Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Lacy/Symonds/Bowen Coercion K
Coercion K (1/2)
Coercion K (1/2).............................................................................................................................................................1
Shell 1/2..........................................................................................................................................................................3
Shell 2/2..........................................................................................................................................................................4
Environment Links (1/5).................................................................................................................................................5
Environment Links (2/5).................................................................................................................................................6
Environment Links (3/5).................................................................................................................................................7
Environment Links (4/5).................................................................................................................................................8
Environment Links (5/5).................................................................................................................................................9
Environment Incentives Links (1/2).............................................................................................................................10
Environment Incentives Links (2/2).............................................................................................................................12
Global Warming Links (1/3).........................................................................................................................................13
Global Warming Links (2/3).........................................................................................................................................14
Global Warming Link (3/3)...........................................................................................................................................15
Taxation Links (1/4)......................................................................................................................................................16
Taxation Links (2/4)......................................................................................................................................................17
Taxation Links (3/4)......................................................................................................................................................18
Taxation Links (4/4)......................................................................................................................................................19
XT- Taxation is Theft....................................................................................................................................................20
XT- Taxation is Theft....................................................................................................................................................21
XT- Taxation is Theft....................................................................................................................................................22
IL Magnifier- Slippery Slope........................................................................................................................................23
Impact- Rights Violations- Extinction..........................................................................................................................24
Rights Violations O/W Extinction.................................................................................................................................25
Impact- Taxation- War...................................................................................................................................................26
Impact- Taxation- War..................................................................................................................................................27
Reject Coercion- All Instances......................................................................................................................................28
Reject Coercion- All Instances......................................................................................................................................29
Reject Coercion- Key to Ethics.....................................................................................................................................30
Reject Taxation- Immoral..............................................................................................................................................31
Reject Taxation- Immoral..............................................................................................................................................32
Reject Taxation- Immoral..............................................................................................................................................33
Reject Taxation- Immoral..............................................................................................................................................34
Ethics First....................................................................................................................................................................35
Turns Case- Regulations...............................................................................................................................................36
A2- Case Outweighs.....................................................................................................................................................37
A2- Warming Outweighs..............................................................................................................................................38
A2- Warming Outweighs..............................................................................................................................................39
Solves Warming............................................................................................................................................................40
A2- Permutation............................................................................................................................................................41
A2- Permutation............................................................................................................................................................42
***Aff Answers***......................................................................................................................................................43
Perm Solvency..............................................................................................................................................................44
Environmental Coercion Key (1/3)...............................................................................................................................45
Environmental Coercion Key (2/3)...............................................................................................................................46
Environmental Coercion Key (3/3)...............................................................................................................................47
Environmental Regulations Ethical (1/1)......................................................................................................................48
Environmental Regulations Solve Coercion (1/1).......................................................................................................49
Environmental Destruction Undermines Rights...........................................................................................................50
Environmental Destruction Undermines Rights...........................................................................................................51
A2: Taxes Are Theft......................................................................................................................................................52
Taxes Key to the Right to Private Property...................................................................................................................53
A2: Private Property is Key to Individual Awareness...................................................................................................54
State Action Key to Freedom........................................................................................................................................55
A2: State Intervention Bad............................................................................................................................................56
Libertarianism Increases Suffering...............................................................................................................................57
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Lacy/Symonds/Bowen Coercion K
Libertarianism Causes Genocide..................................................................................................................................58
Libertarianism Decreases Freedom...............................................................................................................................59
Libertarianism Ignores Consequences..........................................................................................................................60
Libertarianism Wrong – Positive Rights.......................................................................................................................61
A2: Libertarianism Creates Social Equality..................................................................................................................62
Libertarianism Results in No Government...................................................................................................................63
Top-Down Libertarian Revolution Fails.......................................................................................................................64
A2: Freedom Based Rights- Free Will is Never Lost...................................................................................................65
A2: Freedom Outweighs All.........................................................................................................................................66
A2: Negative Freedom Based Rights- Circular Logic Fails.........................................................................................67
A2: Negative Freedom based rights- Rothbard Flawed................................................................................................68
A2: Negative Freedom based rights- Hegel Flawed.....................................................................................................69
A2: Negative Freedom based rights- Fichte Flawed.....................................................................................................70
Negative Freedom Bad – Reduces Freedom/Equality..................................................................................................71
Negative Rights Flawed................................................................................................................................................72
Negative Rights Flawed................................................................................................................................................73
A2: Moral Imperative Comes First...............................................................................................................................74
A2: Must Reject Coercion in Every Instance................................................................................................................75
A2: Weigh Coercion First- Consequentialist Framework Key.....................................................................................76
A2: We Are “Libertarian Consequentialists” ...............................................................................................................77
A2: Libertarianism is Consistent With Consequentialism............................................................................................78
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2008 3
Lacy/Symonds/Bowen Coercion K
Shell 1/2
Environmentalism lends itself to the widespread expansion of governmental influence and
authority at the expense of liberty
George Reisman, Ph.D. is Professor of Economics at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and
Management, 2001, Excerpt of a speech delivered at the Austrian Scholars Conference,
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?control=661&id=71
The same intellectual quarter that a generation or more ago urged the totalitarian control of all aspects of human life for the purpose
of bringing order to what would otherwise allegedly be chaos, now urges a policy of laissez-faire—out of respect for natural harmonies. Of course, it is not a policy of
laissez-faire toward human beings, who are to be as tightly controlled as ever. Nor, of course, is it a policy that recognizes any form of economic harmonies among human beings. No, it is a
toward nature in the raw; the alleged harmonies that are to be respected are those of so-called eco-
policy of laissez-faire
systems. But while the intellectuals have turned against reason, science, and technology, they continue to support
socialism and, of course, to oppose capitalism. They now do so in the form of environmentalism. It should be realized that environmentalism’s
goal of global limits on carbon dioxide and other chemical emissions, as called for in the Kyoto treaty, easily lends itself to the
establishment of world-wide central planning with respect to a wide variety of essential means of production. Indeed,
an explicit bridge between socialism and environmentalism is supplied by one of the most prominent theorists of the environmental movement, Barry Commoner, who was also the Green Party’s
first candidate for President of the United States. The bridge is in the form of an attempted ecological validation of one of the very first notions of Karl Marx to be discredited—namely, Marx’s
prediction of the progressive impoverishment of the wage earners under capitalism. Commoner attempts to salvage this notion by arguing that what has prevented Marx’s prediction from coming
true, until now, is only that capitalism has temporarily been able to exploit the environment. But this process must now come to an end, and, as a result, the allegedly inherent conflict between the
capitalists and the workers will emerge in full force. (For anyone interested, I quote Commoner at length in Capitalism.) Concerning the essential similarity between environmentalism and
socialism, I wrote: The only difference I can see between the green movement of the environmentalists and the old red
movement of the Communists and socialists is the superficial one of the specific reasons for which they want to violate
individual liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The Reds claimed that the individual could not be left free because the result
would be such things as "exploitation," "monopoly," and depressions. The Greens claim that the individual cannot be left free
because the result will be such things as destruction of the ozone layer, acid rain, and global warming. Both claim that centralized
government control over economic activity is essential. The Reds wanted it for the alleged sake of achieving human prosperity. The Greens want it for the
alleged sake of avoiding environmental damage . . . [And in the end,] [b]oth the Reds and the Greens want someone to suffer and die; the one,
the capitalists and the rich, for the alleged sake of the wage earners and the poor; the other, a major portion of all
mankind, for the alleged sake of the lower animals and inanimate nature (Ibid., p. 102). If the world’s intellectuals had been open to the
possibility that they had been wrong about the nature of capitalism and socialism—profoundly, devastatingly wrong—and taken the trouble to read and understand the works of von Mises in
order to learn how and why they had been wrong, socialism would have died once and for all with the Soviet Union, and the whole world would now be moving toward laissez-faire capitalism
intellectuals have chosen to foist the doctrine of environmentalism on the
and unprecedented economic progress and prosperity. Instead, the
world, as a last-ditch effort to destroy capitalism and save socialism.
