AC - cap aff NC - Natural Persons PIC 1AR - all NR - all 2AR - all
JV and Novice Championship
3
Opponent: Harvard-Westlake ADi | Judge: Wei Chen
1AC - cap NC - Natural Persons PIC 1AR - all NR - all 2AR - all
USC Trojan Invitational
2
Opponent: Harvard-Westlake AW | Judge: Ben Cortez
1AC - Cap AC NC - postwork k pro act cp wsde cp 1AR - all NR - postwork and pro act
USC Trojan Invitational
3
Opponent: Harvard-Westlake EJ | Judge: Jacob Nails
1AC - Environmental workers AC 1NR - postwork k violence PIC carbon tax cp theory 1AR - all 2NR - violence PIC and theory
USC Trojan Invitational
5
Opponent: Mission San Jose AD | Judge: Samantha McLoughlin
1AC - Workers AC 1NC - UBI CP Econ DA Police PIC 1AR - all 2NR - Police PIC 2AR - all
Western Series University of Wyoming
2
Opponent: Athenian EY | Judge: Dillon Johnson
1AC - US Heg Asteroid Collision NC - Legal Trust CP Asteroid Mining DA 1AR - All NR - All 2AR - All
Western Series University of Wyoming
3
Opponent: Mount Vernon TK | Judge: Kristiana Baez
1AC - Colonialism Space Weaponization NC - Legal Trust CP Asteroid Mining DA 1AR - All NR - All 2AR - All
Western Series University of Wyoming
6
Opponent: Athenian BK | Judge: Sam Larson
1AC - Space tourism and space debris NC - Legal Trust CP and Asteroid Mining DA 1AR - All NR - All 2AR - All
Woodward
2
Opponent: West Des Moines Valley Tripathy | Judge: Claudia Ribera
AC - Lockean Proviso NC - Legal Trust Cp and Asteroid Mining DA 1AR - all NR - all 2AR - all
Woodward
3
Opponent: Lake Highland Prep Vennam | Judge: Wesley Loofbourrow
AC - Fully Automated Luxury Communism NC - Legal Trust CP and Asteroid Mining DA 1AR - all NR - all 2AR - all
Woodward
6
Opponent: Immaculate Heart Wegmann-Gatarz | Judge: Sarah Sherwood
AC - China Aff (militarism ASATS) NC - Legal Trust CP Asteroid Mining PIC Asteroid Mining DA Russia Fill-In DA 1AR - all NR - all 2AR - all
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Cites
Entry
Date
0-contact info
Tournament: 0-Contact Info | Round: 1 | Opponent: na | Judge: na Hi, I'm Penny. You can contact me for disclosure at penelopestoller26@marlboroug.org.
10/11/21
Carbon Tax CP
Tournament: USC Trojan Invitational | Round: 3 | Opponent: Harvard-Westlake EJ | Judge: Jacob Nails Carbon Tax CP Text: The United States ought to implement a carbon tax. A carbon tax substantially decreases greenhouse gas emissions and increases revenue under every plausible implementation. Barron et. al 5/7 - Alexander R. Barron Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Policy, Smith College; Alex Barron graduated from Carleton College with a B.A. in chemistry and obtained his Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Princeton University, Marc A. C. Hafstead PhD in economics, Stanford University, 2011, BA in mathematical methods in the social sciences and economics, Northwestern University, 2004, and Adele Morris Adele Morris is a senior fellow and policy director for Climate and Energy Economics at the Brookings Institution, “Policy insights from comparing carbon pricing modeling scenarios,” Brookings Institute Climate And Energy Economics Discussion Paper (Web). May 7, 2019. Accessed Oct. 19, 2019. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/ES_20190507_Morris_CarbonPricing.pdf AT Carbon pricing is ... full paper here.
Carbon taxes dramatically reduce emissions and save lives from air pollution – international consensus and best studies prove. Barron et. al 5/7 - Alexander R. Barron Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Policy, Smith College; Alex Barron graduated from Carleton College with a B.A. in chemistry and obtained his Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Princeton University, Marc A. C. Hafstead PhD in economics, Stanford University, 2011, BA in mathematical methods in the social sciences and economics, Northwestern University, 2004, and Adele Morris Adele Morris is a senior fellow and policy director for Climate and Energy Economics at the Brookings Institution, “Policy insights from comparing carbon pricing modeling scenarios,” Brookings Institute Climate And Energy Economics Discussion Paper (Web). May 7, 2019. Accessed Oct. 19, 2019. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/ES_20190507_Morris_CarbonPricing.pdf AT An extensive literature standard epidemiological estimates (Krewski et al., 2009; Lepeule et al., 2012) and EPA tools (Abt, 2017).
Tournament: Heart of Texas Invitational | Round: 3 | Opponent: Peninsula EL | Judge: Clement Agho-Otoghile CP Text: The member nations of the World Trade Organization should establish a global system that provides universal healthcare to all of those nations’ citizens. This system should centrally purchase medicines in accordance with all IP rights and laws and should then universally distribute that medicine, with funds from the richest and healthiest going to subsidize the care of the poorest and sickest as per recommendations made by the CP evidence.
2) In order for universal healthcare to be achieved for all citizens, the system has to be global so that inequity between countries (not just within countries) may be resolved. Faulkner, 19 - ("Global Universal Healthcare: Is It Within Reach?," Middletown Media, 5-4-2019, https://muncievoice.com/22657/global-universal-healthcare-is-it-within-reach/)//va One of the biggest questions about global healthcare is how the costs will be distributed. In developed countries, raising taxes is a valid answer, but in some poorer nations, there is little room for tax reform on an already underprivileged population. So what can be done about it? ¶ For global universal healthcare to work, costs must be shared globally. This may mean charity in third-world nations, and more public and private partnerships in those areas. In other cases, global organizations can be formed, and surrounding nations that are more prosperous will need to help share the burden of costs with their neighbors. ¶ The biggest key with global universal healthcare is a shift in mentality from selfishness and nationalism to a worldwide perspective on healthcare and the welfare of world citizens. No one entity can do it alone. ¶ Is global universal healthcare within reach? With modern technology and communication and the innovations we have seen in healthcare, the answer is yes. The question then becomes: “Will we reach for it together?” ¶
3) Most people lack access to quality basic healthcare even though they spend shocking amounts of money trying to get it – a global universal healthcare system would pool resources to ensure everyone’s access at a much more efficient price and would solve better than the money currently spent on aid because it would establish infrastructure and employ rural community health workers Guardian, 18 - ("Universal health care, worldwide, is within reach," Economist, 4-26-2018, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/04/26/universal-health-care-worldwide-is-within-reach)//va BY MANY measures the world has never been in better health. Since 2000 the number of children who die before they are five has fallen by almost half, to 5.6m. Life expectancy has reached 71, a gain of five years. More children than ever are vaccinated. Malaria, TB and HIV/AIDS are in retreat. ¶ Yet the gap between this progress and the still greater potential that medicine offers has perhaps never been wider. At least half the world is without access to what the World Health Organisation deems essential, including antenatal care, insecticide-treated bednets, screening for cervical cancer and vaccinations against diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough. Safe, basic surgery is out of reach for 5bn people. ¶ Those who can get to see a doctor often pay a crippling price. More than 800m people spend over 10 of their annual household income on medical expenses; nearly 180m spend over 25. The quality of what they get in return is often woeful. In studies of consultations in rural Indian and Chinese clinics, just 12-26 of patients received a correct diagnosis. ¶ That is a terrible waste. As this week’s special report shows, the goal of universal basic health care is sensible, affordable and practical, even in poor countries. Without it, the potential of modern medicine will be squandered. ¶ How the other half dies Universal basic health care is sensible in the way that, say, universal basic education is sensible—because it yields benefits to society as well as to individuals. In some quarters the very idea leads to a dangerous elevation of the blood pressure, because it suggests paternalism, coercion or worse. There is no hiding that public health-insurance schemes require the rich to subsidise the poor, the young to subsidise the old and the healthy to underwrite the sick. And universal schemes must have a way of forcing people to pay, through taxes, say, or by mandating that they buy insurance. ¶ But there is a principled, liberal case for universal health care. Good health is something everyone can reasonably be assumed to want in order to realise their full individual potential. Universal care is a way of providing it that is pro-growth. The costs of inaccessible, expensive and abject treatment are enormous. The sick struggle to get an education or to be productive at work. Land cannot be developed if it is full of disease-carrying parasites. According to several studies, confidence about health makes people more likely to set up their own businesses. ¶ Universal basic health care is also affordable. A country need not wait to be rich before it can have comprehensive, if rudimentary, treatment. Health care is a labour-intensive industry, and community health workers, paid relatively little compared with doctors and nurses, can make a big difference in poor countries. There is also already a lot of spending on health in poor countries, but it is often inefficient. In India and Nigeria, for example, more than 60 of health spending is through out-of-pocket payments. More services could be provided if that money—and the risk of falling ill—were pooled. ¶ The evidence for the feasibility of universal health care goes beyond theories jotted on the back of prescription pads. It is supported by several pioneering examples. Chile and Costa Rica spend about an eighth of what America does per person on health and have similar life expectancies. Thailand spends $220 per person a year on health, and yet has outcomes nearly as good as in the OECD. Its rate of deaths related to pregnancy, for example, is just over half that of African-American mothers. Rwanda has introduced ultrabasic health insurance for more than 90 of its people; infant mortality has fallen from 120 per 1,000 live births in 2000 to under 30 last year. ¶ And universal health care is practical. It is a way to prevent free-riders from passing on the costs of not being covered to others, for example by clogging up emergency rooms or by spreading contagious diseases. It does not have to mean big government. Private insurers and providers can still play an important role. ¶ Indeed such a practical approach is just what the low-cost revolution needs. Take, for instance, the design of health-insurance schemes. Many countries start by making a small group of people eligible for a large number of benefits, in the expectation that other groups will be added later. (Civil servants are, mysteriously, common beneficiaries.) This is not only unfair and inefficient, but also risks creating a constituency opposed to extending insurance to others. The better option is to cover as many people as possible, even if the services available are sparse, as under Mexico’s Seguro Popular scheme. ¶ Small amounts of spending can go a long way. Research led by Dean Jamison, a health economist, has identified over 200 effective interventions, including immunisations and neglected procedures such as basic surgery. In total, these would cost poor countries about an extra $1 per week per person and cut the number of premature deaths there by more than a quarter. Around half that funding would go to primary health centres, not city hospitals, which today receive more than their fair share of the money. ¶ The health of nations Consider, too, the $37bn spent each year on health aid. Since 2000, this has helped save millions from infectious diseases. But international health organisations can distort domestic institutions, for example by setting up parallel programmes or by diverting health workers into pet projects. A better approach, seen in Rwanda, is when programmes targeting a particular disease bring broader benefits. One example is the way that the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria finances community health workers who treat patients with HIV but also those with other diseases. ¶ Europeans have long wondered why the United States shuns the efficiencies and health gains from universal care, but its potential in developing countries is less understood. So long as half the world goes without essential treatment, the fruits of centuries of medical science will be wasted. Universal basic health care can help realise its promise. ¶ Guardian, 17 - ("How to make global universal healthcare a reality," 7-7-2017, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/jul/07/how-to-make-global-universal-healthcare-a-reality)//va Siddharth Chatterjee, resident coordinator to Kenya, United Nations, Nairobi, Kenya @sidchat1 @UNDPKenya Siddharth is leading efforts with the Ministry of Health to leapfrog primary health coverage through PPP initiatives in Kenya. Previously he worked for the Red Cross. Priya Balasubramaniam, senior public health scientist and director, PHFI-RNE Universal Health Initiative, Public Health Foundation of India,New Delhi, India Priya directs one of India’s seminal health policy exercises on health system reform and co-authored the government’s recommendations on universal health coverage as part of the country’s 12th Five Year Plan. Cicely Thomas, senior program officer, Results for Development, Washington DC, USA @results4dev @cicelysimone Cicely has over 10 years experience providing technical support for health system strengthening in LMICs. She is, along with Priya, also a coordinating committee member of the Health Systems Global Private Sector in Health Thematic Working Group. Jolene Skordis, director, UCL Centre for Global Health Economics, London, UK @JSkordis Jolene is an economist working to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of global health systems. Agnes Soucat, director, health financing and governance, World Health Organisation, Geneva, Switzerland @asoucat @WHO Agnes has over 25 years of experience in health and poverty reduction, and has previously worked at the World Bank and the African Development Bank. Anand Reddi, corporate and medical affairs, Gilead Sciences Inc, San Francisco, USA @ReddiAnand @GileadSciences Anand’s work for Gilead Sciences focuses on HIV and viral hepatitis in resource-limited settings. Helen Hamilton, policy advisor for health, Sightsavers, Haywards Heath, UK @HelenCHamilton @Sightsavers_Pol Helen leads health policy work on increasing access to health services for people with disabilities, neglected tropical diseases and eye illnesses 1 | Accept there’s no such thing as a ‘perfect healthcare model’ All healthcare models have their challenges in terms of systems capacity, fiscal space and good governance. I think the progress of countries like Thailand and Sri Lanka towards universal health is certainly laudable, but they each have different approaches to getting there. Thailand’s journey began incrementally and over the years through consistent investment in Primary Health Care (PHC). Meanwhile, India is more focused on achieving Universal Health Care (UHC) through mixed health markets featuring both public and private sector players. Priya Balasubramaniam, senior public health scientist and director, PHFI-RNE Universal Health Initiative, Public Health Foundation of India, New Delhi, India ¶ 2 | Have the same healthcare provider for the rich and the poor If we have dual systems with the “national service” caring