Capitalism K 2AC Capitalism is inevitable – even if we resist. Gary Olson and Jean-Francois Lyotard, 1995 ,”Resisting a Discourse of Mastery: A Conversation with Jean-Franscois Lyotard”, JAC 15.3, a/online] Q.In Cultural Critique and elsewhere you propose that “the main problem in today’s society,” the “problem that overshadows all the others,” is not the contemporary state but capital. In light of the turn to market economies by China, Russia, Eastern Block nations, and, now, even Cuba to a certain extent, how do we resist capitalism and its corrosive effect on the social fabric? A.Impossible. And we have no reason to resist because all these people are looking to capitalism as a solution to their problems. I was in Petersburg last spring, and it was horrible to see all these people—very nice people—without work, without money, and they are just waiting for capitalist investment in order to make things supportable. There is obviously no other solution, except the ridiculous and dangerous solution proposed by this crazy man, this neo-nazi, Zhirinovsky. Capitalism is the only solution. Obviously, the same is true in China with a different way to manage the entrance into capitalism. No, no. This system has no competition, and to resist it is not to make impediments against it, as in the old tradition. No, no. It’s to make the people able to eat, to work, to sleep, to have a home, and so on. And in these conditions, real resistance can appear. Turn: Attempting to move away from capitalism will cause transitional conflicts that will end in increased domination and unsustainable exploitation. Mark Avrum Gubrud @ the Center for Superconductivity Research, 1997, “Nanotechnology and International Security”, a/online With molecular manufacturing, international trade in both raw materials and finished goods can be replaced by decentralized production for local consumption, using locally available materials. The decline of international trade will undermine a powerful source of common interest. Further, artificial intelligence will displace skilled as well as unskilled labor. A world system based on wage labor, transnational capitalism and global markets will necessarily give way. We imagine that a golden age is possible, but we don’t know how to organize one. As global capitalism retreats, it will leave behind a world dominated by politics, and possibly feudal concentrations of wealth and power. Economic insecurity, and fears for the material and moral future of humankind may lead to the rise of demagogic and intemperate national leaders. With almost two hundred sovereign nations, each struggling to create a new economic and social order, perhaps the most predictable outcome is chaos: shifting alignments, displaced populations, power struggles, ethnic conflicts inflamed by demagogues, class conflicts, land disputes, etc. Small and underdeveloped nations will be more than ever dependent on the major powers for access to technology, and more than ever vulnerable to sophisticated forms of control or subversion, or to outright domination. Competition among the leading technological powers for the political loyalty of clients might imply reversion to some form of nationalistic imperialism. Capitalism K 2AC Turn: Capitalism encourages liberty and altruism. Revolt against the market guarantees slavery and oppression. Martin Wolf, chief economic commentator for the Financial Times, 9-10, 2003, “Morality of the Market”, a/online The market economy rests on and encourages valuable moral qualities; provides unprecedented opportunities for people to engage in altruistic activities; underpins individual freedom and democracy; and has created societies that are, in all significant respects, less unequal than the traditional hierarchies that preceded them. In short, capitalism is the most inherently just economic system that humankind has ever devised. It is true that market economies neither create, nor reward, saints. But consider the virtuous behavior that capitalism fosters: trustworthiness, reliability, individual initiative, civility, self-reliance, and selfrestraint. These qualities are, critics correctly note, placed in the service of self-interest. Since people are, with few exceptions, self-interested, that should be neither surprising nor shocking. Yet people are also not completely self-interested. Prosperous market economies generate a vast number of attractive opportunities for those who are not motivated by wealth alone. People can seek employment with non-governmental organizations or charities. They can work in the public sector, as doctors, teachers, or police officers. They can teach the iniquities of capitalism in schools and universities. Those who make a great deal of money can use it for any purpose they wish. They can give it away, for example. Quite a few have. In the advanced market economies, people care deeply about eliminating pain and injustice and ensuring the welfare of fellow humans and, more recently, animals. This concern exists because a rich, liberal society places enormous emphasis on the health and well-being of the individual. Life is no longer nasty, brutish, and short; rather, it is gentle, kind, and long, and more precious than before. The savage punishments and casual indignities of two centuries ago are no longer acceptable to civilized people. Nor are slavery and serfdom, both of which were rendered obsolete and immoral under the capitalist system. Militarists, extreme nationalists, communists, and fascists—the antiliberals—brought these horrors back, if only temporarily. And it is no accident that the creeds that brought them back were fiercely anti-individualistic and anti-market. The race for wealth is inevitable. Allowing growth through capitalism is crucial to preventing domination through military expansion. James Wilson, professor of Government at Harvard, 1997, “The morality of capitalism, a/online Critics of capitalism argue that wealth confers power, and indeed it does, up to a point. Show people the road to wealth, status, or power, and they will rush down that road, and many will do some rather unattractive things along the way. But this is not a decisive criticism unless one supposes, fancifully, that there is some way to arrange human affairs so that the desire for advantage vanishes. The real choice is between becoming wealthy by first acquiring political or military power, or getting money directly without bothering with conquest or domination. If it is in man’s nature to seek domination over other men, there are really only two ways to make that domination work. One is military power, and that is the principle upon which domination existed from the beginning of man’s time on this earth to down about two hundred years ago, when it began to be set aside by another principle, namely the accum-ulation of wealth. Now you may feel that men should not try to dominate other men – although I do not see how you could believe this in Australia given the importance attached to sports. You may like to replace man’s desire to dominate other men, and in a few cases it is prevented by , you only have two choices, and if you choose to compete economically you will reduce the extent to which one group of men will tyrannise over another by the use of military might or political power. religious conversion or a decent temperament. But as long as the instinct persists Capitalism K 2AC Revolutions fail to engage the root of the problem. Michael Zimmerman, professor of philosophy @ Tulane, 1989, “We Need New Myths”, pp 24 Marxism, as Robert Tucker has argued, can be seen as a distorted mythic symbol in which the struggle of good and evil within the individual is projected onto social classes: the blood-sucking capitalist class fights (vainly) to dominate the creative-productive working class. When the capitalist class is destroyed by the proletariat, alienation will supposedly be destroyed as well. If Marxist revolutionaries can bring down the center of capitalism, the United States, world-history will supposedly begin its Golden Age. This myth is so attractive to many people because it portrays in social-class terms the problems that each individual must face. A person committed to the revolutionary cause can through this projection postpone the painful process of their own individuation. It goes without saying, of course, that capitalism is in fact responsible for social ills, but neither the capitalist class nor its individual constituents are the embodiment and source of evil. The dark side is an aspect of every human being; it cannot be eliminated by social revolution The belief that capitalism is the root cause of all societal ill closes the possibility of pragmatic solutions, and fractures the movement by isolating moderates as capitalists. Richard Levin, president of Yale, 1998, The Minnesota Review, 48-49, a/online 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. The same Marxist critic who called me a "self-confessed liberal" also called me, in another essay published in the same year, a "reactionary" ("Terminator" 64), and Donald Morton and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh consign Gerald Graff, Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty, and Andrew Ross to the same camp as Rush Limbaugh (32-33). (Neilson and Meyerson's attack on Bérubé is more restrained--the worst thing they call him is a "liberal pluralist" [45: 267, 47: 239, 245]; but they try to connect him, as I noted, to support of the far right in Central America.) Such people need a simplistic division of the political world into two polar opposites with no awkward alternatives (just as they need a simplistic explanation of the cause and cure of all our problems), because they can't tolerate complexity or uncertainty. That mental set, I believe, is the most significant similarity (or "equivalence") between the far right and far left. Capitalism K 2AC Transformation is impossible. Lack of a clear alternative to capitalism dooms their criticism Joel Jay Kassiola, Dean of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, San Francisco State University, 1990, The Death of Industrial Civilization, p. 159 Transformational or revolutionary action will be difficult to mobilize— let alone implement— without a set of alternative social goals and practices implied by a different worldview and values informing such action. This is so, unless, of course, one wishes to be exclusively negative in one’s critique by advocating the destruction of current social aims and arrangements and leaving it to others at a later, and presumably more propitious, time to create a new social order; for example, as with certain anarchists’ positions such as the nineteenth century, Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin’s “creative destruction.” The risk here is that the new yet to be determined society could be worse than the one changed. Furthermore, by omitting a vision of a supposedly superior, alternative society the achievement of social transformation is thwarted because the proposed theoretical structure or “city coming into being in speech,” as Plato formulates it in The Republic,’ can neither guide political action, so that people know what to strive for, nor provide the evaluative criteria with which to judge how successful their action has been in creating a new—and supposedly better— civilization. 