psychology* Human nature prevents alternative solvency Wilkinson 5 – MA in Philosophy Will Wilkinson, MA in Philosophy, former Academic Coordinator of the Social Change Project and the Global Prosperity Initiative at The Mercatus Center at George Mason University, “Capitalism and Human Nature,” 1-2005, http://www.cato.org/research/article...on-050201.html Tragically, human nature isn't at all as advertised, and neither is pine needle tea. According to the U.S. State Department, at least one million North Koreans have died of famine since 1995. Marx's theory of human nature, like Kim Jong Il's theory of pine needle tea, is a biological fantasy, and we have the corpses to prove it. Which may drive us to wonder: if communism is deadly because it is contrary to human nature, does that imply that capitalism, which is contrary to communism, is distinctively compatible with human nature? A growing scientific discipline called evolutionary psychology specializes in uncovering the truth about human nature, and it is already illuminating what we know about the possibilities of human social organization. How natural is capitalism? Evolutionary Psychology 101 Evolutionary psychology seeks to understand the unique nature of the human mind by applying the logic and methods of contemporary evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology. The main working assumption of evolutionary psychology is that the mind is a variegated toolkit of specialized functions (think of a Swiss Army knife) that has evolved through natural selection to solve specific problems faced by our forebears. Distinct mental functions—e.g., perception; reading other people's intentions; responding emotionally to potential mates—are underwritten by different neurological "circuits" or "modules," which can each be conceived as mini computer programs selected under environmental pressure to solve specific problems of survival and reproduction typical in the original setting of human evolution, the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, the "EEA." Strictly speaking, the EEA is a statistical composite of environmental pressures that account for the evolutionary selection of our distinctively human traits. Loosely, the EEA was the period called the Pleistocene during which humans lived as hunter-gatherers from about 1.6 million years ago up until the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. According to evolutionary psychologists, the basic constitution of the human mind hasn't changed appreciably for about 50,000 years. Thus the evolutionary psychologist's slogan: modern skulls house Stone Age minds. As pioneers of evolutionary psychology Leda Cosmides and John Tooby put it: The key to understanding how the modern mind works is to realize that its circuits were not designed to solve the day-to-day problems of a modern American—they were designed to solve the day-to-day problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Understanding the problems faced by members of human hunter-gatherer bands in the EEA can therefore help us to understand a great deal about human nature, and the prospects and pathologies of modern social systems. First, a word of caution: We cannot expect to draw any straightforward positive political lessons from evolutionary psychology. It can tell us something about the kind of society that will tend not to work, and why. But it cannot tell us which of the feasible forms of society we ought to aspire to. We cannot, it turns out, infer the naturalness of capitalism from the manifest failure of communism to accommodate human nature. Nor should we be tempted to infer that natural is better. Foraging half-naked for nuts and berries is natural, while the New York Stock Exchange and open-heart surgery would boggle our ancestors' minds. What evolutionary psychology really helps us to appreciate is just what an unlikely achievement complex, liberal, market-based societies really are. It helps us to get a better grip on why relatively free and fabulously wealthy societies like ours are so rare and, possibly, so fragile. Evolutionary psychology helps us to understand that successful market liberal societies require the cultivation of certain psychological tendencies that are weak in Stone Age minds and the suppression or sublimation of other tendencies that are strong. Free, capitalist societies, where they can be made to work, work with human nature. But it turns out that human nature is not easy material to work with. There is a rapidly expanding library of books that try to spell out the moral, political and economic implications of evolutionary psychology. (The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley, Darwinian Politics by Paul Rubin, and The Company of Strangers by Paul Seabright are good ones). Below is a short tour of just a few features of human nature emphasized by evolutionary psychologists that highlight the challenges of developing and sustaining a modern market liberal order. We are Coalitional The size of hunter-gather bands in the EEA ranged from 25 to about 150 people. The small size of those groups ensured that everyone would know everyone else; that social interactions would be conducted face-to-face; and that reputations for honesty, hard work, and reliability would be common