for the poor and the private sector caring for the rich, quality will be an afterthought. We need the rich and poor to be cared for by the same provider – this ensures that high quality will be a political priority as those with voting influence are directly affected by the quality of services provided. Jolene Skordis, director, UCL Centre for Global Health Economics, London, UK @JSkordis ¶3 | Give public-private partnerships serious consideration The PPP model needs to be taken to scale in PHC in order to achieve UHC in a planned time frame. I have worked in many parts of the developing world and in general governments have not been able to step up. Now is the time to test new models as the old system is not working. We need a blended service delivery mechanism. We have to open up the insurance space and governments must push for universal insurance cover for all citizens. This is what we’re trying to do in Kenya. Siddharth Chatterjee, resident coordinator to Kenya, United Nations, Nairobi, Kenya @sidchat1 @UNDPKenya ¶4 | Learn from the places getting it right Ghana’s health system isn’t the best I’ve seen but they’ve got some very fundamental things right and have been continually improving over many years. Some of the fundamentals are a commitment to all Ghanaians getting quality, affordable healthcare, and trying to create a national-level risk pool – so the healthier and wealthier subsidise the sicker and poorer. From small-scale experimentation with community-based health insurance, they scaled up to national health insurance, and are now working through the tough challenges of purchasing health services more strategically and sustainably for everyone. The private sector plays a significant role in Ghana’s healthcare provision – a recent World Bank study of Ghana’s private sector noted that Ghanaians access care from private sources more than half of the time. Cicely Thomas, senior programme officer, Results for Development, Washington DC, US @results4dev @cicelysimone ¶5 | Raise taxes to reach the poorest In the majority of developed countries, health services are mostly private. But they are publicly regulated and financed. What we have learned over time is that an equitable system always relies on cross-subsidy, from rich to poor and from healthy to sick. Progressive taxation and public subsidy to ensure access to services is the essence if we want to reach universality of access to health services. Agnes Soucat, director, health financing and governance, World Health Organisation, Geneva, Switzerland @asoucat @WHO ¶6 | Don’t focus on arbitrary targets for health spending The Abuja declaration expects African governments to spend 15 of GDP on healthcare. That’s not easy to do – and is not essential. Singapore spends about 5 of GDP on healthcare and has done a fantastic job in ensuring every citizen has access to a good quality service. Sri Lanka spends between 3–5 and India is pushing for 2.5. But the question should be about what can you do best with what you can afford to spend. There is no magic GDP number that will deliver UHC since every country has varied resources. Ultimately it is not only about more money, but also how you end up spending your existing health budget that matters. Resources are often misspent in the health sector with an inordinate focus towards hospital care. Siddharth Chatterjee and Priya Balasubramaniam ¶7 | Invest more in preventing people getting sick Health is not just the remit of health ministries – sanitation, housing, welfare and education are just a few of the bedrocks of improving population health. We shouldn’t think of healthcare as a pill or a hospital or programme to treat a single disease. Healthcare is clean water and a diet that does not place you at risk of diabetes or stunting. Healthcare is the education you need to find work and pay for a safe and warm home for your family. Healthcare is delaying early marriage and early pregnancy for vulnerable girls. Prevention has been relatively neglected in our policy priorities. Perhaps because prevention activities can seldom be charged for and people are not yet sick so it can be hard to convince both the public and policymakers of the benefits of preventative measures, even though prevention is usually the most cost-effective way to address disease. Jolene Skordis ¶8 | Make tackling individual diseases have a wider impact In resource-limited settings, what health initiatives can catalyse overall healthcare systems strengthening? Vertical initiatives anchored to one disease, such as the focus on HIV through PEPFAR and Global Fund, have led to broader health-system strengthening by alleviating the HIV burden as well as increasing outcomes in mother-to-child transmission. Anand Reddi, corporate and medical affairs, Gilead Sciences Inc, San Francisco, US @ReddiAnand @GileadSciences ¶9 | Focus on equity, not just the number of people reached If we look back at the millennium development goals it is clear that the focus on reaching big numbers has had a detrimental effect on equity. Too often, national policies do not specifically address how marginalised groups will be reached by development programmes in order to benefit from the new facilities and services provided. This problem is often made worse in low-income areas where the services are offered on a cost recovery basis. Helen Hamilton, policy adviser for health, Sightsavers, Haywards Heath, UK @HelenCHamilton @Sightsavers_Pol ¶10 | Be honest about how money shapes healthcare decisions India’s case (and that of South Africa, Brazil and the US) proves how users of a health services are often not the best judge of health services. We rely on doctors to tell us what care we need. If doctors can profit from giving us incorrect advice, they may well do so – particularly if there is little harm likely to be done (eg sending paying patients for extra, unneeded tests or procedures). This results in the cost of care increasing rapidly in the private sector, to the point where even the middle classes can’t afford health insurance in South Africa and the US. We need to remove the profit motive from healthcare if we want efficiency and effectiveness. Jolene Skordis ¶
10/17/21
JF-Asteroid Mining DA
Tournament: Harvard-Westlake Invitational | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harker AA | Judge: Ari Davidson The private sector is essential for asteroid mining – competition is key and government development is not effective, efficient, or cheap enough. Thiessen 21: Marc Thiessen, 6-1, 21, Washington Post, Opinion: SpaceX’s success is one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/01/spacexs-success-is-one-small-step-man-one-giant-leap-capitalism/ It was one ... here on Earth?
Space regulation scares investors away and spills over to other space activities. Freeland 05 Steven Freeland (BCom, LLB, LLM, University of New South Wales; Senior Lecturer in International Law, University of Western Sydney, Australia; and a member of the Paris-based International Institute of Space Law). “Up, Up and … Back: The Emergence of Space Tourism and Its Impact on the International Law of Outer Space.” Chicago Journal of International Law: Vol. 6: No. 1, Article 4. 2005. JDN. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1269andcontext=cjil V. THE NEED FOR ... onboard the ISS.46
Asteroid mining can happen with private sector innovation and is key to solve a laundry list of impacts--climate change, economic decline and asteroid collisions. Taylor 19 Chris Taylor journalist, 19 - ("How asteroid mining will save the Earth — and mint trillionaires," Mashable, 2019, accessed 12-13-2021, https://mashable.com/feature/asteroid-mining-space-economy)//ML How much, exactly? ... impossible to colonize. (Sorry, Mark Watney from The Martian, those potatoes would probably kill you.) Warming causes extinction. Bill McKibben 19, Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College; fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; holds honorary degrees from 18 colleges and universities; Foreign Policy named him to their inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers. "This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out." Rolling Stone. 4-9-2019. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/bill-mckibben-falter-climate-change-817310/ Oh, it could ... have no defence.”
Don’t write our impacts off as low probability – asteroid collision is complex and the existence of space keyholes exponentially increases the risk of collision. Vereš ’19 Peter Vereš ’19, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “Chapter 6 Vision of Perfect Observation Capabilities”, 2019, Planetary Defense, Space and Society, https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/634091/mod_resource/content/1/Planetary20Defence.pdf Often, uncertain orbits ... agencies (ESA, MPC).
Considering the worsening...climate change, inequalities and poverty.
1/15/22
JF-Natural Persons PIC
Tournament: JV and Novice Championship | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harvard-Westlake EB | Judge: Brandon Riedy CP: States ought to ban the appropriation of outer space by private entities except for natural persons, and states ought to recognize the right to property for natural persons in space.
The individual right to property is a basic human right that should be extended to space.
Faires 19 Wes Faires, “The role of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in supporting space property rights,” The Space Review, August 5, 2019. https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3771/1 CT A long-discussed issue has been the absence of provisions pertaining to private entities under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Interpretations in favor of private property rights hold that the purpose of Article II’s ban on “national appropriation” was to place a limitation on member nations’ attempts to exercise territorial and political sovereignty over any part of outer space: to restrict territorial disputes between countries from extending beyond Earth. Without an explicit prohibition of private property rights in the treaty, their development with respect to private entities is unencumbered. Opposition has fluctuated from the position that the prohibition of national appropriation in Article II served to exclude development of property rights for private citizens: without a national entity with the ability to “confer” or pass down property rights to “sub-national” citizens, forward progress is rendered impossible. There were later attempts to classify private citizens as “nationals” in order to apply to them the prohibition of ‘national appropriation’. The 1979 Moon Agreement places an explicit ban on property for a host of entities, including “natural persons,” until such time as an international regime can be formulated. Two nations, the United States and Luxembourg, have enacted legislation favorable to property and mineral rights regarding space resources. This was met with opposition from some in the international community, who called into question whether such unilateral acts were in and of themselves a violation of the non-appropriation principle of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Perhaps in the future, the concept of “property rights” will have evolved beyond the terrestrial concepts of ownership, sovereignty, and territorial acquisition, under a new treaty framework structured by private entities, developed outside the auspices of any nation-state or supranational regime. Until such time, what is needed is a base-level favorable affirmation of private property rights in outer space, one that serves as a foundation for their evolution beyond national borders and which is accepted across the board. To this end, the solution to 50 years of ambiguity regarding private property rights under the under the current UN Outer Space Treaty framework is found within the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Article 17: (1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property. -UN General Assembly. "Universal Declaration of Human Rights." United Nations, 217 (III) A,1948, Paris, Art. 17 The commercial space sector would welcome language favorable to private property rights in space, with specific emphasis on the re-affirmation of Article 17 as it pertains to property rights for private entities. Beyond Article 17, utilization of the UDHR as a default mechanism in situations where legislation is not yet developed can yield an immediate benefit for humanity. On the national level, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be seamlessly integrated into national space policy. Adoption of the UDHR into space policy by state parties to the Outer Space Treaty is essentially a reaffirmation of one of the fundamental principles of the United Nations, and can take place without litigation or implementation of new national legislation, and with no accusation of violation of “national appropriation.” In the international arena, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be seamlessly into to conducting legislative proceedings pertaining to outer space, given that: The overarching thematic priority for UNISPACE + 50 and beyond is “Sustainable Development in Space.” A critical aspect of this calls for ensuring the principles of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development are upheld. The 2030 Agenda is grounded in, and re-affirms, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (A/RES/70/1 para. 10, para. 19). The task at hand is to compel the United Nations Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNCOPUOS) to commit to upholding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Solidarity on such a core foundational UN principle as the UDHR solidifies reflection of Agenda 2030. I propose that UN Secretariat take this opportunity to move forward with Sustainable Development, and lead the way in incorporation the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into international space policy. It is time to recognize property rights as the universally declared human right that it is: “Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.” The definition of property and scope of the UDHR was not limited to any one definition or territory. The UDHR was intended from the outset to be universal: “It is not a treaty; it is not an international agreement … It is a Declaration of basic principles of human rights and freedoms, to be stamped with the approval of the General Assembly by formal vote of its members, and to serve as a common standard of achievement for all peoples of all nations.” -Eleanor Roosevelt, “On the Adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” December 9, 1948 Here in its 70th year of adoption, acceptance of the UDHR into space policy by the international community would be both timely and logical. It reaffirms adherence to a fundamental United Nations cornerstone, and provides an opportunity to strengthen the commitment to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. At a time when feasibility of extraction of minerals from celestial bodies is fast approaching, it is our responsibility to ensure that the transition occurs free of any terrestrial shackles. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights offers an acceptable foundational framework from which property rights can evolve off-planet, that can be embraced by the private sector, adopted across national levels, and upheld in the international arena The CP protects individual property rights while solving case since the aff still applies to corporations.
No perms: The CP would expand the rights of individuals in space, from the mere right to use, to the full bundle of rights protected by private property.
The aff imagines a future that includes space settlement. Space settlement with private appropriation is better than settlement without appropriation.
Absent legally enforced personal rights, like property, space settlements are likely to be dominated by tyrannical governments or corporations. Turns case.