1AR – Transition Bad Any attempt to break free of the global economy will face immediate destruction Ted Trainer, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Social Work, University of New South Wales, last updated 2/17/2003, http://www.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/02-TheSimpler-Way.html, accessed 4/28/03 "When corporations rule the world" This heading, the title of a recent book by David Korten, sums up the situation that has arisen over the last 20 years. A tiny corporate super-rich class has risen to extraordinary wealth and power and are now able to more or less run the world in the ways that suit it. (About 1% of the world’s people now control more than half the capital; Note 7.) They run the transnational corporations, the media and especially the World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organisation. Their wealth funds the think tanks, foundations, universities, journals etc which pump out the message that the neo-liberal way is the best and the only way. Governments eagerly comply with this agenda. Rich world military power is liable to be used ruthlessly against nations which interfere with this agenda of free access for corporations and integration of all regions into the one global market (e.g., Yugoslavia, Iraq.) Much of the literature on globalisation is alarmed at this situation of corporate rule; (see especially Chussudowsky, 1996, Fotopolous, 2002, and many of the works by Chomsky.) There are good reasons for thinking that it is now too late to do anything about this rapid surge to world domination by the super-rich, especially since the "war on terrorism" has provided a perfect pretext for crushing dissent. Elite attempts to halt transition will kill billions and crush the earth’s carrying capacity Chris Lewis, Professor of American Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, 1998, in The Coming Age of Scarcity, ed Dobkowski and Wallimann, p 56-57 Most critics would argue, probably correctly, that instead of allowing underdeveloped countries to withdraw from the global economy and undermine the economies of the developed world, the United States, Europe, and Japan and others will fight neocolonial wars to force these countries to remain within this collapsing global economy. These neocolonial wars will result in mass death, suffering, and even regional nuclear wars. If First World countries choose military confrontation and political repression to maintain the global economy, then we may see mass death and genocide on a global scale that will make the deaths of World War II pale in comparison. However, these neocolonial wars, fought to maintain the developed nations’ economic and political hegemony, will cause the final collapse of our global industrial civilization. These wars will so damage the complex economic and trading networks and squander material, biological, and energy resources that they will undermine the global economy and its ability to support the earth’s 6 to 8 billion people. This would be the worst-case scenario for the collapse of global civilization. 1AR – Transition Bad De-development is classist and maintains capitalism, even when it’s working at its peak. Pip Hinman, staff writer, 1996, “Utopia Revisited”, greenleft.org, a/online But only those with the material means and political power are in a position to do this. Sadly, the majority of people haven't a choice about their work, housing and transportation, a fact which Trainer, at times, seems to skip over. Most of the examples of what Trainer considers to be on the way to becoming "radical conserver societies" pose no challenge to capitalism even if they achieve a high level of self-sufficiency. Indeed, the Israeli kibbutz movement is an integral part of a capitalist expansionist project. Attempts to escape capitalism create worse conditions Martin Peretz, Lecturer in Social Studies, Harvard; February 3, 2003 New Republic What is the grand "progressive" vision for which the French left fights, which the Zionists and Jews are insidiously holding back? In the grand conflicts of the last century, there was always a left-wing structure of Manichaeanism. On the one side: imperialism and capitalism. On the other: a compelling and revolutionary dream. The dreams turned out to be nightmares. But they were dreams, nonetheless. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Che, the Viet Cong, the Sandinistas, always a man and a movement saying they aimed to build a better world, which they actually tried to describe. In the end, of course, the better world did not arrive: In its place were death camps, mass deportations, forced famines, massacres, reeducation programs, prisons of the body, and greater prisons of the soul. Capitalism Good – Racism Capitalism solves racism. James Wilson, professor of Government at Harvard, 1997, “The morality of capitalism, a/online Capitalism promotes civility in another way: it makes prejudice too expensive to afford. The great Nobel laureate economist, Gary Becker pointed this out in a book written 40 years ago. People didn’t take it seriously then but I think we must take it seriously now. If you say to yourself that you will not serve or employ blacks, or Turks, or Cypriots, or whatever group your society happens to be hostile to, you will reduce the number of customers you can reach and the number of potential employees you can hire. This has the effect of shrinking your market and raising the wages of those employees whom you can hire. Now in some environments, such as in the American south until the 1960s, it was possible to maintain segregation in public facilities, because the legal system and its surrounding culture supported segregation so strongly that a businessperson had no chance. Embedded in a thoroughly racist community, capitalism could easily exist side by side with prejudice, because there are no competitive disadvantages to acting on the basis of prejudice. But once that legal and cultural system began to crack, once there were a few opportunities for hiring people on a nondiscriminatory basis or serving customers on a non-discriminatory basis, firms changed dramatically. The nationwide firms changed the fastest, because they realised that capitalism is incompatible with prejudice. None of this is to deny the important role played by law, court order, and the example of desegregated government agencies. But imagine rapid desegregation occurring if only law were operating. It would be slow, uneven, and painful. Public schools desegregated more slowly than hotels and restaurants, not only because white parents cared more about whom their children went to school with than about who was in the next hotel room or at the next café table, but also because school authorities lacked any market incentive to admit more or different pupils. Indeed, a statist economy will not only resist desegregation, it will allocate economic benefits – franchises, licenses, credit – precisely on the basis of political, class, ethnic or racial status. It is capitalism that really requires a cosmopolitan attitude. Capitalism Good – Environmental Protection Capitalism is crucial to preserving the environment and saving lives. Jerry Taylor, director of natural resource studies @ Cato, 4/23/ 2003, http://www.cato.org/dailys/0423-03-2.html Indeed, we wouldn't even have environmentalists in our midst were it not for capitalism. Environmental amenities, after all, are luxury goods. America -- like much of the Third World today -- had no environmental movement to speak of until living standards rose sufficiently so that we could turn our attention from simply providing for food, shelter, and a reasonable education to higher "quality of life" issues. The richer you are, the more likely you are to be an environmentalist. And people wouldn't be rich without capitalism. Wealth not only breeds environmentalists, it begets environmental quality. There are dozens of studies showing that , as per capita income initially rises from subsistence levels, air and water pollution increases correspondingly. But once per capita income hits between $3,500 and $15,000 (dependent upon the pollutant), the ambient concentration of pollutants begins to decline just as rapidly as it had previously increased. This relationship is found for virtually every significant pollutant in every single region of the planet. It is an iron law. Given that wealthier societies use more resources than poorer societies, such findings are indeed counterintuitive. But the data don't lie. How do we explain this? The obvious answer -- that wealthier societies are willing to trade-off the economic costs of government regulation for environmental improvements and that poorer societies are not -- is only partially correct. In the United States, pollution declines generally predated the passage of laws mandating pollution controls. In fact, for most pollutants, declines were greater before the federal government passed its panoply of environmental regulations than after the EPA came upon the scene. Much of this had to do with individual demands for environmental quality. People who could afford cleaner-burning furnaces, for instance, bought them. People who wanted recreational services spent their money accordingly, creating profit opportunities for the provision of untrammeled nature. Property values rose in cleaner areas and declined in more polluted areas, shifting capital from Brown to Green investments. Market agents will supply