knowledge. Even today, people's address books usually contain no more than 150 names. And military squadrons generally contain about as many people as Pleistocene hunting expeditions. Experiments by psychologists Leda Cosmides and Robert Kurzban have shown that human beings have specialized abilities to track shifting alliances and coalitions, and are eager to define others as inside or outside their own groups. Coalitional categories can easily lead to violence and war between groups. Think of Hutus and Tutsis, Albanians and Serbs, Shiites and Sunnis, Crips and the Bloods, and so on ad nauseam. However, coalitional categories are fairly fluid. Under the right circumstances, we can learn to care more about someone's devotion to the Red Sox or Yankees than their skin color, religion, or social class. We cannot, however, consistently think of ourselves as members only of that one grand coalition: the Brotherhood of Mankind. Our disposition to think in terms of "us" versus "them" is irremediable and it has unavoidable political implications. Populist and racialist political rhetoric encourages people to identify themselves as primarily rich or poor, black or white. It is important to avoid designing institutions, such as racial preference programs, that reinforce coalitional categories that have no basis in biology and may heighten some of the tensions they are meant to relax. A great deal of the animosity toward free trade, to take a different example, depends on economically and morally inappropriate coalitional distinctions between workers in Baltimore (us) and workers in Bangalore (them). Positively, free trade is laudable for the way it encourages us to see to members of unfamiliar groups as partners, not enemies. We are Hierarchical Like many animals and all primates, humans form hierarchies of dominance. It is easy to recognize social hierarchies in modern life. Corporations, government, chess clubs, and churches all have formal hierarchical structures of officers. Informal structures of dominance and status may be the leading cause of tears in junior high students. The dynamics of dominance hierarchies in the EEA was complex. Hierarchies play an important role in guiding collective efforts and distributing scarce resources without having to resort to violence. Daily affairs run more smoothly if everyone knows what is expected of him. However, space at the top of the hierarchy is scarce and a source of conflict and competition. Those who command higher status in social hierarchies have better access to material resources and mating opportunities. Thus, evolution favors the psychology of males and females who are able successfully to compete for positions of dominance. Living at the bottom of the dominance heap is a raw deal, and we are not built to take it lying down. There is evidence that lower status males naturally form coalitions to check the power of more dominant males and to achieve relatively egalitarian distribution of resources. In his book Hierarchy in the Forest, anthropologist Christopher Boehm calls these coalitions against the powerful "reverse dominance hierarchies." Emory professor of economics and law Paul Rubin usefully distinguishes between "productive" and "allocative" hierarchies. Productive hierarchies are those that organize cooperative efforts to achieve otherwise unattainable mutually advantageous gains. Business organizations are a prime example. Allocative hierarchies, on the other hand, exist mainly to transfer resources to the top. Aristocracies and dictatorships are extreme examples. Although the nation-state can perform productive functions, there is the constant risk that it becomes dominated by allocative hierarchies. Rubin warns that our natural wariness of zero-sum allocative hierarchies, which helps us to guard against the concentration of power in too few hands, is often directed at modern positive-sum productive hierarchies, like corporations, thereby threatening the viability of enterprises that tend to make everyone better off. There is no way to stop dominance-seeking behavior. We may hope only to channel it to non-harmful uses. A free society therefore requires that positions of dominance and status be widely available in a multitude of productive hierarchies, and that opportunities for greater status and dominance through predation are limited by the constant vigilance of "the people"—the ultimate reverse dominance hierarchy. A flourishing civil society permits almost everyone to be the leader of something, whether the local Star Trek fan club or the city council, thereby somewhat satisfying the human taste for hierarchical status, but to no one's serious detriment. We are Envious Zero-sum Thinkers Perhaps the most depressing lesson of evolutionary psychology for politics is found in its account of the deep-seated human capacity for envy and, related, of our difficulty in understanding the idea of gains from trade and increases in productivity—the idea of an ever-expanding "pie" of wealth. There is evidence that greater skill and initiative could lead to higher status and bigger shares of resources for an individual in the EEA. But because of the social nature of hunting and gathering, the fact that food spoiled quickly, and the utter absence of privacy, the benefits of individual