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Lacy/Symonds/Bowen Coercion K
Shell 2/2
Federal regulations make us slaves to the state
Feser, Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University, 2000
(Edward, “Taxation, Forced Labor, and Theft,” The Independent Review, Volume: 5, Fall, 221-22)
It is important to understand how this argument differs from other libertarian arguments against
taxation. It is not quite the same as the general claim that taxation interferes with individual liberty
insofar as its enforcement is intrusive and it prevents one from doing what he wants with a portion of
his income,2 for there are many who would find such infringements of liberty acceptable but
nevertheless consider uncomfortable the notion that taxation also amounts to forcing people to work.
The argument also differs from the objection that taxation amounts to theft in that forcing someone to labor
and stealing from him are different offenses (although, if we take the former to involve specifically the
stealing of labor, the difference between the objections may be one only of generality). Nonetheless, it is
sometimes suggested that Nozick’s argument is essentially concerned with the violation of property rights
or with theft, rather than with forced labor in that Nozick presupposes that one has a property right in
the portion of one’s earnings the state takes in taxes, a right his critics claim he fails to establish
(Kymlicka 1990, 107–18; Michael 1997, 141; Weinberg 1997, 336; Otsuka 1998, 71).3 Nozick’s argument,
as stated previously, nowhere explicitly appeals to any claim about property rights, and it is by no means
obvious that an argument objecting to some practice on the grounds that it amounts to forced labor needs
even implicitly to do so. Clearly, I might still be forced to labor for someone else if I labor at all, even if I
have no property right in the product of the labor: a slave may own no part of his master’s land or
tools, and thus arguably he cannot own whatever he produced using them— vegetables, say—but he is
nevertheless a slave, even if he is allowed to eat some of the vegetables and thus labors partly for
himself. The master might even allow him to idle away the days if he likes, but insist that if he labors to
any extent, some of his labor must be for the sake of the master: if the slave grows tomatoes because he
wants them, the master will take a portion of them; if he tries to grow only one tomato for himself, the
master will nevertheless take a third of it; if to avoid giving the master that third he tries somehow to
grow only two-thirds of a tomato, the master will take a third of that tomato; and so forth. Insofar as
the master “taxes” away a portion of the product of his labor, the slave has obviously been forced to
work for purposes other than his own, even though he has no property right in the product of his labor
(the portion of it he is allowed to eat also belongs to the master).
These doctrines are intellectual toxins because they constitute a systematic attack on one or more major aspects of the
requirements of human life and well-being. Marxism results in the kind of disastrous conditions now prevailing in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. All the
varieties of collectivism deny the free will and rationality of the individual and attribute his [or her] ideas, character,
and vital interests to his membership in a collective: namely, his membership in an economic class, racial group, nationality, or sex, as the case may be, depending on the specific
variety of collectivism. Because they view ideas as determined by group membership, these doctrines deny the very possibility of knowledge. Their effect is the creation of
conflict between members of different groups: for example, between businessmen [or women] and wage earners,
blacks and whites, English speakers and French speakers, men and women.
Determinism, the doctrine that man's actions are controlled by forces beyond his power of choice, and existentialism, the philosophy that man is trapped in a "human condition" of inescapable
misery, lead people not to make choices they could have made and which would have improved their lives. Cultural relativism denies the objective value of modern civilization and thus
undercuts both people's valuation of modern civilization and their willingness to work hard to achieve personal values in the context of it. The doctrine blinds people to the objective value of such
marvelous advances as automobiles and electric light, and thus prepares the ground for the sacrifice of modern civilization to such nebulous and, by comparison, utterly trivial values as
"unpolluted air."
Logical positivism denies the possibility of knowing anything with certainty about the real world. Linguistic analysis regards the search for truth as a trivial word game. Behaviorism denies the
existence of consciousness. Freudianism regards the conscious mind (the "Ego") as surrounded by the warring forces of the unconscious mind in the form of the "Id" and the "Superego," and thus
as being incapable of exercising substantial influence on the individual's behavior. Keynesianism regards wars, earthquakes, and pyramid building as sources of prosperity. It looks to peacetime
government budget deficits and inflation of the money supply as a good substitute for these allegedly beneficial phenomena. Its effects, as the present-day economy of the United States bears
witness, are the erosion of the buying power of money, of credit, of saving and capital accumulation, and of the general standard of living.
These intellectual toxins can be seen bobbing up and down in the "intellectual mainstream," just as raw sewage can
be seen floating in a dirty river. Indeed, they fill the intellectual mainstream. Virtually, every college and university in the Western world is a philosophical cesspool of these
doctrines, in which intellectually helpless students are immersed for several years and then turned loose to contaminate the rest of society. These irrationalist doctrines, and others like them, are
the philosophical substance of contemporary liberal arts education.
the most urgent task confronting the Western world, and the new intellectuals who must lead it, is a
Clearly,
philosophical and intellectual cleanup. Without it, Western civilization simply cannot survive. It will be
killed by the poison of environmentalism.
To accomplish this cleanup, only the most powerful, industrial-strength, philosophical and intellectual cleansing agents will do. These cleansing agents are, above all, the writings of Ayn Rand
and Ludwig von Mises. These two towering intellects are, respectively, the leading advocates of reason and capitalism in the twentieth century. A philosophical-intellectual cleanup requires that
all or most of their writings be introduced into colleges and universities as an essential part of the core curriculum, and that what is not included in the core curriculum be included in the more
advanced programs. The incorporation of the writings of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises into a prominent place in the educational curriculum is the central goal that everyone should work for
who is concerned about his cultural environment and the impact of that environment on his life and well-being. Only after this goal is accomplished, will there be any possibility that colleges and
universities will cease to be centers of civilization-destroying intellectual disease. Only after it is accomplished on a large scale, at the leading colleges and universities, can there be any
possibility of the intellectual mainstream someday being clean enough for rational people to drink from its waters.
The 21st Century should be the century when man [and woman] begins the colonization of the solar system, not a
return to the Dark Ages. Which it will be, will depend on the extent to which new intellectuals can succeed in
restoring to the cultural environment the values of reason and capitalism.