whatever it is that people are willing to spend money on. And when people are willing to spend money on environmental quality, the market will provide it. Meanwhile, capitalism rewards efficiency and punishes waste. Profit-hungry companies found ingenious ways to reduce the natural resource inputs necessary to produce all kinds of goods, which in turn reduced environmental demands on the land and the amount of waste that flowed through smokestacks and water pipes. As we learned to do more and more with a given unit of resources, the waste involved (which manifests itself in the form of pollution) shrank. This trend was magnified by the shift away from manufacturing to service industries, which characterizes wealthy, growing economies. The latter are far less pollutionintensive than the former. But the former are necessary prerequisites for the latter. Property rights -- a necessary prerequisite for free market economies -- also provide strong incentives to invest in resource health. Without them, no one cares about future returns because no one can be sure they'll be around to reap the gains. Property rights are also important means by which private desires for resource conservation and preservation can be realized. When the government, on the other hand, holds a monopoly on such decisions, minority preferences in developing societies are overruled (see the old Soviet block for details). Furthermore, only wealthy societies can afford the investments necessary to secure basic environmental improvements, such as sewage treatment and electrification. Unsanitary water and the indoor air pollution (caused primarily by burning organic fuels in the home for heating and cooking needs) are directly responsible for about 10 million deaths a year in the DEVELOPING[SIC]Third World, making poverty the number one environmental killer on the planet today. Capitalism can save more lives threatened by environmental pollution than all the environmental organizations combined. Finally, the technological advances that are part and parcel of growing economies create more natural resources than they consume. That's because what is or is not a "natural resource" is dependent upon our ability to harness the resource in question for human benefit. Resources are therefore a function of human knowledge. Because the stock of human knowledge increases faster in free economies than it does in socialist economies, it should be no surprise that most natural resources in the western world are more abundant today than ever before no matter which measure one uses. Capitalism Good– Democracy Capitalism is the soil of morality and individualism that is key for the successful growth of democracy. . James Wilson, professor of Government at Harvard, 1997, “The morality of capitalism, a/online These are the assumptions upon which a capitalist order rests, and I think most people hearing them described will not dissent profoundly from this argument. But now the more controversial part of my argument. My second point is that capitalism in the long run strengthens the moral sensibilities. It does so by sustaining a liberal social order, by sustaining and indeed creating criticism of capitalism itself, and by enhancing civility among citizens. Capitalism is essential to liberalism – and by liberalism I mean the principles around which a free society is organised. 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. There are capitalist economies that exist in authoritarian states but they do not do very well. There is a relationship between democracy and capitalism that the defenders of democracy often overlook to their great disadvantage. Growth Good -- Growth Solves Crunch Growth key to solving scarcity. Michael Zey, PhD and director of the Expansionary Institute, 2000, The Future Factor, 20 Our efforts to achieve dominionization over the basic forces of nature and over the Earth itself have a major beneficial by-product—the creation of a superabundance of food, goods, sources of energy, and manufactured products. This end of scarcity on a global level is a landmark event in human history. During the Macroindustrial Era, we are redefining the concept of "the good life." More important, the rapid diffusion of wealth and wealth-generating technologies and knowledge is in turn enabling the global population to participate in the dominionization process. In the agricultural domain, breakthroughs in biotechnology and genetic engineering will deliver to humanity a veritable cornucopia of new agricultural products that resist disease, frost, and infestation, and have a longer shelf life. Cell factories and plant tissue technology are making possible the mass production of vegetable and fruit in artificial environments. Hydroponic plants will grow in waterless soil! The sum total of these efforts will provide goods and food to the multibillions inhabiting our planet—for the first time in human history the world's population will be well fed, well clothed, and comfortably housed. And a very large population could be served, perhaps 40 to 50 billion people or more. Growth Good -- Growth Solves Environmental Destruction Growth and technology are crucial to halting environmental degradation. Michael Zey, PhD and director of the Expansionary Institute, 2000, The Future Factor, 22-23 Humankind's invention of the "supertree" illustrates one of the least-acknowledged benefits of the hyperprogress occurring during the Macroindustrial Era: although economic, technological, and industrial growth occasionally cause problems, such as pollution and possible reduction in the supply of some natural resources, our technology ultimately generates solutions to the very problems it creates. Our civilization requires wood and paper products to continue progressing. In the process we temporarily reduce the available source of these wood products, namely trees. However, our resourceful species just as quickly replaces these commodities—in this case we applied genetic engineering techniques to produce greater quantities of wood. In fact, economic growth and technology directly counteract environmental degradation. Studies indicate that while a developing country's early economic growth initially can lead to pollution and waste, once that nation achieves true prosperity it then possesses the resources to clean its air and purify its water. In his 1999 book, Earth Odyssey, environmentalist David Hertsgaard reports that the poorest cities, not the most prosperous, were usually the most polluted. The citizens in these places can buy cars, but cannot afford cars with catalytic converters. According to the World Bank, once a nation's per capita income rises to about $4000 in 1993 dollars, it produces less of many pollutants per capita. At this income level a nation can now afford to purchase the technology to purify its coal exhausts and the sewage systems that treat and eliminate a variety of wastes. 12 Although China is switching to cleaner technologies such as nuclear, it still favors the use of its locally abundant, and therefore cheaper, resource, coal. We can predict that once countries like China become more affluent they will have the wherewithal to clean up their atmosphere. Technology is now being used to deal with waste produced by tanker accidents and other unexpected events that can send millions of gallons of oil or other chemicals gushing into our pristine lakes and oceans. One novel method, bioremediation, uses microbes, bacteria as it were, as a veritable cleanup crew, for everything from nuclear waste to oil spills. This new environmental technology is based upon the notion that bacteria are the perfect agents to literally "eat" industrial waste. U.S. Microbics is one company that specializes in this increasingly popular technique. (Publicly held, its stock symbol is BUGS . . . seriously.) In early 1999, it announced that its new production plant had commenced shipping microbial blends to treat hydrocarbon-contaminated soil. U.S. Microbics used biotechnology, bacteria mostly, to clean up sewage wastes, including diesel oil spills. According to the company, "naturally occurring bacteria blends are used to convert the hazardous diesel fuel into harmless, earth-friendly, chemical byproducts." Cap good – poverty Growth empirically reduces poverty Seth W. Norton, Aldeen Professor of Business at Wheaton College, Fall 2002, http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj22n2/cj22n2-5.pdf, accessed 4/26/03 The more relevant issue is the role of economic growth in reducing poverty. The trickle-up contention and the jaundiced view of trickledown —the trickle is just a small trickle—rest strongly on the contention that it is the “quality of growth” and the redistribution of the benefits of growth, not growth itself, that leads to the elimination of poverty. The results documented in Tables 2 and 3 challenge that assertion. For example, suppose the poor countries of the world experienced average economic growth of 5 percent per annum. After 5 years, the compounded income would result in an increase of about 27.62 percent. Ignoring the effect of the other income group, the impact of the rich stratum’s income growth would decrease the death rate (“Death by 40”) by about 3.76 percent, whereas an increase in the income of the poor stratum would reduce the death rate by about 2.55 percent.4 Thus, in the ceteris paribus sense, the poverty reduction by growth of the richest class’s income would generate a greater effect than the poverty reduction attributable to the growth of poor class’s income. However, incomes of the rich and poor do not grow in a ceteris paribus sense. The incomes of the rich and the poor actually grow together as Table 1 clearly documents. More importantly, the data show that poverty falls as the rich get richer. Thus, economic growth should enhance the well-being of the poor as well as the rich. We can directly examine the role of economic growth in ameliorating poverty as measured by the HPI. Table 4 contains regression estimates of the impact of economic growth, as measured by the percentage growth rates in per capita GDP for various time periods, on the HPI. For control purposes, the initial per capita GDP levels are also included in the estimates to assure that the results deal with growth and not just the dispersion of income across countries.5 The results show that the growth rates for all periods are significant determinants of