success in hunting or foraging could not be easily internalized by the individual, and were expected to be shared. The EEA was for the most part a zero-sum world, where increases in total wealth through invention, investment, and extended economic exchange were totally unknown. More for you was less for me. Therefore, if anyone managed to acquire a great deal more than anyone else, that was pretty good evidence that theirs was a stash of ill-gotten gains, acquired by cheating, stealing, raw force, or, at best, sheer luck. Envy of the disproportionately wealthy may have helped to reinforce generally adaptive norms of sharing and to help those of lower status on the dominance hierarchy guard against further predation by those able to amass power. Our zero-sum mentality makes it hard for us to understand how trade and investment can increase the amount of total wealth. We are thus ill-equipped to easily understand our own economic system. These features of human nature—that we are coalitional, hierarchical, and envious zero-sum thinkers—would seem to make liberal capitalism extremely unlikely. And it is. However, the benefits of a liberal market order can be seen in a few further features of the human mind and social organization in the EEA. Property Rights are Natural The problem of distributing scarce resources can be handled in part by implicitly coercive allocative hierarchies. An alternative solution to the problem of distribution is the recognition and enforcement of property rights. Property rights are prefigured in nature by the way animals mark out territories for their exclusive use in foraging, hunting, and mating. Recognition of such rudimentary claims to control and exclude minimizes costly conflict, which by itself provides a strong evolutionary reason to look for innate tendencies to recognize and respect norms of property. New scientific research provides even stronger evidence for the existence of such property "instincts." For example, recent experimental work by Oliver Goodenough, a legal theorist, and Christine Prehn, a neuroscientist, suggests that the human mind evolved specialized modules for making judgments about moral transgressions, and transgressions against property in particular. Evolutionary psychology can help us to understand that property rights are not created simply by strokes of the legislator's pen. Mutually Beneficial Exchange is Natural Trade and mutually beneficial exchange are human universals, as is the division of labor. In their groundbreaking paper, "Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange," Cosmides and Tooby point out that, contrary to widespread belief, hunter-gatherer life is not "a kind of retro-utopia" of "indiscriminate, egalitarian cooperation and sharing." The archeological and ethnographic evidence shows that hunter-gatherers were involved in numerous forms of trade and exchange. Some forms of hunter-gatherer trading can involve quite complex specialization and the interaction of supply and demand. Most impressive, Cosmides and Tooby have shown through a series of experiments that human beings are able easily to solve complex logical puzzles involving reciprocity, the accounting of costs and benefits, and the detection of people who have cheated on agreements. However, we are unable to solve formally identical puzzles that do not deal with questions of social exchange. That, they argue, points to the existence of "functionally specialized, content-dependent cognitive adaptations for social exchange." In other words, the human mind is "built" to trade. Trust and Hayek's Two Orders It is easy to see a kind of in vitro capitalism in the evolved human propensity to recognize property rights, specialize in productive endeavors, and engage in fairly complex forms of social exchange. However, the kind of freedom and wealth we enjoy in the United States remains a chimera to billions. While our evolved capacities are the scaffolding upon which advanced liberal capitalism has been built, they are, quite plainly, not enough, as the hundreds of millions who live on less than a dollar a day can attest. The path from the EEA to laptops and lattes requires a great cultural leap. In recent work, Nobel Prize-winning economists Douglass North and Vernon Smith have stressed that the crucial juncture is the transition from personal to impersonal exchange. Economic life in the EEA was based on repeated face-to-face interactions with well-known members of the community. Agreements were policed mainly by public knowledge of reputation. If you cheated or shirked, your stock of reputation would decline, and so would your prospects. Our evolutionary endowment prepared us to navigate skillfully through that world of personal exchange. However, it did not prepare us to cooperate and trade with total strangers whom we had never met and might never see again. The road to prosperity must cross a chasm of uncertainty and mistrust. The transition to extended, impersonal market order requires the emergence of "institutions that make human beings willing to treat strangers as honorary friends" as Paul Seabright puts it. The exciting story of the way these institutions piggybacked on an evolved psychology designed to solve quite different ecological problems is the topic of Seabright's