Cockell 08 Charles S. Cockell (Center for Earth, Planetary, Space and Astronomical Research – Open University, Milton Keynes), “AN ESSAY ON EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIBERTY,” JBIS, VOL. 61, pp. 255-275, 2008. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Charles-Cockell/publication/258317782_An_Essay_on_Extraterrestrial_Liberty/links/0c96053053a02cfb24000000/An-Essay-on-Extraterrestrial-Liberty.pdf CT 6. EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIBERTY For Berlin 20, ‘negative’ liberty meant the pursuit of individual liberty by removing those mechanisms that exert control over one’s actions. Western liberal democracies pursue, for the most part, philosophies of negative liberty, by attempting to reduce the role of government in individual lives. A restricted sphere of negative liberty is created by tyrannies, in which encroachment into the lives of individuals reduces the number and scope of activities in which people consider themselves free, or at least able to make decisions that can be implemented independently of the State. Of course, by retreating into a core set of activities in which one is completely free, one is in the process of relinquishing liberty, as the scope of free actions is voluntarily reduced. This is in itself a form of slavery. Societies where the scope of negative liberty is reduced can be described as more enslaved, even if the people there may not describe themselves as such, because they have in fact escaped State slavery by retreating from those very activities in which control is exerted. The crucial point is that the sphere within which negative liberty is possible is necessarily constrained by the environmental conditions under which one exists. The more extreme the environmental conditions, the fewer social activities can occur without collective oversight. More saliently, the people themselves may actually request such oversight, to protect their safety from others who would abuse it, with the resulting dangers. Some of these systems of monitoring can be found in societies on Earth. We cannot drive automobiles without safety checks. Our water must be passed through treatment works— life support systems if you will—that ensure that what we are drinking is safe. Indeed, even in some of the most mature terrestrial democracies, a remarkable quantity of basic consumables and resources come to us through systems of compliance overseen by the State. This is a form of control that most people accept because we consider it in our interest. We do not usually see such invasions of our liberty as tyranny, but rather as benevolent actions by the State to ensure our safekeeping. But they are incursions nevertheless, and while democracy is functioning such oversights need not necessarily concern us; or at least they do not worry most of the public, who are more concerned with having fresh water than more abstract thoughts about the allowable extent to which the State should have influence over their water quality. In extraterrestrial environments, spacesuits, water quality, food production, habitat pressurisation and so on and so forth will be subject to regulation by corporations or the State. As on Earth, perhaps many of these incursions will be regarded as acts of beneficence by the State in the interests of safety, and will be willingly accepted. But one fact is undeniable: the extent of negative liberty must be less in extraterrestrial environments than on Earth, and quite significantly less. Even the air will be subject to quality controls and checks. Forms and permissions will be associated with the very act of breathing. No philosophy of advancing the domain of negative liberty, no clever sophistry, can change this truth, which is brought into being by basic survival needs. An undeniable effect will be to expand the opportunities for tyranny. Where the mechanisms for central control are necessarily enlarged in their scope and diversity, a greater number of levers exist, and enable individuals and organisations to exert control and assume power. A reduction in negative liberty does not necessarily imply greater tyranny, but it certainly makes it possible. In extraterrestrial environments, where centralised interventions must be frequent, how much weaker is freedom and how much easier is tyranny to enforce? We cannot know the answers until we undertake the experiment, but we can be fairly sure that the qualitative answer must be ‘more easily’. More insidiously, the restriction of the borders of negative liberty, caused by the apparent need to protect individuals from the irresponsible actions of others, can itself be perpetuated as a form of liberty. The use of alcohol in extraterrestrial environments is one example. On Earth, the excessive use of alcohol may result in broken windows and arrests, but once the windows are repaired little damage has been done to society as a whole. Hence, although there is a negative social collective impact of excessive alcohol use, the prohibition of alcohol consumption of any kind is generally regarded as an infringement of civil liberties that the public will not tolerate. This is why, of course, attempts to do exactly this in the past have been met by black marketeering. But in extraterrestrial environments, a broken window may imply depressurisation, and the instant death of many individuals. The potential impact on society of the irresponsible and thoughtless actions of individuals is greater, and it might seem justifiable to restrict greatly, or even prohibit, the civil liberty of alcohol use, in the interests of collective safety. This principle can be applied to many diverse social interactions that could be construed as threatening people, and the prevention of which can be advanced as the protection of individual and social freedom through the process of restricting negative liberty. Liberty encompasses the freedom that individuals have to actively pursue their own objectives (‘positive liberty’ sensu Berlin). An obvious mechanism by which this becomes practical is the creation of social mechanisms and institutions through which the ‘active’ pursuit of this ‘positive’ sense of liberty is made possible, for example the welfare State. Organisations established to act as conduits for the free expression of different points of view, or to act as means to achieve practical objectives, are not always liberal. Even in some of the most developed democracies, societies and organisations may become dominated by elite closed circles of people, and media channels may be influenced by moguls who use outlets to perpetuate specific corporate views. What prevents these incursions into the structures of liberty from descending into wholesale tyranny? In reality, very little. The subversion of democratic States, or States on the verge of democracy, into societies more reminiscent of dictatorships has many historical precedents. The principal mechanisms that allow individual freedom to triumph over the slide towards tyranny include the legally agreed freedoms that individuals have to establish competition against dominating organisations, and the culture that ensures that the freedom to create organisations is not then abused to destroy the very democratic organisations that guarantee that freedom. In a society in which the freedom to organise and assemble institutions is protected by law, those organisations that distort and alter their environments, or the information they propagate, are likely to be usurped by institutions that reflect a different style of thinking, by the process of individual choice. However, these alternative visions can only be effective, and one can only assert them over the prevailing opinions with confidence, when one has sufficient information to be confident of their likely veracity. On Earth, to express many ideas and counter-opinions one does not need supreme confidence in the truth. If one’s opinion turns out to be in error one gives up, accepts the viewpoint of the adversary and continues one’s life. These opportunities to challenge, however, are central to the power of the individual to confront institutions. But there is one social situation in which the individual’s power is markedly reduced, even rendered completely ineffective against a collective body. Health and safety is one of the most effective levers of social influence and justified coercion, because it invokes the protection of people confronted with life and death situations. Consider, for example, an oxygen supply system on the Moon. The authority that runs such a system might seek control over a political dissenter by threatening to move him or her and their family to a new zone of habitation, on the grounds that the oxygen supply to their habitat is faulty. By doing this, they will remind these individuals who is in control of their survival, and coerce them through fear into mitigating their dissent, thereby creating a more malleable individual and reducing the challenge to collective authority. Governing organisations have access to a vast realm of information that no single individual can hope to have 21. They know, for example, about the oxygen demand, its rate of supply, the pipes that supply it, the maintenance history of the oxygen producing machines, and so on and so forth. For an individual to declare that the intention of the authority to move them to another habitat is for controlling political purposes, he or she must also have access to all such information, which they can then use to demonstrate that there is no safety concern. If they do not have access to this information, then it becomes a simple task for the authorities to portray them as dishonourable individuals inveighing against the hard work of other individuals who are working to secure their individual safety and the security of society 22. They can be then be ostracised, and their general behaviour will be treated as disingenuous. However, to have access to all the information to convincingly uphold a complaint is never possible, because an individual can never know whether they are missing a single crucial fact that makes all the difference to their safety. Even armed with what they perceive to be all the information available, the individual is faced with a choice between allowing an incursion on their home and liberty, or taking the risk that their presumption of having full information is correct. Faced with such a choice, the individual is likely to opt for the former in the interests of caution, particularly in an environment where the other choice may imply death from a failed oxygen system. In the extreme case, this first course of action would be further reinforced in a particularly coercive, venal society where the individual might even be convinced of the capability of the authorities to engineer the failure of their oxygen system and their death, in order to crush dissent, even if their complaint was in fact justified. The end point of this process, when applied across many activities in life, is a colony of automatons performing tasks for an extraterrestrial authority, with their freedom reduced to a withered core of activities in the most private confines of their habitats. Extraterrestrial environments make such an endpoint not merely a possible outcome, but a likely one. This attack on liberty is made possible because the pursuit of individual safety can be made an unchallengeable requirement of a ‘free’ society 23. Freedom from instantaneous death caused by the external environment is the common freedom on which all individuals should converge, and any social structure or plan that brings people closer to that reality must surely be praiseworthy? The removal of other freedoms to achieve the safety of society is excusable. From this position, the environment can itself become the instrument of positive liberty. In this way, and in a rather unique way, encroachment on freedom of thought and movement, in the interests of ensuring the protection of the freedom of the individual against the lethality of the environment, can be transformed into a justifiable and universalisable doctrine of control 24. Unfortunately this approach receives succour from every major tradition of social philosophy that we know on Earth. From Grotius to J.S. Mill, the right to self-preservation has been considered the core of individual liberties 25, a point beyond which no State may go, and which every individual has the right to take it upon him or herself to secure—indeed, such a notion has even been referred to as a ‘natural law’ 26. Even Hobbes’ view of the necessity of sovereign control 27 turns on the right of each individual in a fight to preserve themselves. It is possible to spend much of one’s life on Earth without undue concern for self-preservation. Apart from those unfortunate individuals who confront a burglar or gang, most people will not actually come face to face with the need to infringe others’ rights to self-preservation. Fortunately, although the right to self-preservation is theoretically an unchallengeable right of all people, it remains, in a civil society, one sufficiently protected by the laws, and by regulations against various street crimes that might infringe self-preservation. If, as has been traditional on the Earth, the right to selfpreservation is also held to be a basic right of all people in extraterrestrial environments, then the keys to despotism are handed over to those in control of society. Self-preservation is threatened on a day-to-day basis by the lethality of the environment. In such an environment, each individual does indeed represent a much greater threat to every other individual than on the Earth, because unpredictable and criminal actions against the infrastructure represent a continuously present and potentially catastrophic threat to self-preservation. The authorities therefore have the excuse to implement draconian systems of control to protect the right of every individual to self-preservation. Worse than this, however, the people will voluntarily, in exercising their right to selfpreservation, and to protect themselves, accept more farreaching control over the lives of others 28. Where death is a more likely outcome of criminal action, the Hobbesian State of nature, and the tendency to vigorously guard against it, becomes a more tangible reality 29. A lack of property rights enables tyranny in space by creating a monopoly on power and stifling individual expression.
Cockell 10 Charles S. Cockell (Center for Earth, Planetary, Space and Astronomical Research – Open University, Milton Keynes), “Essay on the Causes and Consequences of Extraterrestrial Tyranny,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol.63, pp. 15-37, January 2010. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Charles-Cockell/publication/258402359_Essay_on_the_Causes_and_Consequences_of_Extraterrestrial_Tyranny/links/00b495305364b3f6e8000000/Essay-on-the-Causes-and-Consequences-of-Extraterrestrial-Tyranny.pdf CT Perhaps the most important economic argument is that a centrally-planned system of production is likely to become autarkic, bearing in mind the political problems outlined earlier. In principle, there is no reason why a centrally-planned system of manufacture should not trade its products with other entities, but in reality if there is no profit motive for the organisation to do so, it will not achieve the same level of inducement to put the effort into overcoming the difficult obstacles of interplanetary trade if it is only charged with fabricating enough of a product to satisfy domestic demand. The problem of autarky is just one of the many problems associated with the system, which ultimately lends itself to political tyranny. The centrally-planned economy is unlikely, despite best efforts, to truly produce what people want and, like centrallyplanned states on the Earth, it cannot predict fashions and desires in the future that will necessarily make its economic output limited and dull compared to private entities, which are constantly striving to try to sell consumers new items. The worst effect of the strictly controlled economy will be the stifling of individual creativity, the opportunity to combine to produce, and the emergence of the political culture that results from the need to generate all the functionaries and state officials, with their attendant powers, that will be required to do the planning in the first place. The logic of a centrally-planned economy, and the attraction of this in the face of the possible failure of entities producing things so basic as oxygen, should be resisted even though it may lead to a less ordered and structured economic network 53. The role of the state in this schemata should be to ensure that sufficient entities exist (and more so for redundancy) to produce what is needed and to encourage a vigorous growth in these industries. It should only intervene to exert wholesale control over the means of production when a failure in some entity, or entities, threatens lives. Rejecting a centrally-planned economy would imply competing means of production, which itself almost certainly implies the presence of a system of private property. The public ownership of all goods might appear superficially to be a security against the possibility of people going short of vital goods. In the early stages of the establishment of settlements, it might well be the case that public ownership of certain commodities such as water and some food provisions will be required to ensure that they are distributed fairly to all occupants. However, for all the reasons just adumbrated, some incentive for production must exist independently of the people running the settlement. Quite apart from this, the problem in a highly isolated group is that complete control of all property by a single authority opens the door to political tyranny. An attraction of a Marxian society might be the economic equality that would result from the previously discussed mechanisms. Central planning, in particular, would obviate the chances of single, private entities accumulating a vast proportion of the wealth and individuals associated with these organisations becoming their own economic tyrants. There is merit in this view, and achieving equality would certainly prevent this outcome. Yet, regulations on monopolies and other tax mechanisms could be used to some degree to prevent excessive and despotic accumulations of wealth. Aside from the most severe cases, there are rational motives for allowing inequality. The environment of outer space is lethal, difficult to work in and a costly place in which to establish enterprises. To rely on the establishment of large networks of human settlements throughout the Solar System, solely on the back of state enterprise and centrally-directed orders, is likely to be folly. There is good reason to question what motives privately-funded people, let alone state organisations, would have for exploring the far reaches of space anyway. So, every incentive must be found to drive groups to establish enterprises for resources, tourism or whatever else is deemed necessary in order to expand. A Marxian system of equality in outer space, even if this could be achieved through some type of agreed social order, will erode the incentive to establish new enterprises from which trade can flow. Arguments that the driven will explore and settle space to expand the reach of humanity, to make it a multiplanet species and to advance science, independent of any economic incentive, are likely to be as ineffective as they were in stimulating productivity in the communist states of the Earth. People are motivated by these laudable and altruistic arguments, but the impulsion to work to secure the common good is not common and it is probably not sufficiently universal to be sure of achieving the results required in outer space. The sense of community, which is perceived to be another golden egg of the Marxian vision, depends of course on what sense of community we are talking about. As I have elaborated elsewhere, the sense of community in a centrally-organised society driven to complete equality is likely - and very rapidly in the environment of outer space - to turn into a highly autarchic control structure in which there is certainly an evident community, but where the freedom of the individual is all but destroyed 54. The society of contented slaves is most likely to emerge in an environment where continuously lethal external conditions give every excuse for control structures to expand into lives with ever more vigour by the process of the tendency of humans to expand their power bases. The maturation of tyranny will be facilitated because the Marxian vision is a single doctrine vision. How exactly this vision will manifest in the environment of space is unpredictable, but any single doctrine society that seeks to protect centrally planned objectives can never tolerate dissenters. It has been recognised for a long time that it is in the nature of singledoctrine societies to remove countervailing views, either through political dictates, peer pressure or the generation of terror and it follows that, eo ipso, few lesser arguments need be entertained against the Marxian vision of an extraterrestrial society. The ease with which the deadly environment can be turned into the common enemy and used to justify the protection and advancement of a single and inflexible political and economic vision makes any social order that promulgates one — and only one — path to social success dangerous. The details of those parts of a Marxian plan that can succeed and those that cannot, therefore, whither into insignificance in the face of the need to encourage a plurality of ideas about how extraterrestrial society should be ordered.