poverty rates, and the sign is negative in all cases—i.e., economic growth reduces measured poverty rates. Moreover, the explanatory power of growth rates increases somewhat as the period lengthens, with the maximum explanatory power occurring with the 1970–90 estimate. The use of the components of the HPI in comparable regressions in Table 5, using only the estimate from Table 4 with the highest adjusted R-squared (the 1970–90 estimate), provides further evidence of the benefits of economic growth to the poor. In particular, if growth increased one standard deviation above the mean for the 1970–90 period (i.e., by .44), the proportion of the population surviving to age 40 would increase by almost 6 percentage points. At the sample mean, there would be a reduction from about 21 percent not surviving to age 40 to about 15 percent. Growth solves mass poverty and vastly increases living standards Ian Vásquez, director of the Cato Institute's Project on Global Economic Liberty, September 2001, http://www.cato.org/research/articles/vas-0109.html, accessed 4/26/03 The historical record is clear: the single, most effective way to reduce world poverty is economic growth. Western countries began discovering this around 1820 when they broke with the historical norm of low growth and initiated an era of dramatic advances in material well-being. Living standards tripled in Europe and quadrupled in the United States in that century, improving at an even faster pace in the next 100 years. Economic growth thus eliminated mass poverty in what is today considered the developed world. Taking the long view, growth has also reduced poverty in other parts of the world: in 1820, about 75 percent of humanity lived on less than a dollar per day; today about 20 percent live under that amount. Cap good – poverty Growth is the main force behind poverty reduction, and contractions increase poverty Ian Vásquez, director of the Cato Institute's Project on Global Economic Liberty, September 2001, http://www.cato.org/research/articles/vas-0109.html, accessed 4/26/03 The pattern of poverty reduction we see around the world should not be surprising. It generally follows the relationship found by a recent World Bank study that looked at growth in 65 developing countries during the 1980s and 1990s. The share of people in poverty, defined as those living on less than a dollar per day, almost always declined in countries that experienced growth and increased in countries that experienced economic contractions. The faster the growth, the study found, the faster the poverty reduction, and vice versa. For example, an economic expansion in per capita income of 8.2 percent translated into a 6.1 reduction in the poverty rate. A contraction of 1.9 percent in output led to an increase of 1.5 percent in the poverty rate. That relationship explains why some countries and regions have done better than others. "Between 1987 and 1998, there was only one region of the world that saw a dramatic fall in both the number of people and the proportion of the population living on less than a dollar a day. That region was East Asia," observes economist Martin Wolf. "But this was also the only region to see consistent and rapid growth in real incomes per head." High growth allowed East Asia to reduce the share of its poor during this period from 26 to 15 percent and the number of poor from 417 million to 278 million people. With annual growth rates of nearly 9 percent since 1979, when it began introducing market reforms, China alone has pulled more than 100 million people out of poverty. The more modest but increasing growth rate in India during the past decade means that the outlook of the poor in the two countries that make up half of the developing world's population is noticeably improving. Cap good – racism Capitalism prevents racism Martin W. Lewis, associate research professor of geography, co-director of Comparative Area Studies, Duke University, 1992, Green Delusions, pp. 173-174 Business leaders have opposed apartheid not because of their magnaniniity, but rather because discrimination is m many respects highly disfunctional for the economy. Many South African companies have long suffered from shortages of skilled labor, yet they have been politically prevented from tapping a huge segment of the populace for such posidons. As a result, wages for white workers have been far greater than the market would dictate, a situation hardly advantageous for capital. Even more importantly, the fact that so many people have been reduced to dire poverty by political edict greatly reduces the internal South African market, which in turn undercuts the potential profitability of consumergoods firms. The underdevelopment of the consumer economy, m turn, severely hampers the country’s overall economic performance. The same underlying patterns may be seen, albeit in weaker form, in the United States. It was, of course, the capitalistic Republican Party that dismantled slavery; until relatively recent times the Democratic Party of workers and farmers formed the bulwark of discrimination. As a system, capitalism thrives on equality of opportunity. Efficient corporations welcome talented individuals from all social ranks into their middle and upper echelons—so long as they are adept at making profits. Thus the editor of Fortune magazine tells us that “One of America’s great competitive weapons is that we are far ahead of the Japanese and most other foreign competitors in at last beginning to admit women to positions of real power” (July 30, 1990, p. 4). Of course, individual capitalists can be as bigoted as any one else, and many are blind to the general requirements of the system as a whole. And so too, equality of opportunity must never be confused with social equity, as those individuals lacking the demanded skills and motivation will always be poorly rewarded by the rational corporation. Cap survival Embracing capitalism is the only way to ensure human survival Michael Zey, executive director of the Expansionary Institute, Professor of Management at Montclair State University, 1998, Seizing the Future, p. 34, pp. 39-40 However, no outside force guarantees the continued progress of the human species, nor does anything mandate that the human species must even continue to exist. In fact, history is littered with races and civilizations that have disappeared without a trace. So, too, could the human species. There is no guarantee that the human species will survive even if we posit, as many have, a special purpose to the species’ existence. Therefore, the species innately comprehends that it must engage in purposive actions in order to maintain its level of growth and progress. Humanity’s future is conditioned by what I call the Imperative of Growth, a principle I will herewith describe along with its several corollaries. The Imperative of Growth states that in order to survive, any nation, indeed, the human race, must grow, both materially and intellectually. The Macroindustrial Era represents growth in the areas of both technology and human development, a natural stage in the evolution of the species’ continued extension of its control over itself and its environment. Although 5 billion strong, our continued existence depends on our ability to continue the progress we have been making at higher and higher levels. Systems, whether organizations, societies, or cells, have three basic directions in which to move. They can grow, decline, or temporarily reside in a state of equilibrium. These are the choices. Choosing any alternative to growth, for instance, stabilization of production/consumption through zero-growth policies, could have alarmingly pernicious side effects, including extinction. He continues… The fifth corollary of the Imperative of Growth claims that a society can remain in a state of equilibrium only temporarily. In reality, a society seemingly in a phase where it neither improves nor regresses is actually in a transition to either growth or decline. Such periods easily seduce their contemporaries into a false sense of security, that their institutions will last forever, they have all the science they need, and there are no more challenges. In fact, during such periods some imagine that they have reached their “golden age,” perhaps even the “end of history.” During such periods of supposed equilibrium, the population ceases to prepare itself for new challenges and becomes risk averse. Importantly, they reject the idea that growth and progress are necessary for their survival. The sixth corollary evolves from the fifth. If the system chooses not to grow, it will decline and eventually disappear, either because other organisms or systems overtake it or because it is impossible to maintain itself even at static levels without in some way deteriorating. This is the Law of Spiraling Regression. It is indeed a curiosity of the late-twentieth-century culture that this truism has been ignored. In the morass of claims about the risks of technological growth and its impact on the ecosystem, the mainstream media and orthodox academics have decided not to consider what harm the full pursuance of zero growth or non growth might inflict on the sociotechnical system, which includes our technological infrastructure, culture, and standard of living. Growth good saves the environment Growth stops people from destroying the environment to survive Bill Emmott, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, 2003, 20:21 Vision, p. 268 Inequality may also bring a risk of environmental degradation, for poor countries may be unable to deal safely with toxic pollutants, or may be so desperate in the face of population growth and poverty that they permit actions, such as deforestation, that have a damaging influence on the global climate. In general, rising incomes bring better control of environmental damage, as Chapter ii will argue. A few extreme environmentalists raise concern about any and all economic growth in poor countries, for in the short term that growth could bring on new environmental challenges, such as the burning of coal and other dirty fuels in Chinese homes and factories. But it would surely be intolerably selfish to deny poor countries advancement on those grounds. The bigger ground for concern is pollution out of desperation: the resort by the poorest to shortsighted forms of agriculture or industry, in the absence of any other means of