book, The Company of Strangers, as well as an important part of forthcoming works by Douglass North and Vernon Smith. As he so often did, F. A. Hayek anticipated contemporary trends. Hayek understood that our kind of economy and society, which he called an extended order, or "macro-cosmos," is in many ways alien to our basic psychological constitution, which is geared to deal with life in small groups, the "micro-cosmos." We live in two worlds, the face-to-face world of the tribe, family, school, and firm, and the impersonal, anonymous world of huge cities, hyper-specialization, and trans-world trade. Each world has its own set of rules, and we confuse them at our peril. As Hayek writes in The Fatal Conceit: If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of worlds at once. The balance is delicate. Once we appreciate the improbability and fragility of our wealth and freedom, it becomes clear just how much respect and gratitude we owe to the belief systems, social institutions, and personal virtues that allowed for the emergence of our "wider civilization" and that allow us to move between our two worlds without destroying or crushing either. Evolutionary Psychology and Political Humility The key political lesson of evolutionary psychology is simply that there is a universal human nature. The human mind comprises many distinct, specialized functions, and is not an all-purpose learning machine that can be reformatted at will to realize political dreams. The shape of society is constrained by our evolved nature. Remaking humanity through politics is a biological impossibility on the order of curing cancer with pine needle tea. We can, however, work with human nature—and we have. We have, through culture, enhanced those traits that facilitate trust and cooperation, channeled our coalitional and status-seeking instincts toward productive uses, and built upon our natural suspicion of power to preserve our freedom. We can, of course, do better. As Immanuel Kant famously remarked, "from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made." But, in the words of philosopher, Denis Dutton, It is not . . . that no beautiful carving or piece of furniture can be produced from twisted wood; it is rather that whatever is finally created will only endure if it takes into account the grain, texture, natural joints, knotholes, strengths and weaknesses of the original material. Evolutionary psychology, by helping us better understand human nature, can aid us in cultivating social orders that do not foolishly attempt to cut against the grain of human nature. We can learn how best to work with the material of humanity to encourage and preserve societies, like own, that are not only beautiful, but will endure. Natural survival instinct makes capitalism unovercomable and desirable – sex edited Serwetman 97 – JD Will Serwetman, JD Suffolk Law, http://www.ninjalawyer.com/writing/marx.html Karl Marx's work laid the foundation for the theories that redefined the left in the nineteenth century. He analyzed capitalism and concluded that while it was productive, the forces that drove it would lead to its inevitable collapse and replacement wi th communism. While Marx gave the world a great deal to think about and has influenced billions, his theories are inherently flawed. Some of the details have been addressed by modern Communists and Socialists, but the basic underlying assumptions of his work, when subjected to scrutiny, seem to conflict with reality. These assumptions lead me to question his conclusions regarding the forces that drive history, the self-consuming nature of capitalist society, and the viability of a communist society. Marx's first set of assumptions regards the nature of [hu]man[s]. He bases his materialist conception of human nature on that of B. Ludwig Fuerbach. Both men believed that a [hu]man[s are] is a product of his society. Every individual's beliefs, attitudes, and ideas a re absorbed at an early age by exposure to those of the world around him. This argument makes some sense but it ignores two things: the infinite and contradictory variety of experiences any society will produce and the evidence that [h]man's behavior will always be guided by certain instincts. Jeffery Dahmer and Martin Luther King were products of the same society. At some age, humans acquire the ability to learn and make their own decisions. At this point, we are free and can develop any way we choose. In a single day, a human being has bi llions of experiences, and he will learn from many of them. Man not only chooses which experiences to learn from, but what he learns. Which experiences influences us most and the degree of their influence is dependent upon our choices. Those choices are the only thing that separates the Dahmers and Martin Luther Kings of the world. However far into the childhood or the womb you take back our chain of experiences, there must be a starting point. That starting point is our subconscious and our base instincts. Man is a product of evolution. When Marx argued that there is no single nature of man because we're simply products of our society, he seemed to be overlooking the forces that made man what he is today. All living organisms possess a survival instinct, without which life could not exist. Humans are no