Tournament: TFA State | Round: 6 | Opponent: | Judge:
Government attempt to assist those who cannot assist themselves contradicts with freedom.
Tibor Machan, philosophy professor, Auburn, PRIVATE RIGHTS AND PUBLIC ILLUSIONS, 1983, p. 74-75
In the last analysis Vlastos defends prima facie rights on grounds we find expressed by Keynes above: Unless one viewed the basic right to property or liberty as sometimes capable of being overridden, government would have to tolerate some peop
le's flourishing extravagantly while others suffered unbearably. Because this is morally unacceptable— the argument maintains—a different theory must be introduced, one that makes room for occasional relaxation of the prohibition against the abridgement of human rights. Vlastos proceeds to outline a position in favor of a doctrine of "equal welfare-rights and freedom rights" for all.34 Absolute welfare rights would entitle all persons to being provided with what is required for their well-being, while freedom rights entitle persons to being left alone to live and act as they choose. Thus, if either welfare rights or freedom rights were absolute, they would cancel each other out in virtually all circumstances. An absolute right is a condition that must be fully and invariably respected; for example, if one has the absolute right to be free, then no one may ever take one's freedom. But the welfare of someone is often secured only through another person's productive support; to gain shelter and food, for instance, those who do not have it can get it only if others provide it. If others have an absolute freedom right, it would not be morally justified to obtain such shelter and food without these others' consent. However, if those without shelter and food (welfare, that is) have an absolute right to it, then others would have to, morally and legally, provide it. In practice this would be impossible. One person's absolute right to liberty trumps or cancels another's absolute right to welfare, and vice versa. A doctrine of prima facie rights appears to solve the problem. Only it does not really. What it does is to leave things pretty much "deuces wild," ameaning that it is entirely arbitrary whether the "prima facie" right to liberty or the "prima facie" right to welfare will be protected. Sometimes one may feel that taking one person's liberty so as to house or feed another is morally acceptable, sometimes one may not. For example, if those who are without shelter and food squander it or fail to be prudent or have never cared about such things until now, then it will seem quite unjust to take these from others who have worked for it. Again, those who have the means to provide welfare nevertheless have their own honorable purposes for the use of these means, such as providing their children with vital medical treatment, giving for charity, improving their artistic talents, or the like. Thus, even when others are in dire need, through no fault of their own, taking from those who have it could easily be seen as quite arbitrary, immoral, or unjust. There may not be enough of the valued things in life for all to have a decent portion. But that may not be used, as a matter of standards of argumentation, to justify taking from those who have managed to obtain some for themselves, even if luck has had something to do with it. It would be wholly unjust to do so. Clearly, the mere feeling of dismay and concern for the needy will not make such taking a morally good thing. There must instead be a sound moral foundation for such action. (Feelings and sentiments, even righteous outrage, have managed to give rise to policies and conduct that could, with some care, be considered morally objectionable, even outrageous in themselves.
And, the demand upon the state that the affirmative makes entrenches the coercive force of the state on social relations.
Jayan Nayer, law professor, Warwick, Fall 1999, p. xxvi
Following this transformation of the material political-economy of the colonized, or “ordered,” colonialism entrenches the “state” as the symbolic “political” institution of “public” social relations. The effect of this “colonization of the mind” is that the “political-economic” form social organization – the state – is universalized as common, if not “natural,” resulting in a homogenization of “political” imagination and language. Thus, diversity was unified, while at the same time, unity was diversified. The particularities and inconveniences of human diversity – culture and tradition – is subordinated to the “civilized” discourse of secular myths (to which the “rule of law” is central), while concurrently, humanity is formally segregated into artificial “states,” enclosures of mythic solidarities and common destinies.