survival. Ecological protection is only possible with through growth Jack Hollander, Professor of Energy & Resources at Berkeley, 2003, The Real Environmental Crisis, pp. 183-184, pp. 193-194 The Endangered Species Act (ESA) embodies many of this book’s themes and can even be seen as one of its major focal points. It is probably the most far-reaching environmental statute ever adopted by any nation. The act is solidly grounded in the moral commitment of the American people to preserve their environment and is a demonstration of the claim, made throughout this book, that free and affluent people will take action to protect their environment when they perceive an important problem and believe there is an effective solution. Scientists, environmentalists, and legislators played important roles, to be sure, but at bottom the Endangered Species Act belongs to the American people. Such a mandate, involving huge expenditures of public and private money, could not have come out of a country whose citizens were not dedicated to environmental quality. Nor could the act have come out of an impoverished country. In fact, the gap between rich and poor countries in biodiversity conservation investments is enormous. In the developed countries, the average investment in protected areas is about $1,687 per square kilometer, whereas in the poor countries the average investment is only $161. This despite the fact that both the biological diversity and threats to that diversity in poor countries are often much greater than in rich countries. He continues… Whether in affluent or developing countries, the link between economic growth and environmental quality is vital. This link was recognized as a principle by the Brundtland report, and it has been confirmed by the actual experience of many affluent countries. In these pages the emphasis has been on the historical experience of the United States, whose robust economic growth and unequaled affluence have stimulated and supported ever stricter environmental protection, including measures such as the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, vehicle fuel-efficiency standards, and the unique Endangered Species Act. Such environmental advances come out of affluence, not poverty. Growth good saves the environment Growth spawns environmentalism and regulations to prevent destruction Jack Hollander, Professor of Energy & Resources at Berkeley, 2003, The Real Environmental Crisis, pp. 2-3 Environmentalists are made, not born. In the industrial countries environmentalism arose as a reaction to the negative impacts of early industrialization and economic growth. On the way from subsistence to affluence, people developed a greater sense of social responsibility and had more time and energy to reflect about environmental quality. They had experienced environmental deterioration firsthand, and they demanded improvement. One of the great success stories of the recent half-century is, in fact, the remarkable progress the industrial societies have made, during a period of robust economic growth, in reversing the negative environmental impacts of industrialization. In the United States the air is cleaner and the drinking water purer than at any time in five decades; the food supply is more abundant and safer than ever before; the forested area is the highest in three hundred years; most rivers and lakes are clean again; and, largely because of technological innovation and the information revolution, industry, buildings, and transportation systems are more energy- and resource-efficient than at any time in the past. This is not to say that the resource/environment situation in the United States is near perfect or even totally satisfactory— of course it is not. Much more needs to be done. But undeniably, the improvements have been remarkable. They have come about in a variety of ways—through government regulation, through taxation, through financial incentives, through community actions. Most important, these environmental improvements cannot be credited solely to government, environmental organizations, or lobbyists, though each has played an important role. Rather, they have come about because the majority of citizens in this and every other democratic affluent society demands a clean and livable environment. Does this imply that the affluent have achieved an improved environment in their own lands by exporting their pollution to the lands of the poor? That has rarely been the case. (See the discussion of exporting pollution in Chapter 7.) Empirically, human behavior will adapt to prevent ecocide Bill Emmott, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, 2003, 20:21 Vision, pp. 281-282 Certainly, things have changed. After all, the world’s populanon has more than trebled in the past hundred years, and world output has risen even faster. So it is only natural to expect that the earth itself will have been affected. But one would also expect people’s behavior to have changed in response. People depend on the earth for their food, air and water, and for other less vital resources too. So they have a strong incentive to protect their enviromnent in ways relevant to their needs, comfort and survival, and a strong incentive to learn both from bad experiences and from new scientific discoveries. If people typically lived, consumed and produced things now in the same way that they did in 1900 (or 1950, or indeed 1980), the world would be a pretty disgusting place: smelly, dangerous, insanitary, toxic and worse. But they don’t. The streets of London or other big, rich cities are no longer full of horse manure, or blanketed in smoky fog, or full of open sewers; houses are no longer full of harmful smoke (not even from cigarettes, one of the biggest killers), and water is cleaner both from the taps and in the rivers and seas. The reasons why people in the rich, developed world have changed the way they live, and why the environment has not in fact been turned to rack and ruin, have to do with prices, technological innovation, social change and, in democracies, government regulation in response to popular pressure. And those reasons are why today’s much larger environmental problems in the developing countries ought, in principle, to be solvable. Growth good saves the environment Liberalization causes industries to use better environmental practices Susmita Dasgupta, professor of economics at American University, senior economist at the World Bank, et all, Winter 2002, http://fletcher.tufts.edu/staff/mkahn/.%5Cpdf248spring03%5CWheeler.pdf, accessed 5/3/03 Elimination of government subsidies often has an environmentally beneficial effect in this context. The heaviest polluters often receive subsidies, because they operate in sectors such as steel and petrochemicals where state intervention has been common. Privatization and reduction of subsidies tend to reduce the scale of such activities, while expanding production in the assembly and service sectors that emit fewer pollutants (Dasgupta, Wang and Wheeler, 1997; Lucas, Hettige and Wheeler, 1992; Jha, Markandya and Vossenaar, 1999; Birdsall and Wheeler, 1993). Elimination of energy subsidies increases energy efficiency, shifts industry away from energy-intensive sectors, and reduces demand for pollution-intensive power (Vukina, Beghin and Solakoglu, 1999; World Bank, 1999). However, higher energy prices also induce shifts from capital- and energy-intensive production techniques to labor- and materials-intensive techniques, which are often more pollutionintensive in other ways (Mani, Hettige and Wheeler, 2000). Economic liberalization also has a common effect, at least in pollution-intensive sectors, of enlarging the market share of larger plants that operate at more efficient scale (Wheeler, 2000; Hettige, Dasgupta and Wheeler, 2000). This change often involves a shift toward publicly held firms at the expense of family firms. The improvement in efficiency means less pollution per unit of production, although larger plants may also concentrate pollution in a certain locality (Lucas, Dasgupta and Wheeler, 2001). In China, stateowned enterprises have much higher costs for reducing air pollution because they are operated less efficiently. Figure 3 displays recent econometric estimates of control costs for sulfur dioxide air pollution in large Chinese factories (Dasgupta, Wang and Wheeler, 1997).1 The level of polluting emissions also reflects managers’ technology decisions. In the OECD countries, innovations have generated significantly cleaner technologies that are available at incremental cost to producers in developing countries. Even in weakly regulated economies, many firms have adopted these cleaner technologies because they are more profitable. Increased openness to trade also tends to lower the price of cleaner imported technologies, while increasing the competitive pressure to adopt them if they are also more efficient (Reppelin-Hill, 1999; Huq, Martin and Wheeler, 1993; Martin and Wheeler, 1992). Thus, firms in relatively open developing economies adopt cleaner technologies more quickly (Birdsall and Wheeler, 1993; Huq, Martin and Wheeler, 1993). Growth stops war Growth reduces conflict, while downswings greatly increase risk of war Paul Collier, director, Development Research Group at the World Bank; professor of economics at Oxford, 2000, in Greed and Grievance, ed. Berdal and Malone, pp. 97-98 The only result that supports the grievance approach to conflict is that a prior period of rapid economic decline increases the risk of conflict. Each 5 percent of annual growth rate has about the same effect as a year of education for the population in reducing the risk of conflict. Thus, a society in which the economy is growing by 5 percent is around 40 percent safer than one that is declining by 5 percent, other things equal. Presumably, growth gives hope, whereas rapid decline may galvanize people into action. Inequality, whether measured in terms of income or landownership, has no effect on the risk of conflict according to the data. This is, of course, surprising given the attention inequality has received as an explanation of conflict. The results cannot, however, be lightly dismissed. For example, the measures of inequality have proved to be significant in explaining economic growth and so are evidenfly not so noisy as to lack explanatory power. Nor is our result dependent upon a particular specification. Anke Hoeffler