exception; without a survival instinct there would be nothing to prevent us from starving ourselves out of negligence, hurling ourselves off of cliffs, or committing suicide when we're upset, any of whi ch would make the continuation of our species impossible. When we face danger or discomfort, human beings respond at a very basic level. Fear and desire are perfectly natural to us. We are separated from other living things, though, by our ability to reason. Nietzsche's most sensible argument was that conscious thought coupled with our survival instinct generates what he called a "will to power." "Will to power" is the application of conscious thought to our survival instinct. It allows us to formulate strategies for survival and act upon them. No theory of human nature is plausible unless it has definitive survival value, and it cannot be inhe rent to man unless it's in our genes. If it's not known to be in our DNA, we can't prove that it exists in all men. Survival instinct and conscious thought can be proven, so the existence of a will to power is hard to ignore. Even Marx acknowledges the human will in "Alienated Labor," although it plays no role in his theory. It is possible that there are other elements of human nature, not accounted for by the will to power, that we have not yet found in our DNA. Looking at human history, we can empirically observe a sense of compassion in men that helps us build the great societies that we have. By compassion, I refer to our general distaste for watching other human beings suffer--those that enjoy suffering cannot function in society, and so do not reproduce as often. Natural selection weeds out people who cannot live wit h others. Marx believed that man could acquire compassion and genuine concern for his comrades simply by making it important in post-capitalist society. This would not only take generations to instill in society, but it there is no reason to believe tha t any given individual would embrace it. Because Marx's materialist view on humanity does not acknowledge our nature, his ideal reflects the same mistakes. If human nature can be changed, as he feels it can simply by changing our society that we live in, why should we live with the inequities of capitalism? The problem is that his assumptions are backed by no credible arguments. If one accepts the materialist conception of the world at face value, then most of what Marx wrote will be consistent. If one disagrees with the way Marx sees manki nd, however, and takes a more Nietzschean view, the Marxist ideal is a prescription for disaster. Due to our naturally distrustful, greedy, and ambitious natures, which precede capitalism, humans will not motivate themselves to do anything unless there is a reward. Their survival instinct won't let them. Competition isn't just good for men--it's necessary. If there were no competition for the things we need, we would just take them and copulate and nothing else. While the species might survive, it would not progress, and we can live better. Competing for resources forces us to establish our identities and do more than just sit there and exist. Our will to power drives us to accumulate food, money, and control in order to maximize our chances of survival and reproduction. As long as our nature remains unchangeable, We will never be able to adjust to life in a Marxist society. Marx's economic theory is flawed as well, since it ignores the role of individuals and looks only at groups. The genius of a few individuals is all that has kept mankind raised from the life in nature that Hobbes called "brutish, nasty and short." The individuals responsible for these achievements were generally not rewarded until the advent of capitalism and is industrial revolution, which has increased our rates of progress exponentially. If these few contributors weren't punished for their differences , they spent their lives working humbly under the "patronage" of feudal lords. Capitalism encourages individuals to make their contributions and spread them throughout the world, raising all of mankind higher and higher from our natural, animal-lik e existence. Capitalism is human nature -alternative doesn’t solve / is a utopian but futile attempt -self-interest manifests more harm in alternatives to capitalism Hunter 11 – Professor of Humanities @ St. Petersburg Mark Hunter, Professor of Humanities @ St. Petersburg, “To Attack Capitalism Is To Attack Human Nature,” 6-21-2011, Real Clear Markets, http://www.realclearmarkets.com/arti...ure_99087.html Never letting a crisis go to waste has become a progressive credo for transformative change. While one hand fans the fires, the other provides momentum for change heretofore unfathomable. The current economic maelstrom has provided the opportunistic left with the perfect excuse to pin blame for our economic problems on the inherent flaws of capitalism. Enter Humanities professor Eugene McCarraher and his tendentious article The End of Capitalism and the Wellsprings of Radical Hope where he declares ex cathedra the need to destroy capitalism in favor of a yet another ill-defined progressive utopia. McCarraher rolls out the usual leftist arguments mischaracterizing capitalism followed by vague references to ideals and lofty goals. In the end, the reader is left with