Property rights are the essential building blocks of a fully inclusive and functional government. Turns case since they envision a democratically governed space that is impossible without appropriation. UNDP ’08 - Working Group on Property Rights, 2008, 'Empowering the Poor Through Property Rights', in Making the Law Work for Everyone Volume II, Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, United Nations Development Programme, New York, pp. 63-128 https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/ch2.pdf AT This transition has reduced global poverty substantially, but as outlined above, billions of people around the world still lack secure property rights, which hinders their economic, political and social security. In order to examine how poverty can best be relieved, and why access to property rights is fundamental to the empowerment of the poor, it is necessary to identify building blocks of a fully-functional property system. Such a system operates in the following four ways: 1) As a system of rules that defines the bundle of rights and obligations between people and assets.15 Property ownership creates ties that bind individual citizens together through the formation of networks of economic and legal rights and corresponding obligations. The credible enforcement of these rights and obligations requires a judicial mechanism that allows for equitable, transparent and efficient dispute resolution. 2) As a system of governance. Property systems are a central facet of state functionality, and as such are an important measurement of fiduciary and administrative effectiveness. The institutional order of the state is based on technical rules and relationships which define interactions between stakeholders, ranging from direct ownership of land to promulgation of rules that govern security of land and house tenure, land planning, zoning, taxing and other aspects of property management. Technological innovation, which has radically reduced the cost of information, has generated the possibility for further transparency and accountability in property systems as an instrument of governance. 3) As a functioning market for the exchange of assets. A fully functional property system allows land, houses, moveable property, equity shares, and ideas to be transformed into assets to be bought and sold at rates determined by market forces. This subjects the exchange of property to a level of transparency and accountability, and allows for the development of financial mechanisms — including credit 67 and insurance — to facilitate transactions and improve economic outcomes. Land, houses and moveable property can thus be leveraged, and assets transformed from static investments into capital which can be bought and sold. However, property rights are a necessary but not sufficient precondition for the development of these financial mechanisms; they also develop through partnership between the market, special funds targeted at access to finance, and the state. 4) As an instrument of social policy. In the absence or failure of the market, the state often plays a direct role in addressing the needs of the poor. The state has at its disposal instruments that can be used to endow its citizens with assets as they relate to property, such as public housing, low interest loans and the distribution of state land. Such instruments help to overcome natural competition for assets. The state also supports social cohesion through the development of co-ownership of infrastructure and services by government and the citizen, supporting the equilibrium between individual and collective interests. Provision of infrastructure by the state critically affects the value and desirability of assets, and can therefore fundamentally affect opportunities for the poor. Impact is Democide – Empirically, murder by tyrannical governments is the biggest impact. It outweighs war and cap. There is a direct relationship between the lack of personal freedom and democide.
Wayman 17 summarizing Rummel Wayman F.W. (2017) Rummel and Singer, DON and COW. In: Gleditsch N. (eds) R.J. Rummel: An Assessment of His Many Contributions. SpringerBriefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice, vol 37. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54463-2_9 CT At Rummel’s website, the dominant theme is that power kills (http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/). As he began one of his books (Rummel, 1994: 1), ‘Power kills; absolute power kills absolutely. This new Power Principle is the message emerging from my previous work on the causes of war and from this work on genocide and government mass murder … The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily.’ A major supporting idea is the term regime, as operationalized by Rummel (1995) and used as the organizing principle for his datasets on ‘democide—genocide and mass murder’ (Rummel, 1998: 1). This idea of a regime is important to his work because there is a lot of variation from regime to regime in the regime’s amount of power, and also in the number of people the regime kills. And Rummel’s dominant theme is that those two characteristics of a regime (power and deaths) co-vary. In my own ordinary language, a regime is a type of government controlling a state apparatus. As Rummel (1995: 9) says, ‘The changes from the Kaiser monarchy to the Weimar Republic to Hitler’s rule … give us three different German regimes. … I count 432 distinct state regimes during the period from 1900 to 1987’. Hence, there would be the czarist regime in Russia until 1917, and then the communist regime from 1917 to 1991. Between February and October 1917, there should I think be a transition period and transitional regime (under Kerensky). Individual rulers, such as general secretaries Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, and their governments, do not represent distinct regimes of their own, but instead are all leaders, successively, of different administrations in the communist regime. To me, Rummel’s (1983) article made the first really convincing case for the inter-liberal or inter-democratic peace. I have since challenged thousands of people, from classrooms to conferences where I am speaking, to name any other proposition in the social sciences that is surprising or counter-intuitive, and that has (according to its advocates at least) no exceptions. No one has ever been able, in my presence, to name such a proposition—other than Rummel’s. The COW Project generated the data for the bulk of the hypothesis tests in IR for decades (Wayman and Singer, 1990: 247–248). And ‘realist theory informed 90 of the hypotheses tested by IR scholars up to the 1970s’ (Walker, 2013: 148). It was a bit of a shock that an anti-realist hypothesis, the inter-democratic peace, had produced such a paradigm-shattering result. Sadly, I never heard Singer say a good word about Rummel’s studies confirming the inter-democratic peace hypothesis. Rummel had used COW data on wars, plus other people’s data on democracy, Liberalism, and freedom of nations, to contradict one of Singer’s claims (namely, Singer’s contention that the inter-democratic peace was based on too few cases and too flawed in other ways to be taken to be true; Small and Singer, 1976). Deciphering Singer’s true position on this is complicated. When Geller and Singer (1998) produced a literature review of scientific studies of international conflict, while they did caution that the evidence is ‘not indisputable’, they did acknowledge that ‘the evidence in the area of the joint freedom proposition is consistent and cumulative. Democratic dyads are less likely to engage in war than are non-democratic pairs’ (Geller and Singer, 1998: 87–88). But on the other hand, on his own at his weekly COW seminar, Singer was much more skeptical about the inter-democratic peace. So it is not surprising that, four years after Geller and Singer’s assessment, one of Singer’s students, Henderson (2002) wrote a book that constituted an attack on the democratic peace literature. In the opening paragraph, Henderson says, ‘It struck me as strange that one of the doyen of the behavioral revolution would be such an avid critic of what some scholars hail as the closest thing to an empirical law in the field’. Instead, Singer seemed more interested in the international or interstate system. While Waltz (1979: 94) defined ‘international political structures in terms of states’, Singer spoke of ‘the national state as level of analysis’ (Singer, 1961: 82–89). Thus, whereas Waltz writes of a system whose basic units are sovereign states, Singer ends up with two systems: an inter-state system and an international system. The international system consists of entities that have an international political goal (including … state creation or survival), engage in international political behavior (including inter-state or extra-state conflict, alliances, trade, or international organizations), or engage in political behavior that has international consequences (such as civil wars). The international system … includes … terrorist groups (Sarkees and Wayman, 2010: 27). Nested within this international system is the interstate system, beginning in 1816, distinguished in terms of ‘recurring international interactions between and among the interstate system members’ (Sarkees and Wayman, 2010: 16). Singer’s COW data are organized around a focus on state system membership. Basically, between 1816 and 1919 an entity is a state system member if it has 500,000 people or more and is diplomatically recognized at an adequate level by Britain and France, while after 1919 it is a state if it is a League of Nations or UN member or has 500,000 people and diplomatic recognition by two major powers. (Note that ‘state’ becomes a short-hand for ‘state system member’; Bremer and Ghosn, 2003.) Much confusion results from the short-hand expressions ‘state’ and ‘system’. ‘Whenever the word “system” was used without a modifier, Singer and Small were referring to the interstate system’ (Sarkees and Wayman, 2010: 16). Likewise, the ‘states’ whose characteristics are listed in the COW datasets are not the population of states, but the population of state system members. Singer’s most widely-cited explanatory articles on interstate war are probably Deutsch and Singer (1964) and Singer, Bremer and Stuckey (1972). Both operate at the system level of analysis. It may be that Singer’s devotion to the interstate system is part of what made him reluctant to embrace the inter-democratic peace. As he said in another widely-cited article, the international system level of analysis ‘almost inevitably requires that we postulate a high degree of uniformity in the foreign policy codes of our national actors’, and ‘the system-oriented approach tends to produce a sort of “black box” or “billiard ball” concept of national actors’. This is consistent with his foreign policy instincts, which were loath to attribute ‘white hats’ to the ‘free world’ and ‘black hats’ to the Soviet Union, in the assigning of blame for the dangers to world peace in the Cold War era. Singer’s posture was very different from Rummel’s, with Rummel in favor of Reagan’s foreign policy and against détente. In these Cold War contexts, Singer may have been uncomfortable with Rummel’s summary that ‘freedom preserves peace and life’. Singer wrote ‘it is evident that my research and teaching has unambiguously been problem-driven’, and ‘for reasons that I struggle to articulate, the problem has been, and remains, that of war’ (Singer, 1990: 2). The COW Project was founded by him at the University of Michigan in 1963, the year after the world nearly was destroyed, had the Cuban Missiles Crisis gone badly. International war attracted Singer’s best efforts at finding the ‘causes of war and conditions of peace’ (1990: 3). As he and Small put it, their focus is a ‘preoccupation with the elimination of international war and the possible role of solid explanatory knowledge in that enterprise’ (Small and Singer, 1982: 17). The first COW war handbook, Wages of War (Singer and Small, 1972) was consequently limited to international wars. Karl Deutsch subsequently convinced Singer that there was a need for a comparable list of civil wars. This led to a new handbook, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816–1980, presenting a ‘comprehensive list that will enhance … study of civil wars’ (Small and Singer, 1982: 204). The civil war list is accompanied with a cautionary note, ‘International war remains our major concern … A research assault on explanation of civil war … is clearly a task better left to others’ (Small and Singer, 1982: 17). Consequently, the COW project had many datasets (such as the Militarized Interstate Dispute dataset) on the correlates of interstate war, but nothing comparable on the civil war data. Nevertheless, the publication of the civil war data was a valuable contribution to studies of civil war, and was also a step toward the full delineation of the totality of modern war. This was followed, in the third COW handbook (Sarkees and Wayman, 2010) with a definition and list of non-state wars, completing the full reckoning of the patterns of war in the past two centuries. Also, the focus of Singer on international war was somewhat vindicated by his co-authored article revealing that, over the time since the Congress of Vienna, inter-state wars had resulted in 32 million battle deaths, intra-state wars only 18 million (Sarkees, Wayman and Singer, 2003). Critics often ask if the COW project has a state-centric bias. A more subtle and I think effective line of inquiry is to ask why the COW project has emphasized state-system-membership rather than simple sovereignty and independence as the defining characteristic of the state. This can cause confusion. For example, a number of non-state wars, including the main phase of one of the deadliest wars in history, the Taiping Rebellion, have been fought in areas that would be considered to be states by students of comparative politics. This and other related difficulties have led pioneers outside the COW project (Gleditsch, 2004; Fazal, 2007), as well as Singer’s successor at the COW Project (Bremer and Ghosn, 2003) to propose various revisions and expansions of the concept of the state, to go beyond the COW state membership definition. These difficulties and challenges continue to provide important frontiers for research on war and the state in coming years. In contrast to Singer, Rummel seems to me to have taken a more inductivist, practical approach to states and similar entities. On his website, powerkills.com, one finds a focus on killing, even of one person. The perpetrators are often leaders of totalitarian states, such as Mao, but can also be rebel leaders (the young Mao) or a king (Leopold of Belgium) who controls what some call a colony (the Belgian Congo) but Rummel calls Leopold’s personal property. The unit of analysis becomes the regime and regime-like power-centers such as Leopold’s Congo or Mao’s rebel territory. Rummel (1986) concluded that ‘War isn’t this century’s biggest killer’. As he said then, ‘About 35,654,000 people have died in this century’s international and domestic wars, revolutions, and violent conflicts. … The number of people killed by totalitarian or extreme authoritarian governments already far exceeds that for all wars, civil and international. Indeed, this number already approximates the number that might be killed in a nuclear war’. He itemized 95 million killed by communist governments, but only ‘831,000 killed by free democratic governments’. Those killed by free democratic governments were always foreigners: In no case have I found a democratic government carrying out massacres, genocide and mass executions of its own citizens … Absolutist governments (those that Freedom House would classify as not free) are not only many times deadlier than war, but are themselves the major factor causing war and other forms of violent conflict. They are a major cause of militarism. Indeed, absolutism, not war, is mankind’s deadliest scourge of all. In light of all this, the peaceful, nonviolent fostering of civil liberties and political rights must be made mankind’s highest humanitarian goal … because freedom preserves peace and life (Rummel, 1986).
3/12/22
JF-Natural Persons PIC
Tournament: JV and Novice Championship | Round: 3 | Opponent: Harvard-Westlake ADi | Judge: Wei Chen CP CP: States ought to ban the appropriation of outer space by private entities except for natural persons, and states ought to recognize the right to property for natural persons in space.
The individual right to property is a basic human right that should be extended to space.