and I have experimented with well over a hundred variants of our core specification, and in none of these is inequality a significant cause of conflict. (By contrast, primary commodity exports are always significant.) Growth is key to peaceful conflict resolution and prevention Indra de Soysa, senior research associate at the International Peace Research Institute, 2000, in Greed and Grievance, ed. Berdal and Malone, p. 126 The question is, How can a country escape from resource dependence and manage to innovate? Economic growth is vital because the raising of per capita income proxies innovative capabilities. Bringing about economic growth through development assistance is one obvious answer. Countries with higher per capita wealth are far less likely to suffer internal conflict and are more likely to exhibit strong democracy—which is widely seen as promoting peace and conflict resolution. Thus, renewed efforts at promoting economic growth and democratic institutions seem to be the best longterm strategy for creating what UNESCO has termed “a culture of peace” in the developing world. Growth solves international conflicts Leonard Silk, Distinguished Professor of Economics at Pace University; Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution, 1992 / 1993 Foreign Affairs But slow growth in the world economy now makes the danger of a reversion to beggar-thy-neighbor policies a real one. n11 Some see the three major economic powers -- the United States, Germany and Japan -- riding in different directions and threatening to pull the world economy apart. But the interdependence resulting from economic integration has greatly reduced the effective autonomy of even large national economies. Nations have found that their policies are now less potent domestically, affect other countries more strongly and produce sharp and often unwelcome changes in the trade and payments balances and exchange rates that link them with others. n11 See Jeffrey E. Garten, A Cold Peace: America, Japan, Germany, and the Struggle for Supremacy, a Twentieth Century Fund Book, Times Books, 1992. In this changed world, cooperation among the major economies in policymaking has become increasingly important. But there are no technical solutions to the economic problems the world is facing. What is most needed is the political will -- the will of the United States, Germany, Japan and other major industrial countries to deal more effectively with their own problems and the will of all the major developed countries to work together for a common end. The most important challenge for economic cooperation in the years ahead will be to keep the world economy growing at a vigorous and sustainable pace. With real economic growth the serious problems of world debt, unbalanced trade, currency disequilibrium and unemployment -- as well as the social, ethnic, racial and nationalist tensions and the violence to which they give rise -- can be contained, and progress made toward their solutions. Growth stops war Development diversifies exports and increases education, solving the two root causes of war Indra de Soysa, senior research associate at the International Peace Research Institute, 2000, in Greed and Grievance, ed. Berdal and Malone, p. 116, p. 127 Collier finds that ethnic heterogeneity and income inequality are mostly unrelated to conflict. Primary goods exports and average years of schooling in the male population, however, are strongly related to conflict. A large share of primary goods in exports provides a revenue stream easy to capture, offering the motivation for rebels to coalesce in seeking loot. The average years of schooling in the male population measures the opportunity costs for young men to join greedmotivated rebellion. This variable is significantly negatively related to conflict: The higher the level of education among males, the less likely they are to engage in risky endeavors such as armed conflict. A country more than one-fourth dependent on primary commodity exports emerges as four times more likely to be engaged in a conflict than one that is not. Similarly, even a slight increase in the level of education can decrease the risk of conflict. As Collier puts it, “A country with large natural resources, many young men, and little education is very much more at risk of conflict than one with opposite characteristics” (italics added). He concludes that the “true cause of much civil war is not the loud discourse of grievance, but the silent force of greed.” He continues… Higher levels of development usually mean the growth of a stronger manufacturing base and the diversification of exports. Because exports of primary commodities are strongly related to conflict, such development will also help reduce the incentives for greed-motivated violence. Again, development assistance can be targeted toward this end. If resource abundance acts to distort the processes that lead to better policies, the donor agencies should seek to counteract trends toward Dutch Disease. To this end, donor agencies could insist on sounder fiscal policies, prevent the adoption of policies that promote rent-seeking, help identify and alter perverse subsidization that benefits merely the urban elite, and build institutions that protect property rights. Moreover, the international community can help with transfer of technology to developing countries and support the processes of harnessing that technology by promoting investment in human capital. Providing assistance toward better educational systems will not only discourage recruitment of youths into rebellion but will also strengthen the longer-term prospects of economic growth and development. Investment in education will also encourage better government in the longer run that will result in informed participation in political and economic life. As recent studies of aid effectiveness find, aid can work wonders in the right policy setting, but it fails in bad ones.” The right policy conditions cannot simply be imposed but must be accepted by those who benefit from such policies. Acceptance of certain policies can be achieved only if people are able to understand them. A2: resource wars Resource wars are rare Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, Director of the Centre for the Study of Peace and Conflict ,Professor of Political Science, at the University of Toronto, 1999, Environment, Scarcity, and Violence, pp. 138-139 Four environmental resources in particular would appear likely to spark simple-scarcity conflicts: agriculturally productive land, forests, river water, and fish. Scarcity of these renewables is rising rapidly in some regions; they are often essential for human survival; and they can be physically seized or controlled. But close study of historical and current cases provides little support for this idea. There is, in fact, virtually no evidence that environmental scarcity is a principal cause of major war among modern states. Arthur Westing has compiled a list of twelve conflicts in the twentieth centuiy involving resources, beginning with World War I and concluding with the Falklands/Malvinas War. Access to oil or minerals was at issue in ten of these conflicts. Just five involved renewable resources, and only two of these—the 1969 Soccer War between El Salvador and Honduras, and the Anglo-Icelandic Cod War of 1972—1973—concerned neither oil nor minerals (cropland was a factor in the former case, and fish in the latter). But, the Soccer War was not a simple-scarcity conflict between states; rather, as explained later in this chapter, it arose from the ecological marginalization of El Salvadoran peasants and their consequent migration into Honduras. And, because the Cod War, despite its name, involved negligible violence, it hardly qualifies as a resource war. In general, scholars such as Choucri and North have not adequately distinguished between scarcities of renewable and nonrenewable resources as causes of international conflict. They have overlooked two reasons why modern states do not generally fight over renewable resources. First, states cannot easily convert cropland, forests, and fish seized from a neighbor into increased state power; although these resources may eventually generate wealth that can be hamessed by the state for its own ends, this outcome is uncertain and remote in time. In contrast, states can quickly use nonrenewables like oil and iron to build and fuel the military machines of national aggression. (Renewables have not always been less important to state power: in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, for example, shortages of timber for naval ships contributed to serious, and sometimes violent, conflict among European powers.) Second, countries with economies highly dependent on renewables tend to be poor, and poor countries cannot easily buy large and sophisticated conventional armies to attack their neighbors. For these reasons, both the incentives and the means to launch resource wars are likely to be lower for renewables than for nonrenewables. A2: rich/poor gap Higher incomes among the rich decrease poverty more than gains for the poor Seth W. Norton, Aldeen Professor of Business at Wheaton College, Fall 2002, http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj22n2/cj22n2-5.pdf, accessed 4/26/03 The pattern that emerges in Table 3 is that the components of the HPI [Human Poverty Index] are mostly negatively related to the incomes of the poor and the incomes of the rich, as well as to the geographic variables. Consequently, higher income to either group tends to reduce poverty rates. The most salient feature in Table 3 is the fact that the coefficients for the rich incomes have a stronger effect on poverty reduction than the coefficients for the poor incomes. That observation is true for all cases. Restricted coefficient estimates (Wald’s) tests reveal that the coefficients for the rich income category are (absolutely) greater than the coefficients for the poor income category for survival, illiteracy, and undernourished children. The significance tests for access to safe water and access to health services indicate that while those measures are more sensitive to the incomes of the rich than to those of the poor, the differences are not statistically significant. More generally and more importantly, there is no evidence that the income gains to the rich do not benefit the poor, at least as evidenced