elusive platitudes without any clear understanding of what exactly McCarraher is proposing, other than more government control and the ever-popular hope. Not to disappoint, McCarraher presents his opening salvo against capitalism with the de rigueur reference to Marx, which serves as a reminder that although Marxism has been thoroughly discredited in practice it still thrives in the rarified academic ranks of the left. McCarraher's argument against capitalism is that it is "unjust as a political economy and rapacious in its relationship to the natural world." And, of course, no progressive critique of capitalism would be complete without the obligatory indictment of how capitalism "compels us to be greedy, callous and petty." McCarraher's denunciation of capitalism is in fact an attack on human nature disguised as political discourse. The "pernicious" traits he attributes to capitalism are, in fact, traits globally present in every political/social order-in many cases far worse in non-capitalistic societies-because they are traits of humanity itself. His entire argument against capitalism consists of nothing more than an elaborate correlation-proves-causation fallacy (*** hoc ergo propter hoc - "with this, therefore because of this"). He wants us to believe that since capitalism contains greed it causes greed. Furthermore, McCarraher seems content to overlook the fact that capitalism is an organic economic system not created as much as evolving naturally as a consequence of free individuals interacting with other free individuals. Private property and the production of goods may be a part of capitalism, but its most essential virtue is as a guardian of man's freedom. Criticizing capitalism for its avarice is not unlike condemning representative democracy for its failure to elect the wisest of men - each may occur, but it is not relevant to their fundamental purpose. Both capitalism and representative democracy maximize freedom by diffusing power and responsibility across the broadest spectrum of society. Rigid control is antithetical to freedom and it is this that most vexes the liberal intellectual. What McCarraher is unwilling to come to terms with is that his inherent criticism of capitalism is not so much an indictment of capitalism but rather a revealing supposition he is making about humanity itself. His attack on capitalism masks a general contempt for a free people who in his worldview will inevitably choose a path of greed and avarice unless a coercive political order prevents it. Therefore, any liberal political/economic system proposed to replace capitalism must have at its core a process through which the masses are controlled and coerced to overcome the human attributes so abhorred by the liberal intellectual that he wrongly attributes to capitalism rather than people. McCarraher presents the reader with a moral crusade cleverly cloaked as political theory. He sees the Deadly Sins ever present in modern capitalism, and like the fourth century ascetic Evagrius Ponticus, McCarraher seems particularly obsessed with man's rapacious gluttony. While capitalism's natural and organic nature is condemned for its "deliberate nurturance of our vilest qualities" he fails to put forth the ramifications of the artificial and contrived alternative. The progressive alternative to capitalism must of necessity resemble Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor because the crux of the matter for both modern liberals and Dostoyevsky is human freedom. The infinite variety that is millions of people making millions of decisions to reflect their own self interest needs to be replaced with a 21st century Ubermensch or new political aristocracy that is able to impose on the masses a sin-free, enlightened order. Redemption comes through man's inability to choose the indulgence of sin, and as such the anointed elite - having removed man's freedom - become the deliverers of man's salvation by taking upon themselves the burden of choice. Mankind, now being absolved of the burden of freedom, can live content without the anxiety of responsibility. However beautiful the veneer of his lofty rhetoric, this "Wellspring" is in the end enslavement. The only way to deliver mankind from the demon Mammon will be by removing the greatest gift of the gods - freedom. In this Faustian exchange we are guaranteed the Marxist security of bread, authoritarian certainty of order and utopian unity of world government. Far from new, McCarraher's Wellspring of Radical Hope is one more self-righteous proclamation by a moral prig intent on delivering mankind to elusive Olympian heights. Beyond the rhetoric, one suspects this experiment would end as other such utopian pursuits have concluded in history - hopeless. Self-interest is human nature Richards 9 – PhD in Philosophy @ Princeton Jay Richards, PhD with honors in Philosophy and Theology from Princeton, “Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem,” pg. 122-123 So capitalism doesn’t need greed. At the same time, it can channel greed, which is all to the good. We should want a social order that channels proper self-interest as well as selfishness into socially desirable outcomes. Any system that requires everyone always to act selflessly is doomed to failure because it’s utopian. People