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Coercive environmental regulations rely on command and control over the market
Glicksman, Professor of Law, and Earnhart Associate Professor, Economics, 07
(Robert L, Dietrich H, DEPICTION OF THE REGULATOR-REGULATED ENTITY RELATIONSHIP
IN THE CHEMICAL INDUSTRY: DETERRENCE-BASED V. COOPERATIVE ENFORCEMENT, William &
Mary Envtl. L. & Pol’y Rev, Vol: 3, May, P. 17)
An alternative model of environmental enforcement is the cooperative model. According to one account, this
model is a “reaction to the adversarial enforcement methods suggested by the deterrence model.”41 The
cooperative model emphasizes compliance, not the deterrence of noncompliance. Accordingly, the
primary function of an inspection may not be, as it is under the deterrence model, to accumulate evidence of
violations for subsequent enforcement actions, but rather to provide advice to regulated entities as a means of
facilitating compliance. Under this approach, an inspection serves largely as an opportunity to resolve
problems.42 Cooperative enforcement approaches have been described as an example of “negotiate
and control,” as compared with the traditional “command and control” environmental regulatory
regime with which coercive enforcement has traditionally been associated.43 Under both the coercive and
cooperative models, facility inspections and enforcement actions serve as threats. Under the coercive
model, the general deterrent effect of an inspection or an enforcement action of one facility derives
exclusively from the threat it creates for other facilities that may be the subject of similar actions in the
future. Under the cooperative model of enforcement, however, regulated facilities may be afforded more opportunities to avoid
sanctions by resolving noncompliance before a penalty is assessed or other enforcement action pursued than under the coercive model. A
cooperative regulator might even withdraw a pending sanction for past noncompliance once compliance has been achieved. Such a
regulator may choose to refrain from sanctioning a facility that has violated its NPDES permit as a result of a cooperative history
between the regulator and the facility. As a result, the cooperative approach “emphasizes flexible or selective enforcement that takes into
consideration the particular circumstances of an observed violation.”44 Indeed, “[l]evying penalties is seen as a mark of
the [cooperative] system’s failure (to otherwise obtain compliance); compliance systems rely far more
on rewards and incentives than penalties.”45
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Just as Lenin and his successors excluded capitalists and others from humanity, Hitler and his henchmen excluded
Jews, the infirmed, and others from humanity as well. Tens of millions of people were murdered at the hands of
these totalitarian regimes. As written in The Green Book, Qadhafi clearly is attempting to exclude capitalists from humanity. Now do you see the connection?
environmentalists want people (especially those living in capitalist countries) to believe their conduct is causing
Beyond a shadow of a doubt,
global warming and, thus, destroying our planet. Therefore, environmentalism has capitalism in its crosshairs. It is those of us
who benefit from the fruits of Western Civilization that are being turned into enemies in the daily sociological and political discourse of environmentalists. Americans, including President Bush,
environmentalism is a serious threat. If we succumb to the global warming propaganda being thrust upon
must come to understand that
then Green Socialism stands a chance of dismantling
us daily (with our left-wing press wittingly or not being used as the primary tool of terror/propaganda),
Western Civilization and throwing us back into the dark ages. Our rights to life, liberty, and property are at stake
here.
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Consider the often heard lament that we are awash with people, that there is intolerable population explosion everywhere and that the resulting urban development, often dubbed "sprawl," needs
to be contained. Is that really so? What demonstrates this? Most importantly, what standards are being used here, whose progress and flourishing is at stake so that such containment is
imperative?
Whenever I fly over the country – which is nearly 20 times a year – I take a look at terra firma and it amazes me how much open, totally undeveloped space exists below me. The American
southwest, especially, just seems to stretch out as far as the eye can see without even so much as a village below. I think on such occasions about all this doom-saying and shake my head in
disbelief. The same happens when I fly in Europe, Africa or New Zealand, places where I work once or twice every year or so. There is so much wilderness in all these places that the panic in the
voices of environmentalists simply sounds less and less a function of reality, more a function of power-seeking.
Now, no doubt, people, with their capacity to do things well or badly and their freedom to choose either, can mess things up a good deal when
it comes to managing their environment. That’s just common sense, which is why some version of environmental ethics is likely to be sound. As far, however, as the
more alarmist version of these concerns go, I remain very worried that we are near dealing with yet another bunch of people interested more in
running everyone else’s life than in being genuinely helpful.
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curtailing
The gases come from the burning of fossil fuels, such as natural gas and oil. So the only way to reduce greenhouse gases significantly is to curtail production. But
production will lower people's standard of living. Americans are pretty close to unanimous in wishing to raise their living standards. So we have a
clash between the citizen and the state. Moreover, the people in the developing world, whose living standards are still behind ours despite much progress since World
War II, stand to suffer immensely from any government-imposed slow-down in production.
But doesn't something as serious as global warming warrant extraordinary measures? The issue is not that simple. While believers in global warming get most of the attention, there is a
substantial literature from climatologists and other scientists pointing out the lack of evidence for warming. Fred Singer of the Science & Environmental Policy Project, says that "precise weather
satellite data, available since 1979 and covering the globe for the first time, show a slight cooling trend." Computer models of the world's climate might predict warming but the data do not. The
believers in warming are in the position of Groucho Marx, who cried, "Who are you going to believe, me or your eyes?"
Singer points out that the climate has been anything but stable over recorded history. The earth apparently has been able to cool and warm without any help from man. In the 1970s some of the
same people now scaring us about global warming were preparing for global cooling. The funny thing is that in each case the solution was government control.
The debate over global warming has gotten nasty lately. Believers say the skeptics are on the payroll of industrial interests. Some, but not all, get money from industry. But many of the believers
get research money from government agencies. Why assume that a climatologist would sell out his scientific integrity to industry but not to government? The government is not likely to continue
to fund research that undercuts
its case for activism. Are we not also entitled to regard scientists working under tax-funded grants as tainted? Perhaps the believers should stop muddying the scientific debate with unproved
charges of intellectual corruption and stick to the evidence.
Years ago socialists said that collective ownership of the means of production would out-produce capitalism. But
with the fall of socialism, those who dislike free markets have been hard-pressed to argue that economic freedom
can't deliver the goods. So a new strategy has emerged. Advocates of government control fault capitalism for
producing too many goods -- at the expense of life and the environment. In their
view, the only hope is to cut back on industrial activity and let government manage the economy in the name of
environmental protection.
mandating a cutback in production is dangerous. At a lower level of production, the world will not be able to
In fact,
sustain a population of five and a half billion people and growing. (Those who want population growth to be controlled should ask themselves whether
they wish government to decide how many children they may have.) The environmental movement should stop presenting its program as though it is costless.
The future is always risky because it is uncertain. The late scholar Aaron Wildavsky liked to say, "Wealthier is healthier." He meant that since we don't know exactly what dangers the future
holds, the best hedge is wealth. Wealth permits the resilience and freedom of action needed to respond to the unforeseen. Government is not good at producing wealth. On the contrary, it
lbimits the key precondition for production, liberty.
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Taxation is coercion in it’s simplest form, imposition of taxes should spark revolutions
Rothbard, Dean of the Austrian School, 95 (Murray N., The Freeman/Ludwig von Mises Institute,
September/October, “Taking Money Back”, http://mises.org/story/2882, 7/7/08)
The natural tendency of government, once in charge of money, is to inflate and to destroy the value of the
currency. To understand this truth, we must examine the nature of government and of the creation of money.
Throughout history, governments have been chronically short of revenue. The reason should be clear:
unlike you and me, governments do not produce useful goods and services that they can sell on the
market; governments, rather than producing and selling services, live parasitically off the market and
off society. Unlike every other person and institution in society, government obtains its revenue from
coercion, from taxation. In older and saner times, indeed, the king was able to obtain sufficient revenue
from the products of his own private lands and forests, as well as through highway tolls. For the State to
achieve regularized, peacetime taxation was a struggle of centuries. And even after taxation was
established, the kings realized that they could not easily impose new taxes or higher rates on old levies;
if they did so, revolution was very apt to break out.