Faires 19 Wes Faires, “The role of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in supporting space property rights,” The Space Review, August 5, 2019. https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3771/1 CT A long-discussed issue has been the absence of provisions pertaining to private entities under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Interpretations in favor of private property rights hold that the purpose of Article II’s ban on “national appropriation” was to place a limitation on member nations’ attempts to exercise territorial and political sovereignty over any part of outer space: to restrict territorial disputes between countries from extending beyond Earth. Without an explicit prohibition of private property rights in the treaty, their development with respect to private entities is unencumbered. Opposition has fluctuated from the position that the prohibition of national appropriation in Article II served to exclude development of property rights for private citizens: without a national entity with the ability to “confer” or pass down property rights to “sub-national” citizens, forward progress is rendered impossible. There were later attempts to classify private citizens as “nationals” in order to apply to them the prohibition of ‘national appropriation’. The 1979 Moon Agreement places an explicit ban on property for a host of entities, including “natural persons,” until such time as an international regime can be formulated. Two nations, the United States and Luxembourg, have enacted legislation favorable to property and mineral rights regarding space resources. This was met with opposition from some in the international community, who called into question whether such unilateral acts were in and of themselves a violation of the non-appropriation principle of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Perhaps in the future, the concept of “property rights” will have evolved beyond the terrestrial concepts of ownership, sovereignty, and territorial acquisition, under a new treaty framework structured by private entities, developed outside the auspices of any nation-state or supranational regime. Until such time, what is needed is a base-level favorable affirmation of private property rights in outer space, one that serves as a foundation for their evolution beyond national borders and which is accepted across the board. To this end, the solution to 50 years of ambiguity regarding private property rights under the under the current UN Outer Space Treaty framework is found within the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Article 17: (1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property. -UN General Assembly. "Universal Declaration of Human Rights." United Nations, 217 (III) A,1948, Paris, Art. 17 The commercial space sector would welcome language favorable to private property rights in space, with specific emphasis on the re-affirmation of Article 17 as it pertains to property rights for private entities. Beyond Article 17, utilization of the UDHR as a default mechanism in situations where legislation is not yet developed can yield an immediate benefit for humanity. On the national level, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be seamlessly integrated into national space policy. Adoption of the UDHR into space policy by state parties to the Outer Space Treaty is essentially a reaffirmation of one of the fundamental principles of the United Nations, and can take place without litigation or implementation of new national legislation, and with no accusation of violation of “national appropriation.” In the international arena, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be seamlessly into to conducting legislative proceedings pertaining to outer space, given that: The overarching thematic priority for UNISPACE + 50 and beyond is “Sustainable Development in Space.” A critical aspect of this calls for ensuring the principles of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development are upheld. The 2030 Agenda is grounded in, and re-affirms, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (A/RES/70/1 para. 10, para. 19). The task at hand is to compel the United Nations Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNCOPUOS) to commit to upholding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Solidarity on such a core foundational UN principle as the UDHR solidifies reflection of Agenda 2030. I propose that UN Secretariat take this opportunity to move forward with Sustainable Development, and lead the way in incorporation the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into international space policy. It is time to recognize property rights as the universally declared human right that it is: “Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.” The definition of property and scope of the UDHR was not limited to any one definition or territory. The UDHR was intended from the outset to be universal: “It is not a treaty; it is not an international agreement … It is a Declaration of basic principles of human rights and freedoms, to be stamped with the approval of the General Assembly by formal vote of its members, and to serve as a common standard of achievement for all peoples of all nations.” -Eleanor Roosevelt, “On the Adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” December 9, 1948 Here in its 70th year of adoption, acceptance of the UDHR into space policy by the international community would be both timely and logical. It reaffirms adherence to a fundamental United Nations cornerstone, and provides an opportunity to strengthen the commitment to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. At a time when feasibility of extraction of minerals from celestial bodies is fast approaching, it is our responsibility to ensure that the transition occurs free of any terrestrial shackles. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights offers an acceptable foundational framework from which property rights can evolve off-planet, that can be embraced by the private sector, adopted across national levels, and upheld in the international arena The CP protects individual property rights while solving case since the aff still applies to corporations.
No perms: The CP would expand the rights of individuals in space, from the mere right to use, to the full bundle of rights protected by private property.
The aff imagines a future that includes space settlement. Space settlement with private appropriation is better than settlement without appropriation.
Space settlement is coming now and prevents inevitable extinction. Future settlers need protections and the rule of law.
Gesl 18 Paul M. Gesl (Maj, USAF JD), “PREPARING FOR THE NEXT SPACE RACE: Legislation and Policy Recommendations for Space Colonies,” A Research Report Submitted to the Faculty In Partial Fulfillment of the Graduation Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF OPERATIONAL ARTS AND SCIENCES (April 2018). https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1053024.pdf CT Why the United States Needs to Think About Space Colonization Now The United States’ space policies under the previous two Presidential administrations have not matched the ambition of the commercial sector. The author has criticized the National Space Policies of both President Obama and George W. Bush as being too “Earth-Centric.”6 Based on the current state of technologies, it is easy to dismiss space colonization as, at best, a problem to worry about tomorrow and, at worst, mere science fiction. This is irresponsible. Reaching space is difficult. Colonizing it will be even more difficult; however, we cannot overlook it as a likely possibility. NASA viewed space colonization as an endeavor within humanity’s reach in the 1970s.7 Now it is beginning to take shape as a reality. In 2015 at the Pioneering Space National Summit, policy makers, industry leaders and advocates agreed that “The long term goal of the human spaceflight and exploration program of the United States is to expand permanent human presence beyond low-Earth orbit in a way that will enable human settlement and a thriving space economy. This will be best achieved through public-private partnerships and international collaboration (emphasis in original).”8 Additionally, there have been several attempts in Congress to pursue space settlement.9 Private industry appears to be taking the lead in this race. Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX intends to establish a colony of a million settlers on the surface of Mars.10 SpaceX is targeting the first manned missions to make this a reality to launch in 2024.11 Mr. Musk envisions the full colonization to take 40-100 years.12 Even if this timeline misses its ambitious deadline by a decade, humanity will be a multi-planetary species in many readers’ lifetimes. It is important to note that Mr. Musk recently stated that SpaceX is “building the first Mars, or interplanetary ship, and I think we’ll be able to do short trips, flights by first half of next year.”13 Even though he joked that the company might miss their timeline, his comments highlight that colonization is an issue that is fast approaching.14 Another factor to consider is that a legal framework needs to be developed before a Martian colony is at its full capacity. Mr. Musk envisions using SpaceX’s BFR to send approximately 100 people per flight to Mars.15 Additionally, SpaceX appears to be planning for humans living on the lunar surface in their Moon Base Alpha.16 SpaceX is not alone in their ambitions. United Launch Alliance (ULA) published their plans to expand the population of humans living and working in space. Their Cis-lunar 1,000 framework is a 30-year plan to develop the cis-lunar economy and grow the population of humans living and working in space from six to 1,000.17 Space colonization is more important to our species than the economic benefits of a space economy and the conquests of exploration. The current world population is 7.4 billion people.18 According to the World Wildlife Foundation and the Global Footprint Network, “the equivalent of 1.7 planets would be needed to produce enough natural resources to match our consumption rates and a growing population.”19 The problem will likely grow worse as the population of the planet continues to grow. According to the United Nations, the Earth’s population will grow to over 11 billion people by 2100.20 Based partially on this, “Prof Stephen Hawking said it was only a matter of time before the Earth as we know it is destroyed by an asteroid strike, soaring temperatures or over-population.”21 Hawking further stated that, “When we have reached similar crisis in or (sic.) history there has usually been somewhere else to colonise (sic.). Columbus did it in 1492 when he discovered the new world. But now there is no new world. No Eutopia (sic.) around the corner. We are running out of space and the only places to go are other worlds.”22 The late Professor Hawking is not alone in his view, the National Space Society observed the benefits of expanding into space. “Outer space holds virtually limitless amounts of energy and raw materials, which can be harvested for use both on Earth and in space. Quality of life can be improved directly by utilization of these resources and also indirectly moving hazardous and polluting industries and/or their waste products off planet Earth.”23 These are just several of the many compelling reasons to colonize space advocated by groups such as the National Space Society and the Space Frontier Foundation.24 ULA appears to be taking steps to meet their ambitions for the future. ULA announced the first step towards making their Cis-lunar 1,000 vision a reality. In October 2017, they announced a partnership with Bigelow Aerospace to launch a habitat to low lunar orbit.25 The launch is expected to be completed before the end 2022.26 Some feel that colonization is going to happen, no matter what governments do.27 If colonization is going to happen, then it is in the United States’ best interest to develop a legal framework that supports the efforts and protects our citizens who will travel to and live in these habitats. This is important for several reasons. First, private corporations appear to have an interest in colonizing space, so it is in humanity’s future whether the government is involved nor not. However, governments can take actions that will accelerate things.28 Second, it is in the best interest of the United States’ economy to support commercial companies that are expanding into space. Third, if the United States does not create a favorable legal framework for space colonization, someone else will. Finally, as humanity expands away from the surface of the Earth, it is important to create a free society based on the principles of the Rule of Law rather than some other form of government, or an anarchistic company town. Absent legally enforced personal rights, like property, space settlements are likely to be dominated by tyrannical governments or corporations. Turns case.
Cockell 08 Charles S. Cockell (Center for Earth, Planetary, Space and Astronomical Research – Open University, Milton Keynes), “AN ESSAY ON EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIBERTY,” JBIS, VOL. 61, pp. 255-275, 2008. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Charles-Cockell/publication/258317782_An_Essay_on_Extraterrestrial_Liberty/links/0c96053053a02cfb24000000/An-Essay-on-Extraterrestrial-Liberty.pdf CT 6. EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIBERTY For Berlin 20, ‘negative’ liberty meant the pursuit of individual liberty by removing those mechanisms that exert control over one’s actions. Western liberal democracies pursue, for the most part, philosophies of negative liberty, by attempting to reduce the role of government in individual lives. A restricted sphere of negative liberty is created by tyrannies, in which encroachment into the lives of individuals reduces the number and scope of activities in which people consider themselves free, or at least able to make decisions that can be implemented independently of the State. Of course, by retreating into a core set of activities in which one is completely free, one is in the process of relinquishing liberty, as the scope of free actions is voluntarily reduced. This is in itself a form of slavery. Societies where the scope of negative liberty is reduced can be described as more enslaved, even if the people there may not describe themselves as such, because they have in fact escaped State slavery by retreating from those very activities in which control is exerted. The crucial point is that the sphere within which negative liberty is possible is necessarily constrained by the environmental conditions under which one exists. The more extreme the environmental conditions, the fewer social activities can occur without collective oversight. More saliently, the people themselves may actually request such oversight, to protect their safety from others who would abuse it, with the resulting dangers. Some of these systems of monitoring can be found in societies on Earth. We cannot drive automobiles without safety checks. Our water must be passed through treatment works— life support systems if you will—that ensure that what we are drinking is safe. Indeed, even in some of the most mature terrestrial democracies, a remarkable quantity of basic consumables and resources come to us through systems of compliance overseen by the State. This is a form of control that most people accept because we consider it in our interest. We do not usually see such invasions of our liberty as tyranny, but rather as benevolent actions by the State to ensure our safekeeping. But they are incursions nevertheless, and while democracy is functioning such oversights need not necessarily concern us; or at least they do not worry most of the public, who are more concerned with having fresh water than more abstract thoughts about the allowable extent to which the State should have influence over their water quality. In extraterrestrial environments, spacesuits, water quality, food production, habitat pressurisation and so on and so forth will be subject to regulation by corporations or the State. As on Earth, perhaps many of these incursions will be regarded as acts of beneficence by the State in the interests of safety, and will be willingly accepted. But one fact is undeniable: the extent of negative liberty must be less in extraterrestrial environments than on Earth, and quite significantly less. Even the air will be subject to quality controls and checks. Forms and permissions will be associated with the very act of breathing. No philosophy of advancing the domain of negative liberty, no clever sophistry, can change this truth, which is brought into being by basic survival needs. An undeniable effect will be to expand the opportunities for tyranny. Where the mechanisms for central control are necessarily enlarged in their scope and diversity, a greater number of levers exist, and enable individuals and organisations to exert control and assume power. A reduction in negative liberty does not necessarily imply greater tyranny, but it certainly makes it possible. In extraterrestrial environments, where centralised interventions must be frequent, how much weaker is freedom and how much easier is tyranny to enforce? We cannot know the answers until we undertake the experiment, but we can be fairly sure that the qualitative answer must be ‘more easily’. More insidiously, the restriction of the borders of negative liberty, caused by the apparent need to protect individuals from the irresponsible actions of others, can itself be perpetuated as a form of liberty. The use of alcohol in extraterrestrial environments is one example. On Earth, the excessive use of alcohol may result in broken windows and arrests, but once the windows are repaired little damage has been done to society as a whole. Hence, although there is a negative social collective impact of excessive alcohol use, the prohibition of alcohol consumption of any kind is generally regarded as an infringement of civil liberties that the public will not tolerate. This is why, of course, attempts to do exactly this in the past have been met by black marketeering. But in extraterrestrial environments, a broken window may imply depressurisation, and the instant death of many individuals. The potential impact on society of the irresponsible and thoughtless actions of individuals is greater, and it might seem justifiable to restrict greatly, or even prohibit, the civil liberty of alcohol use, in the interests of collective safety. This principle can be applied to many diverse social interactions that could be construed as threatening people, and the prevention of which can be advanced as the protection of individual and social freedom through the process of restricting negative liberty. Liberty encompasses the freedom that individuals have to actively pursue their own objectives (‘positive liberty’ sensu Berlin). An obvious mechanism by which this becomes practical is the creation of social mechanisms and institutions through which the ‘active’ pursuit of this ‘positive’ sense of liberty is made possible, for example the welfare State. Organisations established to act as conduits for the free expression of different points of view, or to act as means to