The government will expand its reach if it has an opportunity
Harry Browne, Former Libertarian Party candidate for President, Director of Public Policy for the DownsizeDC.org, THE GREAT LIBERTARIAN OFFER, 2000, p. 23
The Giant Begins to Grow
And coercive laws never stand still. No matter what a law's backers say at the time of passage, the law always stretches in surprising directions. The expansion occurs on at least two fronts: The law almost always is enforced more broadly than intended. When government benefits one group, other groups are encouraged to seek similar benefits. And this is what happened to the civil rights laws. In the first regard, the bureaucrats and courts set out to enforce the law zealously, seeking to root out any kind of discrimination— even though ending segregation, not discrimination, was the motive behind the original law. Companies were ordered not to consider race in any way when making hiring decisions. But usually the reasons for a business decision are hard to prove. Unless a businessman was a noisy bigot, who could say whether racial discrimination had affected his decision to hire someone? To avoid having to read minds, the enforcers treated results as proof of discrimination. If you didn't have a suitable racial mix in your workforce (or even among your customers), you were assumed to be discriminating—and the burden of proof was on you to prove otherwise. So an employer could avoid charges of discrimination only by, in fact, discriminating—by using quotas to assure that he hired the right number of people of the right races. The law against segregation had been transformed into a law requiring discrimination. The law also encouraged other groups to demand similar coverage. Once it was established that government should punish racial discrimination, the door was open to using government to punish anything similar. If it's wrong for an employer, landlord, or organization to discriminate according to race, it must be just as wrong to discriminate according to gender. So the coercion expanded to prohibit discrimination against women—and then religious believers, and then the elderly, and then people with children, and then the handicapped.
Also, every justification for coercion, no matter how legitimate, conditions us to accept further limitations on our liberty.
Tibor R. Machan 2, Research Fellow @ Hoover Institution, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Auburn University, 2002, Liberty and Hard Cases, p. xvii – xix
We are not unfamiliar with the hazards of the slippery slope in our own personal lives. If a man hits his child in some alleged emergency, the very act of doing so may renders him more amenable to smacking the kid under more typical circumstances. Slapping someone who is hysterical may make it easier to slap someone who is only very upset or recalcitrant or annoying or just too slow fetching the beer from the refrigerator. Similarly, a “minor” breach of trust can beget more of the same, a little white lie here and there can beget lying as a routine, and so forth. Moral habits promote a principled course of action even in cases where bending or breaking the principle might not seem too harmful to other parties or to our own integrity. On the other hand, granting ourselves “reasonable” exceptions weakens our moral habits; as we seek to rationalize past action, differences of kind tend to devolve into differences of degree. Each new exception provides the precedent for the next, until we lose our principles altogether and doing what is right becomes a matter of happenstance and mood rather than of loyalty to enduring values. 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—is 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.
The Affirmative attempt to be compassionate leads to no value to life.
Government coercion destroys the value to life and cannot be morally justified
Tibor Machan, PRIVATE RIGHTS and PUBLIC ILLUSIONS, 1995, p. 68-9.
All governmental action that does not serve to repel or retaliate against coercion is antithetical to any respect for human dignity. While it is true that some people should give to others to assist them in reaching their goals, forcing individuals to do so plainly robs them of their dignity. There is nothing morally worthwhile in forced giving. Generally, for a society to respect human dignity, the special moral relations between people should be left undisturbed. Government should confine itself to making sure that this voluntarism is not abridged, no matter how tempting it might be to use its coercive powers to attain some worthy goal.
And, dehumanization is the worst situation possible. It completely destroys any value to life in a society and brings EVERYONE down. Nothing can be held sacred in a dehumanizing society.