Only the producer of the labor has the rights to the fruits, taxation is blatant coercive theft
Kearl, former special assistant to the secretary of defense and to the U.S. trade representative, professor of
Economics at BYU, 77 (J.R., Princeton University Press/JSTOR, Autumn, “Do Entitlements Imply Taxation is
Theft?”,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265125?&Search=yes&term=theft&term=taxation&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%
2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dtaxation%2Btheft%26x%3D0%26y%3D0&item=2&ttl=2976&returnArticleServic
e=showArticle, 7/7/08)
The question of who has rightful claim to the output from privately owned factors of production
(particularly labor) has long been im- portant in political and economic philosophy. Proudhon's famous
dictum that property is theft has been countered in recent years by the notion that taxation is theft. This
question has surfaced once again with the publication of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.,
I971) and Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York, I974). Indeed, Nozick has been viewed as
supporting the an,ti- Proudhon view. J.S. Coleman suggests that ... for Nozick, only the individual is
entitled to the fruits of his own labor, and he has full rights to the use and disposal of them.... [Given] a
set of individuals each having produced certain goods through his own skills and efforts, the question is
then asked: Who has the right to these goods? The answer is self-evident.... Each has the right to the
product of his labor until and unless he chooses [emphasis mine] to transfer some portion of it to
another.1 Taxation must therefore be viewed either as theft by a collective agency or as the charity of
private agents, although it is basically non- voluntary and coercive
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So, the company is coerced to take part of your earnings and divert it to those who have this power to make them do so. If this isn't exactly like what the Mafia does when it engages in extortion I
don't know what is. Yes, some of the funds extorted will be used for purposes that may actually benefit you and some who are extorted don't protest. But maybe that's true about whom the Mafia
extorts, as well. And it doesn't matter because what is wrong with extortion isn't what the money is used for but how it is obtained, namely, coercively.
Often it is Robin Hood who is held up as the role model for justifying taxation: Didn't he "steal" from the rich to "give" to the poor? Well, not, not really.
In the original version of the legend, Robin Hood did just the opposite: He stole from those who stole from the poor and returned the loot to the rightful owners. In those days the upper classes,
from the king to all his cronies, routinely engaged in extortion. They disguised this, however, with the phony claim that everything belongs to the king and his cronies. Yes, monarchs and those
who rationalized monarchy spun this fantasy and managed to sell it to the people that they where the rightful owners "of the realm," that they had a "divine right" to rule us. This way when the
bulk of the country went to work on the farm or wherever, they had to pay "rent" to the monarch and his cronies.
Of course, if I live in your apartment, I pay you rent. It's your apartment, after all, so you have it coming to you. But what if you got your apartment by conquest, by robbing a bunch of people of
what belongs to them? That is mostly how the monarchs got to rule the realm, by conquest. By all rights it is the folks who were working in the realm--on the land and elsewhere--who actually
owned that realm, the monarchs being the phony, pretend owners, nothing better. But since they managed to bamboozle a great many powerless folks into believing that they did own the realm,
the "rent" had to be paid.
Since, however, the American Revolution put the lie to this monarchical ruse, the institution of taxation could not be passed off as some kind of legitimate rent taking. That major political change
showed once and for all that monarchs were sophisticated thugs who ran roughshod over the rest of the people, who violated their basic natural rights all over the place, by robbing and
conscripting them.
Yet, because of the idea that we do need to have our rights protected by some means that involve costs, taxation remained a feature of the society that followed the change from monarchy to
constitutional republicanism.
Not a lot of taxation, mind you, because it seemed pretty clear to the Founders that taxation is in fact extortion. But they didn't see some other, legitimate, morally acceptable way of collecting the
funds needed to pay government for its service of securing our rights. Yet, they might have.
There are other ways governments could be paid for their service of securing our rights that couldn't exist without
legal protection. Contract fees, not taxation, could solve the problem.
But this alternative, legitimate method wasn't in the cards following the revolution, so taxation remained, albeit in a rather modest form. In time, however, it got out of hand.
After all, if the Mafia just took a tiny fraction of income from its victims, most would probably put up with it all rather than to resist. But when the amount moves on to 25 to 70 %, it turns into
big time extortion. And that is how we stand now where taxation has become big time extortion.
Some respond to this by noting that in other countries taxation is much higher. Sure, because they are even farther from having lived up to the spirit and letter of the revolution that America
experienced; namely, removing power from government and returning it to where it belongs, the individual citizens. After all, it is America that is the leader of the free world, with a lot of other
countries, including most of those in Western Europe, way behind. At least that is how it was supposed to happen.
Instead, however, the American Revolution was betrayed and the U.S.A. has undergone a reactionary period in which it reverted, substantially, to the policies of earlier systems of government.
This Europeanization of America is a shame, a damned shame. And it needs to be identified as such before it has any chance of being arrested.
The first step is to acknowledge, unapologetically, that the institution of taxation is not a civilized but a barbaric
method to fund anything, because it amounts to nothing less than outright extortion, a gross violation of human
liberty.
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Taxation makes us slaves to the state and no matter how hard we work, the “master” state
will always steal that which was ours
Feser, Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University, 2000
(Edward, “Taxation, Forced Labor, and Theft,” The Independent Review, Volume: 5, Fall, 221-22)
It is important to understand how this argument differs from other libertarian arguments against
taxation. It is not quite the same as the general claim that taxation interferes with individual liberty
insofar as its enforcement is intrusive and it prevents one from doing what he wants with a portion of
his income,2 for there are many who would find such infringements of liberty acceptable but
nevertheless consider uncomfortable the notion that taxation also amounts to forcing people to work.
The argument also differs from the objection that taxation amounts to theft in that forcing someone to labor and stealing from him are
different offenses (although, if we take the former to involve specifically the stealing of labor, the difference between the objections may
be one only of generality). Nonetheless, it is sometimes suggested that Nozick’s argument is essentially concerned with the violation
of property rights or with theft, rather than with forced labor in that Nozick presupposes that one has
a property right in the portion of one’s earnings the state takes in taxes, a right his critics claim he fails
to establish (Kymlicka 1990, 107–18; Michael 1997, 141; Weinberg 1997, 336; Otsuka 1998, 71).3 Nozick’s
argument, as stated previously, nowhere explicitly appeals to any claim about property rights, and it is by no
means obvious that an argument objecting to some practice on the grounds that it amounts to forced labor
needs even implicitly to do so. Clearly, I might still be forced to labor for someone else if I labor at all,
even if I have no property right in the product of the labor: a slave may own no part of his master’s
land or tools, and thus arguably he cannot own whatever he produced using them— vegetables, say—
but he is nevertheless a slave, even if he is allowed to eat some of the vegetables and thus labors partly
for himself. The master might even allow him to idle away the days if he likes, but insist that if he labors to any extent, some of his
labor must be for the sake of the master: if the slave grows tomatoes because he wants them, the master will take a portion of them; if he
tries to grow only one tomato for himself, the master will nevertheless take a third of it; if to avoid giving the master that third he tries
somehow to grow only two-thirds of a tomato, the master will take a third of that tomato; and so forth. Insofar as the master
“taxes” away a portion of the product of his labor, the slave has obviously been forced to work for
purposes other than his own, even though he has no property right in the product of his labor (the
portion of it he is allowed to eat also belongs to the master).
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Taxation from the state is illegitimate for the same reasons “protection services” from the
mafia are illegitimate.
Feser, Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University, 2000
(Edward, “Taxation, Forced Labor, and Theft,” The Independent Review, Volume: 5, Fall, 229)
The reply that the state does not really steal from us because it provides services in return (Kearl 1977)
also fails, even if we grant the controversial assumption that the average citizen really does get back from the
state services commensurate to the amount he is forced to pay. After all, the Mafioso providing “protection
services” in return for extorted payments may in many cases really protect his clients from other
criminals, yet we would not count his actions any less illegitimate for that reason. The upshot is that,
whether or not I am given anything in return for my tax dollars, those dollars are still taken from me
involuntarily even if I do not want the services provided or would prefer to get them elsewhere. No one
would consider the local florist any less a thief if, after taking some of my property by force, he sent me
flowers.