achieve practical objectives, are not always liberal. Even in some of the most developed democracies, societies and organisations may become dominated by elite closed circles of people, and media channels may be influenced by moguls who use outlets to perpetuate specific corporate views. What prevents these incursions into the structures of liberty from descending into wholesale tyranny? In reality, very little. The subversion of democratic States, or States on the verge of democracy, into societies more reminiscent of dictatorships has many historical precedents. The principal mechanisms that allow individual freedom to triumph over the slide towards tyranny include the legally agreed freedoms that individuals have to establish competition against dominating organisations, and the culture that ensures that the freedom to create organisations is not then abused to destroy the very democratic organisations that guarantee that freedom. In a society in which the freedom to organise and assemble institutions is protected by law, those organisations that distort and alter their environments, or the information they propagate, are likely to be usurped by institutions that reflect a different style of thinking, by the process of individual choice. However, these alternative visions can only be effective, and one can only assert them over the prevailing opinions with confidence, when one has sufficient information to be confident of their likely veracity. On Earth, to express many ideas and counter-opinions one does not need supreme confidence in the truth. If one’s opinion turns out to be in error one gives up, accepts the viewpoint of the adversary and continues one’s life. These opportunities to challenge, however, are central to the power of the individual to confront institutions. But there is one social situation in which the individual’s power is markedly reduced, even rendered completely ineffective against a collective body. Health and safety is one of the most effective levers of social influence and justified coercion, because it invokes the protection of people confronted with life and death situations. Consider, for example, an oxygen supply system on the Moon. The authority that runs such a system might seek control over a political dissenter by threatening to move him or her and their family to a new zone of habitation, on the grounds that the oxygen supply to their habitat is faulty. By doing this, they will remind these individuals who is in control of their survival, and coerce them through fear into mitigating their dissent, thereby creating a more malleable individual and reducing the challenge to collective authority. Governing organisations have access to a vast realm of information that no single individual can hope to have 21. They know, for example, about the oxygen demand, its rate of supply, the pipes that supply it, the maintenance history of the oxygen producing machines, and so on and so forth. For an individual to declare that the intention of the authority to move them to another habitat is for controlling political purposes, he or she must also have access to all such information, which they can then use to demonstrate that there is no safety concern. If they do not have access to this information, then it becomes a simple task for the authorities to portray them as dishonourable individuals inveighing against the hard work of other individuals who are working to secure their individual safety and the security of society 22. They can be then be ostracised, and their general behaviour will be treated as disingenuous. However, to have access to all the information to convincingly uphold a complaint is never possible, because an individual can never know whether they are missing a single crucial fact that makes all the difference to their safety. Even armed with what they perceive to be all the information available, the individual is faced with a choice between allowing an incursion on their home and liberty, or taking the risk that their presumption of having full information is correct. Faced with such a choice, the individual is likely to opt for the former in the interests of caution, particularly in an environment where the other choice may imply death from a failed oxygen system. In the extreme case, this first course of action would be further reinforced in a particularly coercive, venal society where the individual might even be convinced of the capability of the authorities to engineer the failure of their oxygen system and their death, in order to crush dissent, even if their complaint was in fact justified. The end point of this process, when applied across many activities in life, is a colony of automatons performing tasks for an extraterrestrial authority, with their freedom reduced to a withered core of activities in the most private confines of their habitats. Extraterrestrial environments make such an endpoint not merely a possible outcome, but a likely one. This attack on liberty is made possible because the pursuit of individual safety can be made an unchallengeable requirement of a ‘free’ society 23. Freedom from instantaneous death caused by the external environment is the common freedom on which all individuals should converge, and any social structure or plan that brings people closer to that reality must surely be praiseworthy? The removal of other freedoms to achieve the safety of society is excusable. From this position, the environment can itself become the instrument of positive liberty. In this way, and in a rather unique way, encroachment on freedom of thought and movement, in the interests of ensuring the protection of the freedom of the individual against the lethality of the environment, can be transformed into a justifiable and universalisable doctrine of control 24. Unfortunately this approach receives succour from every major tradition of social philosophy that we know on Earth. From Grotius to J.S. Mill, the right to self-preservation has been considered the core of individual liberties 25, a point beyond which no State may go, and which every individual has the right to take it upon him or herself to secure—indeed, such a notion has even been referred to as a ‘natural law’ 26. Even Hobbes’ view of the necessity of sovereign control 27 turns on the right of each individual in a fight to preserve themselves. It is possible to spend much of one’s life on Earth without undue concern for self-preservation. Apart from those unfortunate individuals who confront a burglar or gang, most people will not actually come face to face with the need to infringe others’ rights to self-preservation. Fortunately, although the right to self-preservation is theoretically an unchallengeable right of all people, it remains, in a civil society, one sufficiently protected by the laws, and by regulations against various street crimes that might infringe self-preservation. If, as has been traditional on the Earth, the right to selfpreservation is also held to be a basic right of all people in extraterrestrial environments, then the keys to despotism are handed over to those in control of society. Self-preservation is threatened on a day-to-day basis by the lethality of the environment. In such an environment, each individual does indeed represent a much greater threat to every other individual than on the Earth, because unpredictable and criminal actions against the infrastructure represent a continuously present and potentially catastrophic threat to self-preservation. The authorities therefore have the excuse to implement draconian systems of control to protect the right of every individual to self-preservation. Worse than this, however, the people will voluntarily, in exercising their right to selfpreservation, and to protect themselves, accept more farreaching control over the lives of others 28. Where death is a more likely outcome of criminal action, the Hobbesian State of nature, and the tendency to vigorously guard against it, becomes a more tangible reality 29. A lack of property rights enables tyranny in space by creating a monopoly on power and stifling individual expression.
Cockell 10 Charles S. Cockell (Center for Earth, Planetary, Space and Astronomical Research – Open University, Milton Keynes), “Essay on the Causes and Consequences of Extraterrestrial Tyranny,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol.63, pp. 15-37, January 2010. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Charles-Cockell/publication/258402359_Essay_on_the_Causes_and_Consequences_of_Extraterrestrial_Tyranny/links/00b495305364b3f6e8000000/Essay-on-the-Causes-and-Consequences-of-Extraterrestrial-Tyranny.pdf CT Perhaps the most important economic argument is that a centrally-planned system of production is likely to become autarkic, bearing in mind the political problems outlined earlier. In principle, there is no reason why a centrally-planned system of manufacture should not trade its products with other entities, but in reality if there is no profit motive for the organisation to do so, it will not achieve the same level of inducement to put the effort into overcoming the difficult obstacles of interplanetary trade if it is only charged with fabricating enough of a product to satisfy domestic demand. The problem of autarky is just one of the many problems associated with the system, which ultimately lends itself to political tyranny. The centrally-planned economy is unlikely, despite best efforts, to truly produce what people want and, like centrallyplanned states on the Earth, it cannot predict fashions and desires in the future that will necessarily make its economic output limited and dull compared to private entities, which are constantly striving to try to sell consumers new items. The worst effect of the strictly controlled economy will be the stifling of individual creativity, the opportunity to combine to produce, and the emergence of the political culture that results from the need to generate all the functionaries and state officials, with their attendant powers, that will be required to do the planning in the first place. The logic of a centrally-planned economy, and the attraction of this in the face of the possible failure of entities producing things so basic as oxygen, should be resisted even though it may lead to a less ordered and structured economic network 53. The role of the state in this schemata should be to ensure that sufficient entities exist (and more so for redundancy) to produce what is needed and to encourage a vigorous growth in these industries. It should only intervene to exert wholesale control over the means of production when a failure in some entity, or entities, threatens lives. Rejecting a centrally-planned economy would imply competing means of production, which itself almost certainly implies the presence of a system of private property. The public ownership of all goods might appear superficially to be a security against the possibility of people going short of vital goods. In the early stages of the establishment of settlements, it might well be the case that public ownership of certain commodities such as water and some food provisions will be required to ensure that they are distributed fairly to all occupants. However, for all the reasons just adumbrated, some incentive for production must exist independently of the people running the settlement. Quite apart from this, the problem in a highly isolated group is that complete control of all property by a single authority opens the door to political tyranny. An attraction of a Marxian society might be the economic equality that would result from the previously discussed mechanisms. Central planning, in particular, would obviate the chances of single, private entities accumulating a vast proportion of the wealth and individuals associated with these organisations becoming their own economic tyrants. There is merit in this view, and achieving equality would certainly prevent this outcome. Yet, regulations on monopolies and other tax mechanisms could be used to some degree to prevent excessive and despotic accumulations of wealth. Aside from the most severe cases, there are rational motives for allowing inequality. The environment of outer space is lethal, difficult to work in and a costly place in which to establish enterprises. To rely on the establishment of large networks of human settlements throughout the Solar System, solely on the back of state enterprise and centrally-directed orders, is likely to be folly. There is good reason to question what motives privately-funded people, let alone state organisations, would have for exploring the far reaches of space anyway. So, every incentive must be found to drive groups to establish enterprises for resources, tourism or whatever else is deemed necessary in order to expand. A Marxian system of equality in outer space, even if this could be achieved through some type of agreed social order, will erode the incentive to establish new enterprises from which trade can flow. Arguments that the driven will explore and settle space to expand the reach of humanity, to make it a multiplanet species and to advance science, independent of any economic incentive, are likely to be as ineffective as they were in stimulating productivity in the communist states of the Earth. People are motivated by these laudable and altruistic arguments, but the impulsion to work to secure the common good is not common and it is probably not sufficiently universal to be sure of achieving the results required in outer space. The sense of community, which is perceived to be another golden egg of the Marxian vision, depends of course on what sense of community we are talking about. As I have elaborated elsewhere, the sense of community in a centrally-organised society driven to complete equality is likely - and very rapidly in the environment of outer space - to turn into a highly autarchic control structure in which there is certainly an evident community, but where the freedom of the individual is all but destroyed 54. The society of contented slaves is most likely to emerge in an environment where continuously lethal external conditions give every excuse for control structures to expand into lives with ever more vigour by the process of the tendency of humans to expand their power bases. The maturation of tyranny will be facilitated because the Marxian vision is a single doctrine vision. How exactly this vision will manifest in the environment of space is unpredictable, but any single doctrine society that seeks to protect centrally planned objectives can never tolerate dissenters. It has been recognised for a long time that it is in the nature of singledoctrine societies to remove countervailing views, either through political dictates, peer pressure or the generation of terror and it follows that, eo ipso, few lesser arguments need be entertained against the Marxian vision of an extraterrestrial society. The ease with which the deadly environment can be turned into the common enemy and used to justify the protection and advancement of a single and inflexible political and economic vision makes any social order that promulgates one — and only one — path to social success dangerous. The details of those parts of a Marxian plan that can succeed and those that cannot, therefore, whither into insignificance in the face of the need to encourage a plurality of ideas about how extraterrestrial society should be ordered.
Property rights are the essential building blocks of a fully inclusive and functional government. Turns case since they envision a democratically governed space that is impossible without appropriation. UNDP ’08 - Working Group on Property Rights, 2008, 'Empowering the Poor Through Property Rights', in Making the Law Work for Everyone Volume II, Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, United Nations Development Programme, New York, pp. 63-128 https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/ch2.pdf AT This transition has reduced global poverty substantially, but as outlined above, billions of people around the world still lack secure property rights, which hinders their economic, political and social security. In order to examine how poverty can best be relieved, and why access to property rights is fundamental to the empowerment of the poor, it is necessary to identify building blocks of a fully-functional property system. Such a system operates in the following four ways: 1) As a system of rules that defines the bundle of rights and obligations between people and assets.15 Property ownership creates ties that bind individual citizens together through the formation of networks of economic and legal rights and corresponding obligations. The credible enforcement of these rights and obligations requires a judicial mechanism that allows for equitable, transparent and efficient dispute resolution. 2) As a system of governance. Property systems are a central facet of state functionality, and as such are an important measurement of fiduciary and administrative effectiveness. The institutional order of the state is based on technical rules and relationships which define interactions between stakeholders, ranging from direct ownership of land to promulgation of rules that govern security of land and house tenure, land planning, zoning, taxing and other aspects of property management. Technological innovation, which has radically reduced the cost of information, has generated the possibility for further transparency and accountability in property systems as an instrument of governance. 3) As a functioning market for the exchange of assets. A fully functional property system allows land, houses, moveable property, equity shares, and ideas to be transformed into assets to be bought and sold at rates determined by market forces. This subjects the exchange of property to a level of transparency and accountability, and allows for the development of financial mechanisms — including credit 67 and insurance — to facilitate transactions and improve economic outcomes. Land, houses and moveable property can thus be leveraged, and assets transformed from static investments into capital which can be bought and sold. However, property rights are a necessary but not sufficient precondition for the development of these financial mechanisms; they also develop through partnership between the market, special funds targeted at access to finance, and the state. 4) As an instrument of social policy. In the absence or failure of the market, the state often plays a direct role in addressing the needs of the poor. The state has at its disposal instruments that can be used to endow its citizens with assets as they relate to property, such as public housing, low interest loans and the distribution of state land. Such instruments help to overcome natural competition for assets. The state also supports social cohesion through the development of co-ownership of infrastructure and services by government and the citizen, supporting the equilibrium between individual and collective interests. Provision of infrastructure by the state critically affects the value and desirability of assets, and can therefore fundamentally affect opportunities for the poor.
Impact is Democide – Empirically, murder by tyrannical governments is the biggest impact. It outweighs war and cap. There is a direct relationship between the lack of personal freedom and democide.