aren’t like that. That’s the problem with socialism: it doesn’t fit the human condition. It alienates people from their rightful self-interest and channels selfishness into socially destructive behavior like stealing, hoarding, and getting the government to steal for you. Cap Inevitable – Defense of Evo Psych Evolutionary psychology is the only field of science that’s demographically inclusive Pinker 2 – PhD from Harvard Steven, PhD from Harvard in experimental psychology, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p. 342-343 To begin with, research on the biological basis of sex differences has been led by women. Because it is so often said that this research is a plot to keep women down, I will have to name names. Researchers on the biology of sex differences include the neuroscientists Raquel Gur, Melissa Hines, Doreen Kimura, Jerre Levy, Martha McClintock, Sally Shaywitz, and Sandra Witelson and the psychologists Camilla Benbow, Linda Gottfredson, Diane Halpern, Ju¬dith Kleinfeld, and Diane McGuinness. Sociobiology and evolutionary psy¬chology, sometimes stereotyped as a "sexist discipline," is perhaps the most bi-gendered academic field I am familiar with. Its major figures include Laura Betzig, Elizabeth Cashdan, Leda Cosmides, Helena Cronin, Mildred Dicke-man, Helen Fisher, Patricia Gowaty, Kristen Hawkes, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mag¬dalena Hurtado, Bobbie Low, Linda Mealey, Felicia Pratto, Marnie Rice, Catherine Salmon, Joan Silk, Meredith Small, Barbara Smuts, Nancy Wilmsen Thornhill, and Margo Wilson. It is not just gender feminism's collision with science that repels many feminists. Like other inbred ideologies, it has produced strange excrescences, like the offshoot known as difference feminism. Carol Gilligan has become a gender-feminist icon because of her claim that men and women guide their moral reasoning by different principles: men think about rights and justice; women have feelings of compassion, nurturing, and peaceful accommoda¬tion." If true, it would disqualify women from becoming constitutional lawyers, Supreme Court justices, and moral philosophers, who make their liv¬ing by reasoning about rights and justice. But it is not true. Many studies have tested Gilligan's hypothesis and found that men and women differ little or not at all in their moral reasoning.14 So difference feminism offers women the worst of both worlds: invidious claims without scientific support. Similarly, the gender-feminist classic called Women's Ways of Knowing claims that the sexes differ in their styles of reasoning. Men value excellence and mastery in intellectual matters and skeptically evaluate arguments in terms of logic and evidence; women are spiritual, relational, inclusive, and credulous.15 With sisters like these, who needs male chauvinists? Gender feminism's disdain for analytical rigor and classical liberal princi¬ples has recently been excoriated by equity feminists, among them Jean Bethke Elshtain, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Wendy Kaminer, Noretta Koertge, Donna Laframboise, Mary Lefkowitz, Wendy McElroy, Camille Paglia, Daphne Patai, ******ia Postrel, Alice Rossi, Sally Satel, Christina Hoff Sommers, Nadine Strossen, Joan Kennedy Taylor, and Cathy Young.' Well before them, promi¬nent women writers demurred from gender-feminist ideology, including Joan Didion, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Cynthia Ozick, and Susan Sontag.'7 And ominously for the movement, a younger generation has rejected the gender feminists' claims that love, beauty, flirtation, erotica, art, and heterosexuality are pernicious social constructs. The title of the book The New Victorians: A Young Woman's Challenge to the Old Feminist Order captures the revolt of such writers as Rene Denfeld, Karen Lehrman, Katie Roiphe, and Rebecca Walker, and of the movements called Third Wave, Riot Grrrl Movement, Pro-Sex Fem¬inism, Lipstick Lesbians, Girl Power, and Feminists for Free Expression.16 The difference between gender feminism and equity feminism accounts for the oft-reported paradox that most women do not consider themselves feminists (about 70 percent in 1997, up from about 60 percent a decade be¬fore), yet they agree with every major feminist position." The explanation is simple: the word "feminist" is often associated with gender feminism, but the positions in the polls are those of equity feminism. Faced with these signs of slipping support, gender feminists have tried to stipulate that only they can be considered the true advocates of women's rights. For example, in 1992 Gloria Steinem said of Paglia, "Her calling herself a feminist is sort of like a Nazi say¬ing they're not anti-Semitic."' And they have invented a lexicon of epithets for what in any other area would be called disagreement: "backlash," "not getting it," "silencing women," "intellectual harassment."21 All this is an essential background to the discussions to come. To say that women and men do not have interchangeable minds, that people have desires other than power, and that motives belong to individual people and not just to entire genders is not to attack feminism or to compromise the interests of women, despite the misconception that gender feminism speaks in their name. All the arguments