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The same is true of public action. When citizens of a country delegate to government, by means of democratic and judicial processes,
the power to forge paternalistic public policies such as banning drug abuse, imposing censorship, restraining
undesirable trade, and supporting desirable trade, the bureaucratic and police actions increasingly rely on the kind of
violence and intrusiveness that no free citizenry ought to experience or foster. And the bureaucrats and the police tell
themselves, no doubt, that what they’re doing is perfectly just and right.
Consider, for starters, that when no one complains about a crime—because it is not perpetrated against someone but rather involves breaking a paternalistic law—to even detect the “crime”
requires methods that are usually invasive. Instead of charges being brought by wronged parties, phone tapping, snooping, anonymous reporting, and undercover work are among the dubious
means that lead to prosecution. Thus the role of the police shifts from protection and peacekeeping to supervision, regimentation, and reprimand. No wonder, then, that officers of the law are
often caught brutalizing suspects instead of merely apprehending them. Under a paternalistic regime, their goals have multiplied, and thus the means they see as necessary to achieving those
goals multiply too.
The same general danger of corrupting a free society’s system of laws may arise when government is called on to
deal with calamities. There is the perception, of course, that in such circumstances the superior powers of government
are indispensable, given the immediateness of the danger. The immediate benefits—a life saved by a marine—are evident. Yet the dangers of
extensive involvement by legal authorities in the handling of nonjudicial problems are no less evident, if less immediate in
impact.
Using state based incentives to solve public harms creates a perpetual cycle
Hazlitt, founding board member of the Mises Institute and Journalist for The Wall Street Journal, 07
(Henry, Can the State Reduce Poverty? http://www.mises.org/story/2526)
From the beginning of history, sincere reformers as well as demagogues have sought to abolish or at least
to alleviate poverty through state action. In most cases their proposed remedies have only served to
make the problem worse. The most frequent and popular of these proposed remedies has been the simple
one of seizing from the rich to give to the poor. This remedy has taken a thousand different forms, but
they all come down to this. The wealth is to be "shared," to be "redistributed," to be "equalized." In fact,
in the minds of many reformers it is not poverty that is the chief evil but inequality. All schemes for
redistributing or equalizing incomes or wealth must undermine or destroy incentives at both ends of the
economic scale. They must reduce or abolish the incentives of the unskilled or shiftless to improve their
condition by their own efforts; and even the able and industrious will see little point in earning anything
beyond what they are allowed to keep. These redistribution schemes must inevitably reduce the size of the
pie to be redistributed. They can only level down. Their long-run effect must be to reduce production and
lead toward national impoverishment. The problem we face is that the false remedies for poverty are
almost infinite in number. An attempt at a thorough refutation of any single one of them would run to
disproportionate length. But some of these false remedies are so widely regarded as real cures or
mitigations of poverty that if I do not refer to them I may be accused of having undertaken a book on
the remedies for poverty while ignoring some of the most obvious.
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Tyranny, elimination of civil rights, and the politics of fear are a direct result of the
addiction to power created by taxation
Rozeff, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 05 (Michael, Ludwig von Mises Institute, June 29, “How the Power to Tax is
the Power to Destroy”, http://mises.org/story/1853, 7/7/08)\
Finally, the rulers have a ninth incentive, to maintain indefinitely the power to tax. At least three
destructive activities result. One is continually to manufacture propaganda to justify taxes. Rulers are
forever raising a hue and cry about imminent dangers and problems. They publicize desperate "needs" that
are essential to survival: poverty programs to forestall disunity, riot or crime, drug prohibition to
prevent threats to the nation's health, subsidies to prevent failure of the food supply or loss of the
family farmers who are the nation's backbone, and central banking to prevent catastrophic banking
failures. Basically, rulers appeal to their subjects' fears, insecurities and deep nationalistic, patriotic,
religious and other desires in order to justify their actions.
Second, rulers recruit a corps of propagandists, in government and out, who tout the party line, and in
return receive money, favors, access, or other emoluments that they value, including power and
feelings of importance. The perverse consequence is a corruption of society's information processes.
A third means of keeping the power to tax is to diminish effective criticism of the rulers. Were
rebellious anti-tax voices to gain influence, the rulers would be worse off. Hence, they try to halt and
suppress such criticism.[11] Sadly, free speech and the power to tax are incompatible, and the rulers will
curtail free speech wherever possible and under whatever clever guises they can manufacture.
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There is a moral obligation to reject the slave mentality of taxation by the state
Feser, Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University, 2000
(Edward, “Taxation, Forced Labor, and Theft,” The Independent Review, Volume: 5, Fall, 224)
Typically, libertarians do not argue for the thesis of self-ownership to any great extent, for the obvious
reason that it seems as plausible a moral first principle as one could hope for, something that seems just
intuitively true. Most people would agree with the thesis on considering it, and the libertarian’s hope is
to convince them that because they (at least implicitly) accept it, they ought to accept also the
libertarianism that follows from it. Nevertheless, libertarians have attempted such arguments. They
generally proceed by trying to show that the thesis of self-ownership is something we must accept if we
are to justify other widely shared fundamental moral commitments. For instance, nearly everyone
would accept that slavery is immoral, not just in cases where the slave is treated badly, but in every
case. It is not just the maltreatment of other persons one owns that is morally offensive, but the fact of
ownership itself. It seems obvious that no one has the right to own another person, and the most
plausible explanation is that each person owns himself, has a right over himself that no one else can
usurp. Another argument for self-ownership concerns the famous “eyeball lottery” scenario: even supposing
it were possible to remove painlessly one eyeball from everyone who has two so that the extra eyeballs
could be redistributed via lottery to those who by accident of birth have no eyeballs, we would still find
such a practice abhorrent, for even though it might be kind for someone voluntarily to give up an
eyeball for the sake of a blind person, it would be immoral to force him to do so. And the reason why is
surely that they are his eyeballs to do with as he pleases; he owns them, along with his other body parts;
indeed, he owns himself entirely. In rebutting such defenses of the thesis of self-ownership, Cohen’s strategy
is to try to show that we can account for the immorality of slavery and of eyeball redistribution without
committing ourselves to the thesis—that one can consistently be against them without being for self-
ownership. Cohen begins by trying to show that you can accept redistributive taxation without accepting
either slavery or self-ownership. He suggests that it is possible that you may have obligations to others from
which the state has no right to absolve you and indeed has the duty to enforce via taxation (1995, 234). In this
case, you would not have a right, derived from self-ownership, to refrain from surrendering part of your
income to the state; however, neither would the state have the rights of a slaveholder over you, because
it could not do whatever it wanted with you, but only what is required to enforce the presumed moral
obligation.