Wayman 17 summarizing Rummel Wayman F.W. (2017) Rummel and Singer, DON and COW. In: Gleditsch N. (eds) R.J. Rummel: An Assessment of His Many Contributions. SpringerBriefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice, vol 37. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54463-2_9 CT At Rummel’s website, the dominant theme is that power kills (http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/). As he began one of his books (Rummel, 1994: 1), ‘Power kills; absolute power kills absolutely. This new Power Principle is the message emerging from my previous work on the causes of war and from this work on genocide and government mass murder … The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily.’ A major supporting idea is the term regime, as operationalized by Rummel (1995) and used as the organizing principle for his datasets on ‘democide—genocide and mass murder’ (Rummel, 1998: 1). This idea of a regime is important to his work because there is a lot of variation from regime to regime in the regime’s amount of power, and also in the number of people the regime kills. And Rummel’s dominant theme is that those two characteristics of a regime (power and deaths) co-vary. In my own ordinary language, a regime is a type of government controlling a state apparatus. As Rummel (1995: 9) says, ‘The changes from the Kaiser monarchy to the Weimar Republic to Hitler’s rule … give us three different German regimes. … I count 432 distinct state regimes during the period from 1900 to 1987’. Hence, there would be the czarist regime in Russia until 1917, and then the communist regime from 1917 to 1991. Between February and October 1917, there should I think be a transition period and transitional regime (under Kerensky). Individual rulers, such as general secretaries Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, and their governments, do not represent distinct regimes of their own, but instead are all leaders, successively, of different administrations in the communist regime. To me, Rummel’s (1983) article made the first really convincing case for the inter-liberal or inter-democratic peace. I have since challenged thousands of people, from classrooms to conferences where I am speaking, to name any other proposition in the social sciences that is surprising or counter-intuitive, and that has (according to its advocates at least) no exceptions. No one has ever been able, in my presence, to name such a proposition—other than Rummel’s. The COW Project generated the data for the bulk of the hypothesis tests in IR for decades (Wayman and Singer, 1990: 247–248). And ‘realist theory informed 90 of the hypotheses tested by IR scholars up to the 1970s’ (Walker, 2013: 148). It was a bit of a shock that an anti-realist hypothesis, the inter-democratic peace, had produced such a paradigm-shattering result. Sadly, I never heard Singer say a good word about Rummel’s studies confirming the inter-democratic peace hypothesis. Rummel had used COW data on wars, plus other people’s data on democracy, Liberalism, and freedom of nations, to contradict one of Singer’s claims (namely, Singer’s contention that the inter-democratic peace was based on too few cases and too flawed in other ways to be taken to be true; Small and Singer, 1976). Deciphering Singer’s true position on this is complicated. When Geller and Singer (1998) produced a literature review of scientific studies of international conflict, while they did caution that the evidence is ‘not indisputable’, they did acknowledge that ‘the evidence in the area of the joint freedom proposition is consistent and cumulative. Democratic dyads are less likely to engage in war than are non-democratic pairs’ (Geller and Singer, 1998: 87–88). But on the other hand, on his own at his weekly COW seminar, Singer was much more skeptical about the inter-democratic peace. So it is not surprising that, four years after Geller and Singer’s assessment, one of Singer’s students, Henderson (2002) wrote a book that constituted an attack on the democratic peace literature. In the opening paragraph, Henderson says, ‘It struck me as strange that one of the doyen of the behavioral revolution would be such an avid critic of what some scholars hail as the closest thing to an empirical law in the field’. Instead, Singer seemed more interested in the international or interstate system. While Waltz (1979: 94) defined ‘international political structures in terms of states’, Singer spoke of ‘the national state as level of analysis’ (Singer, 1961: 82–89). Thus, whereas Waltz writes of a system whose basic units are sovereign states, Singer ends up with two systems: an inter-state system and an international system. The international system consists of entities that have an international political goal (including … state creation or survival), engage in international political behavior (including inter-state or extra-state conflict, alliances, trade, or international organizations), or engage in political behavior that has international consequences (such as civil wars). The international system … includes … terrorist groups (Sarkees and Wayman, 2010: 27). Nested within this international system is the interstate system, beginning in 1816, distinguished in terms of ‘recurring international interactions between and among the interstate system members’ (Sarkees and Wayman, 2010: 16). Singer’s COW data are organized around a focus on state system membership. Basically, between 1816 and 1919 an entity is a state system member if it has 500,000 people or more and is diplomatically recognized at an adequate level by Britain and France, while after 1919 it is a state if it is a League of Nations or UN member or has 500,000 people and diplomatic recognition by two major powers. (Note that ‘state’ becomes a short-hand for ‘state system member’; Bremer and Ghosn, 2003.) Much confusion results from the short-hand expressions ‘state’ and ‘system’. ‘Whenever the word “system” was used without a modifier, Singer and Small were referring to the interstate system’ (Sarkees and Wayman, 2010: 16). Likewise, the ‘states’ whose characteristics are listed in the COW datasets are not the population of states, but the population of state system members. Singer’s most widely-cited explanatory articles on interstate war are probably Deutsch and Singer (1964) and Singer, Bremer and Stuckey (1972). Both operate at the system level of analysis. It may be that Singer’s devotion to the interstate system is part of what made him reluctant to embrace the inter-democratic peace. As he said in another widely-cited article, the international system level of analysis ‘almost inevitably requires that we postulate a high degree of uniformity in the foreign policy codes of our national actors’, and ‘the system-oriented approach tends to produce a sort of “black box” or “billiard ball” concept of national actors’. This is consistent with his foreign policy instincts, which were loath to attribute ‘white hats’ to the ‘free world’ and ‘black hats’ to the Soviet Union, in the assigning of blame for the dangers to world peace in the Cold War era. Singer’s posture was very different from Rummel’s, with Rummel in favor of Reagan’s foreign policy and against détente. In these Cold War contexts, Singer may have been uncomfortable with Rummel’s summary that ‘freedom preserves peace and life’. Singer wrote ‘it is evident that my research and teaching has unambiguously been problem-driven’, and ‘for reasons that I struggle to articulate, the problem has been, and remains, that of war’ (Singer, 1990: 2). The COW Project was founded by him at the University of Michigan in 1963, the year after the world nearly was destroyed, had the Cuban Missiles Crisis gone badly. International war attracted Singer’s best efforts at finding the ‘causes of war and conditions of peace’ (1990: 3). As he and Small put it, their focus is a ‘preoccupation with the elimination of international war and the possible role of solid explanatory knowledge in that enterprise’ (Small and Singer, 1982: 17). The first COW war handbook, Wages of War (Singer and Small, 1972) was consequently limited to international wars. Karl Deutsch subsequently convinced Singer that there was a need for a comparable list of civil wars. This led to a new handbook, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816–1980, presenting a ‘comprehensive list that will enhance … study of civil wars’ (Small and Singer, 1982: 204). The civil war list is accompanied with a cautionary note, ‘International war remains our major concern … A research assault on explanation of civil war … is clearly a task better left to others’ (Small and Singer, 1982: 17). Consequently, the COW project had many datasets (such as the Militarized Interstate Dispute dataset) on the correlates of interstate war, but nothing comparable on the civil war data. Nevertheless, the publication of the civil war data was a valuable contribution to studies of civil war, and was also a step toward the full delineation of the totality of modern war. This was followed, in the third COW handbook (Sarkees and Wayman, 2010) with a definition and list of non-state wars, completing the full reckoning of the patterns of war in the past two centuries. Also, the focus of Singer on international war was somewhat vindicated by his co-authored article revealing that, over the time since the Congress of Vienna, inter-state wars had resulted in 32 million battle deaths, intra-state wars only 18 million (Sarkees, Wayman and Singer, 2003). Critics often ask if the COW project has a state-centric bias. A more subtle and I think effective line of inquiry is to ask why the COW project has emphasized state-system-membership rather than simple sovereignty and independence as the defining characteristic of the state. This can cause confusion. For example, a number of non-state wars, including the main phase of one of the deadliest wars in history, the Taiping Rebellion, have been fought in areas that would be considered to be states by students of comparative politics. This and other related difficulties have led pioneers outside the COW project (Gleditsch, 2004; Fazal, 2007), as well as Singer’s successor at the COW Project (Bremer and Ghosn, 2003) to propose various revisions and expansions of the concept of the state, to go beyond the COW state membership definition. These difficulties and challenges continue to provide important frontiers for research on war and the state in coming years. In contrast to Singer, Rummel seems to me to have taken a more inductivist, practical approach to states and similar entities. On his website, powerkills.com, one finds a focus on killing, even of one person. The perpetrators are often leaders of totalitarian states, such as Mao, but can also be rebel leaders (the young Mao) or a king (Leopold of Belgium) who controls what some call a colony (the Belgian Congo) but Rummel calls Leopold’s personal property. The unit of analysis becomes the regime and regime-like power-centers such as Leopold’s Congo or Mao’s rebel territory. Rummel (1986) concluded that ‘War isn’t this century’s biggest killer’. As he said then, ‘About 35,654,000 people have died in this century’s international and domestic wars, revolutions, and violent conflicts. … The number of people killed by totalitarian or extreme authoritarian governments already far exceeds that for all wars, civil and international. Indeed, this number already approximates the number that might be killed in a nuclear war’. He itemized 95 million killed by communist governments, but only ‘831,000 killed by free democratic governments’. Those killed by free democratic governments were always foreigners: In no case have I found a democratic government carrying out massacres, genocide and mass executions of its own citizens … Absolutist governments (those that Freedom House would classify as not free) are not only many times deadlier than war, but are themselves the major factor causing war and other forms of violent conflict. They are a major cause of militarism. Indeed, absolutism, not war, is mankind’s deadliest scourge of all. In light of all this, the peaceful, nonviolent fostering of civil liberties and political rights must be made mankind’s highest humanitarian goal … because freedom preserves peace and life (Rummel, 1986).
3/12/22
JF-Salvage Law CP
Tournament: Harvard-Westlake Invitational | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harker AA | Judge: Ari Davidson CP: Apply the maritime law of salvage to space debris. Salter ’16 - Alexander William Salter Assistant Professor of Economics, Rawls College of Business, Texas Tech University, “SPACE DEBRIS: A LAW AND ECONOMICS ANALYSIS OF THE ORBITAL COMMONS,” 19 STAN. TECH. L. REV. 221 (2016). https://www-cdn.law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/19-2-2-salter-final_0.pdf AT Assuming a nation-state...nations’ space objects
1/15/22
ND - Police PIC
Tournament: USC Trojan Invitational | Round: 5 | Opponent: Mission San Jose AD | Judge: Samantha McLoughlin Police Unions PIC CP Text: A just government should abolish police unions and recognize the unconditional right of all other workers to strike. The aff makes police collective bargaining worse and gives more power to police unions. Andrew Grim, 20 Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is at work on a dissertation on anti-police brutality activism in post-WWII Newark - ("What is The Blue Flue and How Has It Increased Police Power," Washington Post, 7-1-2020, 11-2-2021https:www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/07/01/what-is-blue-flu-how-has-it-increased-police-power/)AW This weekend, officers ... concessions from municipalities.
Police unions use collective bargaining to reinforce systems of racism and violence. Clark ‘19 Paul F. Clark School Director and Professor of Labor and Employment Relations, Penn State, 10-10-2019, "Why police unions are not part of the American labor movement," Conversation, https://theconversation.com/why-police-unions-are-not-part-of-the-american-labor-movement-142538accessed 10/20/2021 marlborough jh In the wake ... nation at large.
Police backed by unions are more violent than non-unionized police. Ingraham ’20. Christopher Ingraham Reporter 20. ("Police Unions and Police Misconduct: What the Research Says About the Connection," Washington Post, 6-10-2020, 10-27-2021 https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/10/police-unions-violence-research-george-floyd/)//AW Some of the ... said on Twitter. Police unions are anti-labor- means the aff can never solve without getting rid of them AND turns case. Modak 20. Ria Modak Student Coordinator, Muslim American Studies Working Group, Harvard Student Labor Action Movement and the Harvard Graduate Students Union 20 - ("Police Unions Are Anti-Labor," Ria Modak, Harvard Political Review, 9-9-2020, 10-27-2021 https://harvardpolitics.com/police-unions-are-anti-labor/)//AW My own experiences ... protect anti-worker interests.