Fasching93: Although every culture is inherently utopian in its potentiality, the internal social dynamic through which its symbolic world-view is maintained as a sacred order has a tendency to transform it into a closed ideological universe (in Karl Mannheim's sense of the ideological; namely, a world-view that promises change while actually rein-¶ 156 The Ethical Challenge of Auschwitz and Hiroshima ¶ forcing the status quo) that tends to define human identity in terms advantageous to some and at the expense of others. Historically the process of dehumanization has typically begun by redefining the other as, by nature, less than human. So the Nazis did to the Jews, and European Americans did to the Native Americans, men have done to women, and whites to blacks. By relegating these social definitions to the realm of nature they are removed from the realm of choice and ethical reflection. Hence those in the superior categories need feel no responsibility toward those in the inferior categories. It is simply a matter of recognizing reality. Those who are the objects of such definitions find themselves robbed of their humanity. They are defined by and confined to the present horizon of culture and their place in it, which seeks to rob them of their utopian capacity for the onomous self-transcending self-definition. The cosmicization of social identities is inevitably legitimated by sacred narratives, whether religious or secular-scientific (e.g., the Nazi biological myth of Aryan racial superiority), which dehumanize not only the victims but also the victors. For to create such a demonic social order the victors must deny not only the humanity of the other who is treated as totally alien but also their own humanity as well. That is, to imprison the alien in his or her enforced subhuman identity (an identity that attempts to deny the victim the possibility of self-transcendence) the victor must imprison himself or herself in this same world as it has been defined and deny his or her own self-transcendence as well. The bureaucratic process that appears historically with the advent of urbanization increases the demonic potential r of this process, especially the modern state bureaucracy organized around the use of the most efficient techniques to control every area of human activity. The result is, as Rubenstein reminds us, the society of total domination in which virtually nothing is sacred, not even human life. The heart of such a bureaucratic social order is the sacralization of professional roles within the bureaucratic structure such that technical experts completely identify themselves with their roles as experts in the use of techniques while totally surrendering the question of what those technical skills will be used for to the expertise of those above them in the bureaucratic hierarchy. It is no accident that the two cultures that drew the world into the cataclysm of World War II, Germany and Japan were militaristic cultures, cultures that prized and valued the militaristic ideal of the unquestioningly obedient warrior. In these nations, the state and bureaucratic order became one and the same. As Lewis Mumford has argued, the army as an invention of urban civilization is a near-perfect social embodiment of the ideal of the machine.37 The army brings mechanical order to near perfection in its bureaucratic structure, where human beings are stripped of their freedom to choose and question and where each individual soldier becomes an automaton carrying out orders always "from higher up" with unquestioning obedience. Bureaucracy dehumanizes because it separates means from ends. The self becomes an instrument or means for ends chosen by others. The self that is forbidden to choose its own ends is deprived of its utopian possibility of choosing to become other than what it is. ¶
Also, Welfare assistance hurts the poor.
Rector and Fagan ’96. Robert E. Rector and Patrick F. Fagan, writers for the Heritage Foundation. “How Welfare Harms Kids.” The Heritage Foundation. June 5, 1996. http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/BG1084.cfm
The simple fact is that children are suffering because the U.S. welfare system has failed. Designed as a system to help children, it has ended up damaging and abusing the very children it was intended to save. The welfare system has failed because the ideas upon which it was founded are flawed. The current system is based on the assumption that higher welfare benefits and expanded welfare eligibility are good for children. According to this theory, welfare reduces poverty, and so will increase children's lifetime well-being and attainment. This is untrue. Higher welfare payments do not help children; they increase dependence and illegitimacy, which have a devastating effect on children's development. Americans often are told that the current welfare system does not promote long-term dependence. This also is untrue. The 4.7 million families currently receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) already have spent, on average, six-and-a-half years on welfare. When past and estimated future receipts of AFDC are combined, the estimated average length of stay on AFDC, among those families currently receiving benefits, is 13 years. Among the 4.7 million families currently receiving AFDC, over 90 percent will spend over two years on the AFDC caseload. More than 75 percent will spend over five years on AFDC. It is welfare dependence, not poverty, that has the most negative effect on children. Recent research by Congressional Budget Office Director June O'Neill shows that increasing the length of time a child spends on welfare may reduce the child's IQ by as much as 20 percent. Welfare dependency as a child has a negative effect on the earnings and employment capacity of young men. The more welfare income received by a boy's family during his childhood, the lower the boy's earnings will be as an adult, even when compared to boys in families with identical non-welfare income. Welfare also plays a powerful role in promoting illegitimacy. Research by CBO Director O'Neill also shows, for example, that a 50 percent increase in monthly AFDC and food stamp benefit levels will cause a 43 percent increase in the number of illegitimate births within a state. Illegitimacy, in turn, has an enormous negative effect on children's development and on their behavior as adults. Being born outside of marriage and raised in single parent homes: Triples the level of behavioral and emotional problems among children; Nearly triples the level of teen sexual activity; Doubles the probability a young woman will have children out of wedlock; and, Doubles the probability a boy will become a threat to society, engage in criminal activity, and wind up in jail. Overall, welfare operates as a form of social toxin. The more of this toxin received by a child's family, the less successful the child will be as an adult. If America's children are to be saved, the current welfare system must be replaced. The automatic and rapid growth of welfare spending must be curtailed. Welfare should no longer be a one-way handout; recipients should be required to work for benefits received. Steps must be taken to reduce future illegitimacy, beginning with restricting cash welfare to unmarried teen mothers.
Vote negative to reject coercion. 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 man 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.