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We must be fully committed toward to ending coercive measures of the state. It’s our moral
imperative to never compromise our goals toward liberty
Rothbard, former teacher at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, 78
(Murray, For A New Liberty, “A Strategy for Liberty,” www.mises.org/rothbard/newliberty14.asp, date accessed:
7/9/08)
There is another grave flaw in the very idea of a comprehensive planned program toward liberty. For
the very care and studied pace, the very all-embracing nature of the program, implies that the State is
not really the common enemy of mankind, that it is possible and desirable to use the State for
engineering a planned and measured pace toward liberty. The insight that the State is the major enemy
of mankind, on the other hand, leads to a very different strategic outlook: namely, that libertarians
should push for and accept with alacrity any reduction of State power or activity on any front. Any
such reduction at any time should be a welcome decrease of crime and aggression. Therefore, the
libertarian's concern should not be to use the State to embark on a measured course of destatization, but
rather to hack away at any and all manifestations of statism whenever and wherever he or she can. In keeping
with this analysis, the National Committee of the Libertarian party in October 1977 adopted a declaration of
strategy which included the following: We must hold high the banner of pure principle, and never
compromise our goal?. The moral imperative of libertarian principle demands that tyranny, injustice,
the absence of full liberty, and violation of rights continue no longer. Any intermediate demand must
be treated, as it is in the Libertarian Party platform, as pending achievement of the pure goal and inferior
to it. Therefore, any such demand should be presented as leading toward our ultimate goal, not as an
end in itself. Holding high our principles means avoiding completely the quagmire of self-imposed,
obligatory gradualism: We must avoid the view that, in the name of fairness, abating suffering, or fulfilling
expectations, we must temporize and stall on the road to liberty. Achieving liberty must be our overriding
goal. We must not commit ourselves to any particular order of destatization, for that would be
construed as our endorsing the continuation of statism and the violation of rights. Since we must never
be in the position of advocating the continuation of tyranny, we should accept any and all destatization
measures wherever and whenever we can. Thus, the libertarian must never allow himself to be trapped
into any sort of proposal for "positive" governmental action; in his perspective, the role of government
should only be to remove itself from all spheres of society just as rapidly as it can be pressured to do so.
Neither should there be any contradictions in rhetoric. The libertarian should not indulge in any rhetoric,
let alone any policy recommendations, which would work against the eventual goal. Thus, suppose that a
libertarian is asked to give his views on a specific tax cut. Even if he does not feel that he can at the
moment call loudly for tax abolition, the one thing that he must not do is add to his support of a tax cut
such unprincipled rhetoric as, "Well, of course, some taxation is essential?," etc. Only harm to the
ultimate objective can be achieved by rhetorical flourishes which confuse the public and contradict
and violate principle.
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Ethics First
We must not reject the ethical consideration of taxation.
Feser, Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University, 2000
(Edward, “Taxation, Forced Labor, and Theft,” The Independent Review, Volume: 5, Fall, 224)
Although this argument is related to the forced-labor argument, it is clearly set off from the
latter in Nozick’s text, and the charge that taxation amounts to the partial ownership of taxpayers
is clearly stronger than the charge that it amounts to forced labor. Even someone willing to allow a
little forced labor must surely find uncomfortable the notion of partial ownership of other people—
even a Haworthian penny’s worth of ownership. Forced labor can come in degrees of
severity and duration, and therefore the defender of taxation can convince himself that he need
not essentially be committed to stripping people of their right to self-determination, but only to
inconveniencing them. But it is difficult to make ownership of other people, even partial ownership,
sound palatable. Nonetheless, the sort of forced labor involved in taxation, given the absoluteness of the
state’s claim over a portion of one’s earnings from labor, amounts precisely to the partial ownership of
other people. Those who dismiss Nozick’s views of taxation on the grounds that a little
forced labor may be a good thing thus fail to deal with the heart of his case. Oddly, the
writer who seems most impressed by this argument not only is not a libertarian, but a
Marxist of sorts: G. A. Cohen, who finds it a daunting challenge to his project of rescuing socialism from the
ash heap to which history has apparently consigned it. Cohen is convinced that it is futile to attempt to show
that taxation, despite appearances, does not amount to forced labor and therefore does not really conflict with
self-ownership: Suppose that whenever I scratch my back I am required by the state to scratch someone
else’s. It surely follows that I lack full ownership of my hand. And the implication of non-(full) ownership
survives when we suppose that if I scratch your back in return for scratching mine, then some further
scratching of the backs of third parties can be exacted by the state from each of us, after the manner of
redistributive income taxation. (1995, 220–21) To avoid Nozick’s conclusion that such taxation is immoral,
only one option remains open to Nozick’s critics: they must, Cohen asserts, try to undermine the thesis of
selfownership itself (1995, 229). Of course, that thesis has a tremendous prima facie plausibility, as
Cohen himself recognizes. His aim is in fact not to refute it—he denies that it can be refuted—but only
the more limited task of showing that we need not accept it.
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There are those who would reply that government regulation is, in fact, consented to by way of the electoral
process, but this is sophistry. The electoral process must conform to due process, not override it, since none of us is
authorized to vote other people into servitude. We may vote on who should administer the laws but not on what laws
we must live by; that’s a matter of argument and must evolve through the common law, not via the vote. That is why a lynch mob is
immoral and unjust – it aims to trump justice, of which due process is a crucial element.
Since many people realize that others really have no moral authority to govern them without their consent, as well as that
government regulations amount to just such "governance," there are massive efforts to evade or circumvent such regulations. Arguably the huge legal
departments in major corporations are part of such efforts. The motivation for this is very much akin to what underlies the existence of black markets or smuggling operations – people do
not believe that bans on the production and sale of various goods and services is morally justified, so they work
diligently and cleverly to dodge such bans.
This is so even if what’s banned is itself unsavory, shameful – for example, prostitution or mindless gambling. What they do know, at least tacitly, is that
there is something radically wrong about governmental efforts to suppress such trade. It is a bit like when we know that police brutality is wrong even if
we disapprove of the person who is its target, or when we know that beating someone up for having insulted another is going way beyond any kind of permissible
response.
in business it is quite possible that a reason why folks so often run afoul of "the law" – à la Martha Stewart, for instance – is that much of
So,
the law bearing on them is understood by them as harassment, nothing to do with crime or civil order. All those government
regulations in banking, manufacture, marketing, sales, and so forth impose burdens on professionals, what with all the rules, fines, and even prison sentences administered not for having violated
someone’s rights but merely for having the capacity to do so – they might hurt someone, they might injure someone, they might defraud someone, although they haven’t done so at all.
Government regulation is nearly all precautionary, preventive, yet in the criminal law that’s banned, deemed a violation of due process. Only if someone
has violated – or is very likely to violate – another’s rights, may law enforcement go into action against that individual.
So,one result of this precautionary nature of government regulation is that those covered by it work very hard to evade them. That’s so, arguably,
because many people do not really believe the regulations are just and thus consider them an imposition they should
not suffer. No, they probably haven’t some coherent, fully worked out idea about this; but in their guts, as it were, they sense confidently enough that there is something amiss here. And
this leads to their treating not just government regulations but nearly all laws as suspect, perhaps not really deserving of
compliance.
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If global warming or ozone depletion or whatever, really are consequences of the actions of the human race
considered collectively, but not of the actions of any given individual, including any given individual private
business firm, then the proper way to regard them is as the equivalent of acts of nature. Not being caused by the
actions of individual human beings, they are equivalent to actions not morally caused by human beings at all, that is to
say, to acts of nature.
Once we see matters in this light, it becomes clear what the appropriate response is to such environmental change, whether global warming and ozone depletion, or global cooling and ozone
individual human beings must be free to
enrichment, or anything else nature may bring. It is the same as the appropriate response of man to nature in general. Namely,
deal with nature to their own maximum individual advantage, subject only to the limitation of not initiating the use
of physical force against the person or property of other individual human beings. By following this principle, man [and
women] will deal with the any negative forces of nature resulting as byproducts of his [or her] own activity taken in
the aggregate in precisely the same successful way that he [or she] regularly deals with the primary forces of nature.