by broad and well-established measures of poverty. The results for undernourished children merit special attention. The coefficient for the rich incomes is negative and significant, indicating that an increase of rich people’s incomes reduces this measure of children’s malnutrition. The coefficient for poor peoples’ incomes is slightly positive but not significant. Presumably, the estimate reflects multicollinearity. Regressing the undernourishment variable on just the incomes of the poor does lead to a reduction in the proportion of undernourished children. However, the comparable simple regression estimate for the incomes of the rich is still substantially greater.2 Thus, the easiest interpretation is that the relationship between the incomes of the rich and undernourished children is negative and robust, but the relationship between the incomes of the poor and reduced children’s malnutrition is weaker and perhaps nonexistent. [Spelling-out of Human Poverty Index not in original. –KLK] Even if only the rich benefit, they invest in infrastructure that solves for everyone Seth W. Norton, Aldeen Professor of Business at Wheaton College, Fall 2002, http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj22n2/cj22n2-5.pdf, accessed 4/26/03 Despite the assertions of Marxists, there are simple reasons to presume that _r might exceed _p. Consider externalities. If the rich inhabitants of a country invest in some infrastructure that helps the rich, it might also help the poor as the effects of infrastructure “spillover” as benefits to the poor. Investment in education, for example, is widely perceived to produce positive externalities to the community. Consider also the interaction between the incomes of the rich, economies of scale, and the incomes of the poor. If there are economies of scale in the provision of various services (e.g., health services and sanitation), then the increases in demand associated with higher incomes of the rich would generate a lower price and therefore permit poor people to consume more (increasing their real income), provided the scale economies did not also lead to a higher price due to diminished competition. Consider the relative consumption versus investment of the rich and poor. Suppose the poor spend most of their income on subsistence consumption, while the rich invest a greater part of their income. Under those circumstances, increasing the incomes of the rich would lead to higher economic growth and could also reduce the average level of poverty in a country. Growth democracy Growth is the only check on brutal dictatorships Bill Emmott, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, 2003, 20:21 Vision, pp. 15-16 The potential for dictatorship, with associated deadly brutality, is undimmed. The main limiting factor is economic: centralized control has proved to be a poor way to build a wealthy, modern economy, and wealthy economies are those most able to afford the latest offensive, defensive or repressive technologies. Modern, wealthy economies have developed when economic power has been dispersed to a wide population and when individual enterprise has been given its head. Such developments make dictatorship harder and repression costlier. But it is far from impossible to sustain a dictatorship over long periods of time, as the Chinese Communist Party has shown. And the importance of the economic sacrifice entailed by centrally directed regimes is essentially relative: it is the growing wealth of other countries, operating in an open market economy, that makes it harder for a dictatorship to restrain the economic expectations of its own citizens and to keep up with other countries’ military technology and resources. But if other countries’ economies become depressed, life for the dictator could well become easier. Growth solves corruption Dr Camillo Premoli, International Mineral Research, September 12, 1997, Mining Journal 1. There is an undeniable correlation between a country's GNP and its Corruption Index. Somewhat predictably, the poorest countries score high on perceived corruption. But there are several exceptions: Chile, with its modest GNP, is easily the least corrupted country in South America (perhaps a factor in its recent mining boom). Conversely Italy, with a GNP superior to either Australia or the UK, has a level of perceived corruption similar to Bolivia -- a country 20 times poorer. A telling reality. Widening inequalities lead to democratic reforms, which solve poverty Bill Emmott, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, 2003, 20:21 Vision, pp. 244-245 A paper in Harvard’s Quarterly Journal of Economics in November 2000, by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, provided empirical evidence to support what common sense would suggest had been the case: that the major democratic reforms (extending the franchise, and so on) in Britain, Germany, France and Sweden in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries all coincided with peaks in inequality. In other words, a widening of inequality brought about social and political pressure for reform, which the established elites responded to by providing the discontented with greater democratic representation. The elastic stretched; and for fear that it might break, bringing on violence and turmoil, political reforms were offered and accepted. This, in turn, has had a levelling effect. For, in time, democratic reform influences those in government: those seeking election will make sure that their policies are of broad benefit to those who they hope will vote for them. Hence the provision of, and improvement of access to, public education and other services; hence the granting of steadily greater rights and protections for ordinary workers; hence the gradual introduction, even without pressure from socialists, of progressive taxation, by which governments could draw more of their revenue from the few than from the many. The effect of this on posttax incomes is complex, since taxes alter people’s behavior. But, as a general rule, it has narrowed the gap between posttax incomes. The other big effect of democracy on inequalities of income and wealth has been to make societies, or rather political establishments, less tolerant of high levels of unemployment. “Let them eat cake” is no longer a viable or acceptable reaction. The result has been that, in the democracies, efforts have either been made to try to reduce unemployment or to make unemployment less disastrous financially by expanding welfare benefits. That has been less true of the United States than of Western Europe or Japan, but, beginning with the “New Deal” of the 193os, it has nevertheless been the American trend too. Cap is inevitable – must work within it Capitalism is inevitable; activists should strive to ensure it develops in a positive manner Bill Emmott, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, 2003, 20:21 Vision, pp. 26-27 Since all the progress that has been, and will be, seen in technology and in general welfare has arisen from capitalist activities, and since no alternative set of ideas has emerged to give hope to poorer countries that they can match the rich world’s progress by adopting anything other than capitalism, it might seem reasonable to assume that capitalism is likely to be simply a given for the twenty-first century. One way or another, it will be a feature of life during the next hundred years. That is surely true. But all the difference in the world, and for the world, is contained in that phrase, “one way or another.” How much technology develops, how it develops, how well-off we become in material terms, how big a problem the relative poverty of the underdeveloped world will pose for the developed countries, how the planet’s environment serves to limit or enable our activities and circumscribe or enhance our lives: all these questions depend on the way capitalism develops, or rather the way it is allowed to develop. This, too, like the role of leadership in preserving peace, is probably an eternal question. Our feelings about capitalism have always been and probably always will be mixed. Capitalism works. It appeals to the inherently competitive instinct in man, the instinct that to survive and thrive one must compete, and that to compete one must take risks. There is no alternative to globalization Deirdre Curtin, Utrecht University, “Sovereignty, Democracy And The Outcomes Of The 2001 Wto Ministerial,” 2001, http://www.cedla.uva.nl/pdf/Democracy%20and%20the%20WTO%20fourth%20session. pdf, accessed 8/30/03 Now we see a serious clash between people who see globalization as a good thing and people who see it as a bad thing? What is striking though, is those who believe it as a bad thing have not really put forward an alternative to it. They are proposing a negative, epitomized by ‘shrink or sink’. They are the anti-globalists, and may be it is in the nature of their argument that they shouldn’t put forward a positive vision of how trade and other relations should be structured across borders in a global sense. But they can be accused of an ostrich-like behaviour in terms of latching on to the familiar and ignoring the current-day realities of an increasingly networked and technologically charged world, in the context of which it is impossible to go back to the good old days of state control, to define borders and slower and more old fashioned methods of communication. No alt kills criticism Resistance to capitalism is meaningless unless a stable alternative and process of change can be outlined Richard Rorty, philosopher, Achieving Our Country, 1998, p. 103-104. The Sixties did not ask how the various groups of stakeholders were to reach a consensus about when to remodel a factory rather than build a new one, what prices to pay for raw materials, and the like. Sixties leftists skipped lightly over all the questions which had been raised by the experience of nonmarket economies in the so-called socialist countries. They seemed to be suggesting that once we were rid of both bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, “the people” would know how to handle competition from steel mills or textile factories in the developing world, price hikes on imported oil, and so on. But they never told us how “the people” would learn how to do this. The cultural Left still skips over such questions. Doing so is a consequence of its preference for talking about “the system” rather than about specific social practices and specific changes in those practices. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic. Its insouciant use of terms like “late capitalism” suggests that we can just wait for capitalism to collapse, rather than figuring out what, in the absence of markets, will set prices and regulate distribution. The voting public, the public which must be won over if the Left is to emerge from the academy into the public square, sensibly wants to be told the details. It wants to know how things are going to work after markets are put behind us. It wants to know how participatory democracy is supposed to function. The cultural Left offers no answers to such demands for further information, but until it confronts them it will not be able to be a political Left. The public, sensibly, has no interest in getting rid of capitalism until it is offered details about the alternatives. Nor should it be interested in participatory democracy—the liberation of the people from the power of the technocrats—until it is told how deliberative assemblies will acquire the same know-how which only the technocrats presently possess. Even someone like myself, whose admiration for John Dewey is almost unlimited, cannot take seriously his defense of participatory democracy against Walter Lippmann’s insistence on the need for expertise. Individual resistance fails Ted Trainer, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Social Work, University of New South Wales, 1995, The Conserver Society, pp. 211-212 When confronted with the limits to growth view there is a tendency to conclude that one ought to change one’s own lifestyle in conserver society directions. This is indisputably desirable and worthwhile, but I want to argue that it is in general far from the most important commitment. First, it is not at all easy for most people to change their lifestyles far in the direction of conserver society while they are living within this society. Most of us have little choice but to have a car, buy food that has been transported a long way, use sewers, and work in a job of questionable social worth. Again, the main problems are the structures and systems within which we are trapped. These condemn most of us to doing a lot of consuming and polluting. We can with effort change some things about our lifestyle, e.g., many of us could grow more food and wear out old clothes. But we will not get to conserver society through individuals resolving to change their personal lifestyles because most of the problem is to do with social structures, not lifestyles. Individual decisions to live more simply will not contribute much to getting those town banks established or to planting edible landscape beside the railway lines, because such decisions will not help more people to understand and eventually vote for those structural changes. Seeking individual change is fruitless Lester W. Milbrath, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Sociology at SUNYBuffalo, 1996, in Building Sustainable Societies, ed. Pirages, p. 289 In some respects personal change cannot be separated from societal change. Societal transformation will not be successful without change at the personal level; such change is a necessary but not sufficient step on the route to sustainability. People hoping to live sustainably must adopt new beliefs, new values, new lifestyles, and new worldview. But lasting personal change is unlikely without simultaneous transformation of the socioeconomic/political system in which people function. Persons may solemnly resolve to change, but that resolve is likely to weaken as they perform day-to-day within a system reinforcing different beliefs and values. Change agents typically are met with denial and great resistance. Reluctance to challenge mainstream society is the major reason most efforts emphasizing education to bring about change are ineffective. If societal transformation must be speedy, and most of us believe it must, pleading with individuals to change is not likely to be effective. Protest doesn’t change the system Protest doesn’t undermine the system – Seattle proves Brink Lindsey, senior fellow at Cato, “Globaloney Dying,” February 5, 2002, http://www.techcentralstation.com/020502C.html, accessed 9/6/03 From its inception, the protest movement was less than met the eye. Some 30,000 demonstrators gathered in Seattle in November 1999 on the occasion of the World Trade Organization's ministerial conference. Meetings were disrupted, the city was trashed, and ultimately the WTO ministers failed to agree on a new round of trade talks. But most of the numbers in Seattle were peaceful marchers supplied by organized labor - a good, old-fashioned parochial interest group that had little in common, ideologically or culturally, with the radical activists and "anarchist" goons that grabbed all the media attention. And the failure of the WTO meeting had little to do with the commotion outside. Rather, the Clinton administration's insistence on negotiating WTO labor standards, and European and Japanese foot-dragging on agricultural liberalization, were the real culprits. Radicalism Right wing rollback Right-wing groups will squash their movement and bring global fascism Martin W. Lewis, associate research professor of geography, co-director of Comparative Area Studies, Duke University, 1992, Green Delusions, pp. 170-171 The extreme left, for all its intellectual strength, notably lacks the kind of power necessary to emerge victorious from a real revolution. A few old street radicals may still retain their militant ethos, but today’s college professors and their graduate students, the core marxist contingent, would be ineffective. The radical right, on the other hand, would present a very real threat. Populist rightwing paramilitary groups are well armed and well trained, while establishment-minded fascists probably have links with the American military, wherein lies the greatest concentration of destructive power this planet knows. Should a crisis strike so savagely as to splinter the American center and its political institutions, we could well experience a revolutionary movement similar to that of Germany in the 1930s. Marxists, however, would likely counter this argument by citing the several cases of successful socialist revolutions. Successful though they were, none makes a compelling analogue. First, no marxist revolution has ever come close to occurring in an advanced capitalist nation. Triumphant leftist revolutions have only taken place in economically backward countries, and generally only after an unrelated war had demoralized the old guard. More importantly, as Hamerow (1990) clearly shows, all successful marxian revolutions have relied on the strategic cooperation of the bourgeoisie against the aristocracy; only after the old regime is toppled are the fractionated moderates cut out of power. Considering the fate that has generally befallen them under such circumstances, it is unlikely that the business classes—even in the world’s more feudal countries—would again be tempted by the promises of a mixed economy offered to them by would-be leftist revolutionaries. Except perhaps in El Salvador and Peru, contemporary marxist revolutionary movements are irritants to the ruling elites rather than real threats. In contemplating the likely future of a revolutionary United States, we encounter the ultimate paradox of contemporary marxism: the unintended collusion of the radical left and the radical right. Even during periods of normality, the opposing ends of the political spectrum feed strongly on each other—in sardonic fashion, they are each other’s best allies. The marxian left is extraordinarily frightening to the vast majority of the populace, and the stronger it becomes, the more seductive the propaganda of the radical right grows. The equation can also be reversed; leftist rhetoric draws its real power in opposition to the radical right, not the accommodating center. With every KKK outrage, with every atrocity committed by the Los Angeles Police Department, the marxian message grows ever more convincing to horrified progressives. The broad center of responsible conservatives, moderates, and liberals may attempt to remain dispassionate and to refute both extremes, but in a deteriorating political environment, marked by inflamed passions, such a stance will seem to many increasingly inadequate. If, in the event of extraordinary crisis, the center does fold, I must conclude that most Americans would follow the far right rather than the far left. American society has simply been too prosperous, and the majority of its citizens too accustomed to owning property, to be willing to risk everything on a communist experiment. Alexander Cockburn of The Nation has repeatedly pleaded with liberals not be afraid to endorse socialism—a fine position indeed if one would like to see reactionaries gain uncontested power throughout the United States. If truly concerned about social justice and environmental protection, I would counter liberals should not be afraid first to embrace, and then seek to reform, capitalism. Economic Downturn War Economic decline leads to nuclear war Chris H. Lewis Professor at UC Boulder, "The Coming Age of Scarcity" p. 56 1998 Most critics would argue, probably correctly, that instead of allowing underdeveloped countries to withdraw from the global economy and undermine the economies of the developed world, the United States, Europe, and Japan and others will fight neocolonial wars to force these countries to remain within this collapsing global economy. These neocolonial wars will result in mass death, suffering, and even regional nuclear wars. If first world countries choose military confrontation and political repression to maintain the global economy, then we may see mass death and genocide on a global scale that will make the deaths of World War II pale in comparison. However, these neocolonial wars, fought to maintain the developed nations' economic and political hegemony, will cause the final collapse of our global industrial civilization. These wars will so damage the complex economic and trading networks and squander material, biological and energy resources that they will undermine the global economy and its ability to support the earth's 6 to 8 billion people. This would be the worst case scenario for the collapse of global civilization