in the remainder of this chapter have been advanced most forcefully by women. Cap Inevitable / Alternative Suffering A centrally planned economy is impossible – leaders won’t try it, if they do the result is mass suffering Richards 9 – PhD in Philosophy @ Princeton Jay Richards, PhD with honors in Philosophy and Theology from Princeton, “Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem,” pg. 76-77 At the same time, the hunch that some sort of oversight is required to make a market work is on target. Free trade isn’t anarchy. It requires a rule of law that makes sure one person doesn’t steal from another person or force the other person into an un- willing exchange (merely a more sophisticated form of theft). But that doesn’t mean the government should control the market. Think of the trading game again. What if, instead of the students getting to trade freely, the teacher dictated or tried to guess which toy each of her twenty-five students preferred? What are the chances that the students would end up with toys they liked just as much as the toys they got by trading freely? Near zero. What if the teacher was a substitute teacher who had never met the class before? Nearer zero. Now multiply the problem by a few bazillion, and you have some sense of the problem confronting anyone who wants to centrally plan an economy, as the Socialists did. To plan a whole economy, you have to set prices and production quotas for all the goods and services it contains. Do this even a little wrong, and there will be all sorts of wasteful surpluses and shortages in the market. But nobody has ever succeeded in planning a whole economy of any size and gotten it just a little wrong. Either they quickly backed away from the attempt to plan the entire economy, or else they created widespread famine and death, as Lenin and Mao Tse-tung discovered. Why did they fail? It’s not because these men were stupid. It’s because they didn’t know it all. That’s pretty much what it would it take. The successful master controller would need to know the economic value not just of every product in the market. He would need to know the economic value of every individual thing in the market at any given time and place, since the value of things can change drastically depending on the situation. Remember, the value of a good is equal to the wealth and opportunity someone is willing to give up to obtain it at a specific moment. Such assessments vary from person to person and vary even for the same person in different circumstances and at different times. No one has access to all of that information.23 The issue is not just the sheer number of choices. If this were only a math problem, someday a bigger, faster computer might solve it. The problem is knowledge. No one has access to all the constantly changing judgments of the billions of agents involved even in small economies. The conclusion is inescapable: central economic planning is impossible—full stop. |
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Sardon
Deus Vult
Join Date: Oct 2014
Location: Le Canada
Posts: 3,811
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Last edited by Colin; 07-04-2015 at 06:51 AM.
Reason: your spoiler tagged messed up and the quote was way too long
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Zetectic
Bloodvayne
Join Date: Nov 2012
Posts: 4,087
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Graal hundred years' war
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41
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twilit
michael
Join Date: May 2012
Location: Hyrule
Posts: 3,511
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42
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SouthernZombie*
0.0
Join Date: May 2015
Location: Destiny
Posts: 1,235
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07-05-2015
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43
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Sardon
Deus Vult
Join Date: Oct 2014
Location: Le Canada
Posts: 3,811
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Still didnt get enough reasons.
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07-05-2015
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44
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Andre'
Peggz the gif master
Join Date: Nov 2013
Location: Canada
Posts: 76
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Imo, Graal is just a self-centered game where nobody thinks about eachother. Honestly admit it, the only people that care about eachother are the queefs that are dating one-another. But then you run in to certain players that actually do care, but you know, we get over powered by the American players that for some odd reason have sudden hate for their moose-riding, syrup harvesting, french speaking neighbors. |
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07-05-2015
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45
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Ivy
Earning Unix dem stacks
Join Date: Apr 2013
Location: In a fox hole somewhere
Posts: 7,391
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I didn't think there were people who hated Canadians 0_o aren't they stereotyped to be nice people?
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