Allow me to elaborate on this. Here we are. We enjoy an incredibly marvelous industrial civilization, whose nature is indicated by the fact that because of it vast numbers of human beings can
travel at breathtaking speeds for hundreds of miles at a stretch in their own personal automobiles, listening to symphony orchestras as they go—indeed, can fly over whole continents in a matter
of hours in jet planes, while watching movies and drinking martinis; can walk into darkened rooms and flood them with light by the flick of a switch; can open a refrigerator door and enjoy
delicious, healthful food brought from all over the world; can do all this and so much more. This is what we have. This, and much, much more, is what people everywhere could have if they were
intelligent enough to establish economic freedom and capitalism.
But all this counts for virtually nothing as far as the environmentalists are concerned. They are ready to throw it all away because, they allege, it causes global warming and ozone depletion, i.e.,
bad weather. And the best way, they say, for us to avoid such bad weather, and thus to control nature more to our advantage, is to abandon modern, industrial civilization and capitalism.
The appropriate answer to the environmentalists is that we will not sacrifice a hair of industrial civilization, and that
if global warming and ozone depletion really are among its consequences, we will accept them and deal with them—by such
reasonable means as employing more and better air conditioners and sun block, not by giving up our air
conditioners, refrigerators, and automobiles.
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Solves Warming
A2- Permutation
Compromising liberty for the sake of political expediency threatens the very foundation of
our freedom; unadulterated adherence to the principles of liberty is essential
Tibor R. Machan, Research Fellow @ Hoover Institution, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at
Auburn University, January 27, 2004, LewRockwell.com, “Logic, Liberty, and Reality,”
http://www.lewrockwell.com/machan/machan27.html
There is a principle in logic that goes like this: Once a contradiction has infected an argument, anything can follow. Another way of putting it
is that once a viewpoint has contradictions in it, nothing reasonable can be expected from it except accidentally.
When one discusses politics, a charge frequently leveled is that one’s views aren’t realistic but too purist, too idealistic. Champions of all kinds of political ideas hear this but in America it is put
libertarians undeniably advocate public policies that are very close to what the basic
to libertarians especially often. This is because
principles of the American political system would imply.
If one takes a look at the Declaration of Independence and just considers the ordinary meaning of its central claims, no other political system apart from libertarianism could reasonably come to
mind. Unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – precisely what libertarianism affirms. For laws to be established so as to secure our rights – that’s another libertarian thesis.
None of us may justly be deprived of life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness, period.
Libertarians do tweak this a bit when they make explicit something that is clearly implicit in this claim, namely, that we all have the right to private property. That’s because without that right,
there can be no effective right to life and liberty, let alone the pursuit of happiness. And the founders, especially the author of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, were quite aware of this.
Now those who complain that libertarians are not being realistic basically have in mind that unless one compromises on
the basic principles of the Declaration one is simply not in touch with political reality.
Yet if those principles are actually sound, if we do have the rights Jefferson identified as ours by our very nature, then to compromise them would
pretty much amount to breaching the application of logic to politics. If it is true that any human being (not crucially incapacitated) has an
unalienable right to his or her life or liberty or pursuit of happiness, then reasoning logically from this would imply that you, I, our neighbors and millions of others
have these rights. And that means that violating them, even for wonderful and widely demanded purposes such as providing others with
health care or education or art museums, is illogical. And by the rules of logical inference, once such a move is accepted, tolerated, and made part
of public policy, what follows is a humongous mess in public affairs, that’s what.
And that is just what we are witnessing now in the United States of America, as well as many other places. There is no consistent public policy anywhere, none to which political leaders swear
any allegiance and none they bother to follow loyally. That’s the thrust of the beef about the absence of a coherent vision in political campaigning. And the courts, too, are all over the map, one
day affirming individual rights, the next denying them in the myriad of cases on which they rule. Furthermore, taxation violates our right to liberty and property and government regulation is a
blatant attack on due process, which requires that only those who have violated someone’s rights may be burdened with fines or jail.
So when libertarians are told they are being unrealistic, not pragmatic enough – which means not practical, not in line with reality – what
they are really being told is that they refuse to accept the mess that today amounts to practical politics. They are being told
that they are aiming too high by insisting that politics, like personal life itself, ought to have integrity and not embrace contradictory ideas and policies. No libertarian in his right mind
believes that full consistency is easy or even very likely, just as none believes that full personal integrity is easy or very likely for people to achieve. But
to accept that one ought to just cave in to the demands of deliberate compromise, that this is what the norm should be, is to
promote meaninglessness and arbitrariness in public affairs.
The simple truth is that the sole hope for justice and decency in public life is to insist on practicing only what is consistent
with fundamental principles based on human nature and the requirements of social existence. The mere fact that this isn’t
likely to be around the corner anytime soon, anywhere on the globe, or that it is very difficult to secure, does not change anything. By acquiescing to compromise, being
"realistic," one simply throws in the towel and gives up on seeking any rhyme or reason in political matters.
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A2- Permutation
Any combination of free market capitalism and central planning is impossible – the two
economic regimes are mutually exclusive
Ludwig von Mises, 1918-1920. Director, League of Nation's Austrian Abrechnungs Amt [Reparations
Commission], 1945-1969. Visiting Professor, New York University, Graduate School of Business Administration,
April 18, 1950, Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism, http://www.mises.org/midroad/mr2.asp
A second group seems to be less radical. They reject socialism no less than capitalism. They recommend a third system, which, as they say, is as far from capitalism as it is from socialism, which
as a third system of society's economic organization, stands midway between the two other systems, and while retaining the
This third system is known as the system of interventionism
advantages of both, avoids the disadvantages inherent in each. . In the terminology of
American politics it is often referred to as the middle-of-the-road policy. What makes this third system popular with many people is the particular way they choose to look upon the problems
involved. As they see it, two classes, the capitalists and entrepreneurs on the one hand and the wage earners on the other hand, are arguing about the distribution of the yield of capital and
entrepreneurial activities. Both parties are claiming the whole cake for themselves. Now, suggest these mediators, let us make peace by splitting the disputed value equally between the two
. The State as an impartial arbiter should interfere, and should curb the greed of the capitalists and assign a part
classes
of the profits to the working classes. Thus it will be possible to dethrone the moloch capitalism without enthroning the moloch of totalitarian socialism.
Yet this mode of judging the issue is entirely fallacious. The antagonism between capitalism and socialism is not a dispute about the distribution of booty. It is a
controversy about which two schemes for society's economic organization, capitalism or socialism, is conducive to the better attainment of those ends which all people consider as the ultimate
aim of activities commonly called economic, viz., the best possible supply of useful commodities and services. Capitalism wants to attain these ends by private enterprise and initiative, subject to
the supremacy of the public's buying and abstention from buying on the market. The socialists want to substitute the unique plan of a central authority for the plans of the various individuals.
They want to put in place of what Marx called the "anarchy of production" the exclusive monopoly of the government. The antagonism does not refer to the mode of distributing a fixed amount
of amenities. It refers to the mode of producing all those goods which people want to enjoy.
The conflict of the two principles is irreconcilable and does not allow for any compromise. Control is indivisible.
Either the consumers' demand as manifested on the market decides for what purposes and how the factors of
production should be employed, or the government takes care of these matters. There is nothing that could mitigate
the opposition between these two contradictory principles. They preclude each other. Interventionism is not a golden
mean between capitalism and socialism. It is the design of a third system of society's economic organization and must be appreciated as such.
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***Aff Answers***
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Perm Solvency
Perm solves best – Blasting away ideological impulses releases a freedom of inquiry where
political disengagement can produce genuine insight
Friedman, Political Science at Bernard University, 97
(Jefferey, "What's Wrong with Libertarianism," Critical Review, Volume: 3, pg 459-460)
The remedy for this persistent fear is the same as that for the low intellectual standards of libertarian
scholarship: blast away the ideology~ strip off even the ideological impulse, by withdrawing one’s
emotional commitment to political conclusions that have not yet been justified. Even while this makes
room for intellectual seriousness, it promotes a joyous freedom of inquiry: one need no longer fear where
one is headed. The moment a libertarian leaves libertarianism behind, reality loses its threatening
aspect; his intellectual marginality becomes a precious source of fresh insight into every aspect of
politics and culture. It seems paradoxical but true that high seriousness can be enjoyable, and that
political disengagement can produce genuine insights into politics. The paradoxes may be dispelled,
however, by realizing that disengagement is equivalent to alienation. Alienation plants the seeds of
doubt, doubt nourishes serious thinking, and serious thought is the only alternative to an intellectual
complacency that must always be shadowed by fear of its own simplification.
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Two so-called "third generation" or "solidarity" rights are to a healthy environment and to development. 15 Neither
is fully accepted under international law; but both are emerging as recognized interests which could eventually gain
human rights status as, it is here predicted, Eastern concepts of duty and community rights
seize a larger role in the development of international human rights law. 16 A right to enjoy and use a healthy
environment, one that is clean, ecologically balanced and protected, and whose physical, social and cultural
elements are adequate for both individual well-being and dignity and collective development, can be seen as
necessarily [*224] underlying all other rights. 17 A right to development, entailing a sustainable and constantly
improving livelihood for a particular population, would be both a basis for realization, and the evolutionary
outcome, of all other rights. 18
In the process of violating the rights listed above, culprits trample on the victims' procedural rights: access to
information; environmental assessment as an integral part of planning; participation in judicial and administrative
proceedings; and effective domestic remedies and compensation. It is important to note, however, that while these
rights are crucial tools in the battle against it, their denial does not constitute ecocide. 19
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Environmental degradation threatens the rights and dignity of the human species; our
ethical obligation to guard against it supercedes the liberty of those who would destroy it
Mark Allan Gray, First Secretary, Australian Permanent Mission to the United Nations, New York. Former Head of
the Environmental Law Unit, Legal Office, Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Canberra, Spring
1996, “The International Crime of Ecocide,” California Western International Law Journal, 26 Cal. W. Int'l L.J. 215
The natural world's beauty, complexity and fragility suggest that it and its components in their own right have
interests worthy of protection, or at least that our liberty to exploit nature is not limited solely by the claims of
other people. Radical theorists argue for recognition of legal rights of nature or the "environment," 23 which
includes non-living elements. Others limit their claim to living things 24 or specifically to animals. 25 A convincing
argument, for instance, is made that whales have an emerging right to life, which right will gain recognition as statist
and positivist conceptions of international law give way to humanist and natural law conceptions. 26 Such rights do
not currently enjoy recognition under international law. 27 Nevertheless, every element of nature is unique and has
inherent dignity, and therefore warrants respect regardless of its value to man. Being different from humans does not
mean being less worthy of respect. All living things are vulnerable and, in the case of fauna, sentient, and therefore
deserving of protection. These interests, it is here predicted, will go beyond the moral and take on legal
characteristics as human understanding of our world improves and as the Eastern concept of duty influences the
elaboration of international human rights law. Ecocide can be envisioned as not just the breach of a legal duty of
care, but the violation of a duty to protect. This construct would serve to protect the environment better than the
human rights basis because it would not depend upon acceptance of non-human rights and its identification would
focus on the culprit rather than the victim.
These interests are also relevant to our human-rights based model of [*226] ecocide, as their impairment affects
man. The degradation of nature offends human dignity and distresses many, including the author, at a spiritual
level because nature is a part of humanity. More fundamentally, the cohesion and interdependence of all living
things mean that we are harmed as a part of nature (much as a state's right to complain about transboundary
pollution is really the collective right of its citizens). As one publicist put it, "the integrity of nature is also the
integrity of the human species as part and product of nature." 28 To destroy nature is to destroy ourselves.
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Agencies payed by tax dollars ensure rights and safety throughout the nation
Holmes and Sunstein, 99 (Stephen and Cass, THE COST OF RIGHTS: WHY LIBERTY DEPENDS ON
TAXES, 1999, p. 19. (MHDRG/E592))
Opposition to government has been a defining there of American populism in the late twentieth century. Its
slogan is, Don't tread on me! Or as Ronald Reagan put it, "Government isn't the solution; it's the problem."
More recently, critics of all things governmental, such as Charles Murray and David Boaz, have claimed that
an "adult making an honest living and minding his own business deserves to be left alone," and the "real
problems in the United States is th same one being recognized all over the world: too much government."
Everyday, every hour, private catastrophes are averted or mitigated by public expenditures that are
sometimes large, even massive, but that go unrecognized. Americans simply assume that our public
officials - national, state, and local - will routinely lay hold of public resources and expend them to
salvage, or boost the value of, private rights. Despite the undesirably high incidence of crime in the United
States, for instance, a majority of citizens feel relatively secure most of the time, in good measure due to
the effort of the police, publicly salaried protectors of one of our most basic liberties: personal or
physical security.
Alt fails: alternative causality outweighs their alternative, too many outside factors
Friedman, Political Science at Bernard University, 97
(Jefferey, "What's Wrong with Libertarianism," Critical Review, Volume: 3, pg 414-15)
First, it is facile to assume, as Murray does, that even if personal responsibility is essential to happiness,
market and nonprofit activity are its essential manifestations. The ability to “make a good living”
depends overwhelmingly on good luck—on dispositions, habits, and skills that an individual cannot
acquire on her own, but is sometimes fortunate enough to acquire from others. Is it to the upper middle-
class child’s credit that he enters an Ivy League university savvy in the ways of modern institutions,
relatively welleducated, and organized enough to accomplish tasks and make short—term sacrifices? Is it the
ghetto child’s fault that she emerges unskilled and illiterate from public school, bereft of self-discipline from
a disintegrated family, or listless and afraid from 18 years in a housing project? Do people never lose their
jobs because of a recession or a shift in market conditions for which they are not the cause; and do they
never gain them because the talents and experiences they happen to have—or that they were able to
acquire because of dispositions they were lucky enough to inherit or learn from others—position them
well to take advantage of whatever the market now happens to value? F. A. Hayek (1976, 74) wisely
realized that market outcomes cannot legitimately—or successfully— be defended on the basis of desert.
Murray, by contrast, advocates, in effect, a return to Victorian psychology. His libertarianism is just as
vulnerable as Victorianism was to the discovery that people are not, in fact, solely or even largely
responsible for their good or ill fortune.
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Hegel’s philosophy is flawed- only proves importance, not necessity of private property
Van Duffel, 04 (Siegfried "Libertarian Natural Rights.", Critical Review Vol. 16, Issue 4 (December 2004) pp.
353-375)
The best-developed theory I know that builds a justification of private property on a specifically human
need—proposed by Hegel in his Philosophy of Right—is often thought to be profoundly antiliberal, and
certainly does not sustain inviolate property rights.9 Hegel defends what has been called a “developmental
thesis” about the connection between individual freedom and private property (Patten 1999, 140; see
also Stillman 1980). According to this approach, the rationale behind private property is that it provides
the property holder with a concrete perception of his agency, and in this way helps to constitute her as
a free person. One problem with this defense, as Allen Patten (1999, 149) has suggested, is that the
argument—even if it succeeds—would demonstrate only that private property is a sufficient condition
for developing and sustaining one’s personality. But, as with Rothbard’s argument, Hegel’s is hardly
sufficient to demonstrate the superiority of private property over other kinds of property
arrangements that might accomplish the same objective.
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↓ Continued ↓
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