12/12/21
ND-Econ DA
Tournament: USC Trojan Invitational | Round: 5 | Opponent: Mission San Jose AD | Judge: Samantha McLoughlin Econ DA The economy is steadily recovering now, but is fragile. Rugaber 11/8 - Christopher Rugaber Economics Reporter, Associated Press, “'A struggle and a journey': Report shows US economy recovering,” Christian Science Monitor (Web). Nov. 8, 2021. Accessed Nov. 8, 2021. https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2021/1108/A-struggle-and-a-journey-Report-shows-US-economy-recovering AT America’s employers accelerated ... months of declines. Strikes cause widespread economic harm - GM strikes prove. John McElroy, 2019, Strikes Hurt Everybody.Wards Auto Industry News, October 25, https://www.wardsauto.com/ideaxchange/strikes-hurt-everybody But strikes don’t ... threaten the economy. Shannon Pettypiece, 10-24, 21, Biden on the sidelines of 'Striketober,' with economy in the balance, NBC News, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-sidelines-striketober-economy-balance-n1282094 But President Biden ... feels is appropriate." Economic downturns devastate people’s lives. EPI ’09 – Economic Policy Institute, “Economic Scarring: The long-term impacts of the recession,” Economic Policy Institute (Web). Briefing Paper #243. Sept. 30, 2009. Accessed Nov. 8, 2021. https://www.epi.org/publication/bp243/ AT Economic recessions are ... years to come. Economic decline causes nuclear war – collapses faith in deterrence Tønnesson, 15—Research Professor, Peace Research Institute Oslo; Leader of East Asia Peace program, Uppsala University (Stein, “Deterrence, interdependence and Sino–US peace,” International Area Studies Review, Vol. 18, No. 3, p. 297-311, dml) Several recent works ... disputes and diplomacy. Economic decline drastically increases poverty – turns case. Pettinger ‘20 Tejvan Pettinger studied PPE at LMH, Oxford University and works as an economics teacher and writer, 3-13-2020, "Impact of economic recession," Economics Help, https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/5618/economics/negative-impact-of-economic-recession/marlborough jh A recession (fall ... lower mortality rates)’
12/12/21
ND-Postwork K
Tournament: Damus Hollywood Invitational | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harker NA | Judge: David Dosch NC – Recommended K The aff’s refusal to work is not a refusal of work – their endorsement of striking reinforces the belief that withholding labor puts people in a position of power. This reduces humans to labor capital, which causes work-dependency and inhibits alternatives. Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ The societal dependence on work If work is associated with environmental pressures in at least four different ways, why do we have to maintain it at constant or increased levels? We hold that in industrial society four distinct levels of structural and cultural dependency on work may be discerned. These are to be understood as broad analytical categories which in reality comprise and cross individual and structural levels in various ways, and are all interdependent. Personal dependence. A first aspect is individual or personal dependence on work: Work as regular, gainful employment constitutes one of the central social relations in modern ‘work society’ and is a central point of reference in people’s lives. As a principal source of income, waged work fulfils the existential function of providing livelihoods and social security. It is constructed to secure basic social rights, social integration, recognition, status, and personal identity (Frayne 2015b; Weeks 2011). This is probably why ‘social’ is so often equated with ‘work’. State dependence. Secondly, dependence on work pertains to the modern welfare state: the revenues and economic growth generated through work contribute substantially to the financing of social security systems. Affording welfare is therefore a main argument for creating jobs. Wage labour is thus a dominating tool for redistribution; through wages, taxes on wages and on the consumption that production generates, almost all distribution takes place. Hence, what the job is, and what is being produced, is of secondary importance (Paulsen 2017). Work is moreover a convenient instrument of control that structures and disciplines society, and ‘renders populations at once productive and governable’ (Weeks 2011, 54; Gorz 1982; Lafargue 2014 1883). Specifically, the dominant neoliberal ideology, its condemnation of laziness and idealisation of ‘hardworking people’ has intensified the ‘moral fortification of work’. Accordingly, the neoliberal ‘workfare’ reforms have focused on job creation and the relentless activation for the labour market, effectively ‘enforcing work (…) as a key function of the state’ (Frayne 2015b, 16). Economic dependence. Thirdly, besides the economic imperative for individuals to ‘earn a living’ and pay off debt, modern economies are dependent on work in terms of an industrious labour force, long working hours for increasing economic output under the imperatives of capital accumulation, growth and competition, and rising incomes for increasing purchasing power and demand. Creating or preserving jobs constitutes the standard argument for economic growth. In turn, work as one basic factor of production creates growth. However, the relation between growth and employment is conditioned, amongst other factors, primarily by constantly pursued labour productivity: for employment to rise or stay stable, the economy must grow at a sufficiently high rate to exceed productivity gains, in order to offset job losses and avoid ‘jobless growth’. Moreover, faltering expansion triggers a spiral of recession which not only affects economic stability but results in societal crises as a whole (Jackson 2009; Paech 2012). However, besides being unsustainable and insatiable, growth is also increasingly unlikely to continue at the rates required for economic stability (Kallis et al. 2018; IMF 2015). The individual and structural economic dependence on work and economic growth therefore implies profound vulnerability as livelihoods and political stability are fatefully exposed to global competition and the capitalist imperative of capital accumulation, and constrained by ‘systemically relevant’ job and growth creating companies, industries and global (financial) markets (Gronemeyer 2012; Paech 2012). Cultural dependence. A fourth aspect concerns cultural dependence: The ‘work ethic’ is the specific morality described by Max Weber (19921905) as constitutive of modern industrial culture, 2 and determining for all its subjects as shared ‘common senses’ about how work is valued and understood. It means an ingrained moral compulsion to gainful work and timesaving, manifested in the common ideals of productivity, achievement and entrepreneurship, in the feeling of guilt when time is ‘wasted’, in personal identification with one’s ‘calling’, in observations of busyness, even burnout as a ‘badge of honour’ (Paulsen 2014), and in descriptions of a culture that has lost the ‘capacity to relax in the old, uninhibited ways’ (Thompson 1967, 91). Even for those who do not share such attitudes towards work, in a work-centred culture it is normal to (seek) work. It is so commonsensical that it seems impractical to question it, and it continues to be normalised through socialisation and schooling. Consequently, people become limited in their imagination of alternatives, the prospect of losing one’s job usually causes heartfelt fear (Standing 2011). For a work society that ‘does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won’, there can be nothing worse than the cessation of work (Hannah Arendt, cited in Gorz 1989, 7–8). The wage relation based on the commodity labour is, in other words, an essential functional feature of the industrial-capitalist system, and the exaltation of work remains its social ethic. For modern industrial society work is ‘both its chief means and its ultimate goal’ (Gorz 1989, 13; Weber 1992 1905; Weeks 2011); it is centred and structurally dependent on work, despite work’s environmentally adverse implications. This constellation constitutes the dilemma between work and the environment, and it is why we argue that work is absolutely central to present-day unsustainability and should accordingly be dealt with in sustainability research. Work necessitates material throughput and waste that destroys the environment, even when the jobs are ‘green’ Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ An ecological critique of work What is the problem with modern-day work from an environmental perspective? A number of quantitative studies have researched the correlation of working hours and environmental impacts in terms of ecological footprint, carbon footprint, greenhouse gas emissions, and energy consumption, both on micro/household and on macro/cross-national levels, and for both ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries (Fitzgerald, Jorgenson, and Clark 2015; Hayden and Shandra 2009; Knight, Rosa, and Schor 2013; Nässén and Larsson 2015; Rosnick and Weisbrot 2007). Based on these findings, and going beyond them, we develop a qualitative classification of ecological impacts of work broadly (not working hours only), distinguishing four analytically distinct factors (Hoffmann 2017). Fundamentally, all productive activity is based on material and energy throughputs within wider ecological conditions, which necessarily involves interference with the ecosphere. The appropriation and exploitation of non-human animals, land, soil, water, biomass, raw materials, the atmosphere and all other elements of the biosphere always to some extent causes pollution, degradation, and destruction. Thus, work is inherently both productive and destructive. However, this biophysical basis alone need not make work unsustainable, and it has not always been so (Krausmann 2017). Contributing to its unsustainability is, firstly, the Scale factor: the greater the amount of work, the more ‘inputs’ are required and the more ‘outputs’ generated, which means more throughput of resources and energy, and resulting ecological impacts. In other words, the more work, the larger the size of the economy, the more demands on the biosphere (Hayden and Shandra 2009; Knight, Rosa, and Schor 2013). Obviously, there are qualitative differences between different types of work and their respective environmental impacts. Moreover, besides the evident and direct impacts, indirect impacts matter also. The tertiary/service sector is therefore not exempt from this reasoning (Hayden and Shandra 2009; Knight, Rosa, and Schor 2013), not only due to its own (often ‘embodied’) materiality and energy requirements, but also because it administrates and supports industrial production processes in global supply chains (Fitzgerald, Jorgenson, and Clark 2015; Haberl et al. 2009; Paech 2012). Additionally, modern work is subject to certain integrally connected and mutually reinforcing conditions inherent in industrial economic structures, which aggravate ecological impacts by further increasing the Scale factor. These include the systematic externalisation of costs, and the use of fossil fuels as crucial energy basis, which combined with modern industrial technology enable continuously rising labour productivity independently of physical, spatial or temporal constraints (Malm 2013). Taken together, this leads to constantly spurred economic growth with a corresponding growth in material and energetic throughputs, and the creation of massive amounts of waste. The latter is not an adverse side-effect of modern work, but part of its purpose under the imperatives of growth, profitability, and constant innovation, as evident in phenomena such as planned obsolescence or the ‘scrapping premium’, serving to stimulate growth and demand, and hence, job creation (Gronemeyer 2012). These conditions and effects tend to be neglected when ‘green jobs’ are promised to resolve the ecological crisis (Paus 2018), disregarding that the systematically and continuously advanced scale of work and production has grown far beyond sustainable limits (Haberl et al. 2009). Unions are intrinsically invested in labor being good – they don’t strike to get rid of work; they strike to get people back to work. Lundström 14: Lundström, Ragnar; Räthzel, Nora; Uzzell, David {Uzell is Professor (Emeritus) of Environmental Psychology at the University of Surrey with a BA Geography from the University of Liverpool, a PhD Psychology from the University of Surrey, and a MSc in Social Psychology from London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London. Lundstrom is Associate professor at Department of Sociology at Umea University. Rathzel is an Affiliated as professor emerita at Department of Sociology at Umea University.}, 14 - ("Disconnected spaces: introducing environmental perspectives into the trade union agenda top-down and bottom-up," Taylor and Francis, 12-11-2014, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2015.1041212?scroll=topandamp;needAccess=true)//marlborough-wr/ Even though there was support for environmental perspectives in LO at this time – after all, the National Congress commissioned the programme, an environmental unit was established at headquarters and a majority of the congress accepted the programme – this waned significantly when the economy was threatened. This reflects the influence of the ‘jobs vs. environment’ conflict on processes of integrating environmental perspectives into the union agenda (Räthzel and Uzzell 2011). Union policies are embedded in a mode of production marked by what Marx called the ‘metabolic rift’. The concept is one of the pillars upon which Foster develops ‘Marx’s Ecology’ (Foster 2000, 155 f). It argues that the capitalist industrial system exploits the earth without restoring its constituents to it. More generally, Marx defined the labour process as metabolism (Stoffwechsel) between nature (external to humans) and human nature. When humans work on and with nature to produce the means of their survival, they also develop their knowledge and their capabilities, and transform their own human nature (Marx 1998). Polanyi later reduced the concept of the ‘metabolic rift’ to the commodification of land (Polanyi 1944), thus paving the way for a perspective that sees the solution in the control of the market, but disregards the relations of production as they are lived by workers in the production process. But to understand why trade unions have difficulties developing and especially holding on to environmental policies it is important to recognise that since nature has become a privately owned ‘means of production’ it has become workers’ Other. Unions have been reduced and have reduced themselves to care only for one part of the inseparable relationship between nature and labour. On the everyday level of policies this means that environmental strategies lose momentum in times of economic crises and when jobs are seen to be threatened. In this respect, unions are no different from political parties and governments. In spite of numerous publications by the ILO and Union organisations, which show that a move to a ‘green economy’ can create new jobs (Poschen 2012; Rivera Alejo and Martín Murillo 2014), unions have been reluctant to exchange ‘a bird in the hand for two in the bush’ – even if the bird in the hand becomes elusive. The alternative is rejecting the affirmative to embrace postwork – it questions the centrality of work and ontological attachments to productivity to enable emancipatory transformation of society to an ecologically sustainable form. Your ballot symbolizes an answer to the question of whether work can be used as the solution to social ills. The plan doesn’t “happen,” and you are conditioned to valorize work – vote neg to interrogate these ideological assumptions. Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ What is postwork? How can a ‘postwork’ approach contribute to resolving these issues? The notions critique of work (Frayne 2015a, 2015b) or postwork (Weeks 2011) have emerged in recent years in social science research and popular culture, building on a long intellectual tradition of (autonomist and neo-)Marxist, anarchist, and feminist theory (Seyferth 2019; Weeks 2011). The critique of work targets work in a fundamental sense, not only its conditions or exploitation. It is aimed at the centrality of work in modern ‘work society’ as a pivotal point for the provision of livelihoods through monetary income, the granting of social security, social inclusion, and personal identity construction, on which grounds unemployed persons and unpaid activities are excluded from recognition, welfare provision and trade union support. Moreover, the crucial role of waged work in the functioning of the welfare state and the modern industrialised economy is part of this critique (Chamberlain 2018; Frayne 2015b; Paulsen 2017). Although commonly taken as naturally given, this kind of societal order and its institutions such as the wage relation, labour markets, unemployment, or abstract time are historically and culturally exceptional modes of human coexistence (Applebaum 1992; Graeber 2018; Gorz 1989; Polanyi 2001 1944; Thompson 1967). This critique of the structures and social relations of work society is accompanied by the critique of its cultural foundation, the work ethic; an ideological commitment to work and productivism as ends in themselves, moral obligations, and as intrinsically good, regardless of what is done and at what cost (Gorz 1982; Weber 1992 1905; Weeks 2001). Postwork, however, is not only a critical stance. Criticising work and work society, aware of their historical contingency, implies the potential for an emancipatory transformation of industrial society. The focus is thereby not necessarily on abolishing work tout-court, but rather on pointing out and questioning its relentless centrality and asking what a more desirable, free and sustainable society might look like; a society in which work is no longer the pivotal point of social organisation and ideological orientation, including all questions and debates around this objective (Chamberlain 2018; Frayne 2015a; Weeks 2011). As a relatively new and dynamically developing approach, postwork is, despite similar political claims, not uniform in its reasoning. Some, drawing on the classical ‘end-of-work’ argument (Frayne 2016), assume an imminent technology-induced massive rise in unemployment. This is welcomed as an opportunity to reduce and ultimately abolish work to liberate humankind (Srnicek and Williams 2015). Others emphasise the remarkable fact that throughout the past two centuries technological development has not challenged the centrality of work in modern lives, despite the prospect that technological change would allow for much shorter working hours (e.g., Keynes 1930). This has not materialised due to the requirements of a work-centred, work-dependent society. On the contrary, work has become more central to modern societies. These deeper structural and cultural aspects and dependencies seem to remain unaffected by technological trends (Paulsen 2017; Weeks 2011). The ecological case for postwork The perspective of postwork/critiques of work may enrich sustainability debates in many ways; here, our focus is again on ecological concerns. First, postwork offers a much needed change in focus in sustainability debates, away from narrow critiques of individual consumption and the overemphasis on ‘green jobs’, towards understanding work as one central cause of sustained societal unsustainability. Postwork directs the focus towards crucial overlooked issues, e.g. the ways in which work is ecologically harmful, or which problems arise due to the social and cultural significance of modern-day work, including existential dependencies on it. Postwork seeks to re-politicise work, recognising that its conception and societal organisation are social constructs and therefore political, and must accordingly be open to debate (Weeks 2011). This opens conceptual space and enables open-minded debates about the meaning, value and purpose of work: what kind of work is, for individuals, society and the biosphere as a whole, meaningful, pointless, or outright harmful (Graeber 2018)? Such debates and enhanced understanding about the means and ends of work, and the range of problems associated with it, would be important in several regards. In ecological regard it facilitates the ecologically necessary, substantial reduction of work, production and consumption (Frey 2019; Haberl et al. 2009). Reducing work/working hours is one of the key premises of postwork, aiming at de-centring and de-normalising work, and releasing time, energy and creativity for purposes other than work (Coote 2013). From an ecological perspective, reducing the amount of work would reduce the dependency on a commodity-intensive mode of living, and allow space for more sustainable practices (Frayne 2016). Reducing work would also help mitigate all other work-induced environmental pressures described above, especially the ‘Scale factor’ (Knight, Rosa, and Schor 2013), i.e. the amount of resources and energy consumed, and waste, including emissions, created through work. A postwork approach facilitates debate on the politics of ecological work reduction which entails difficult questions: for example, which industries and fields of employment are to be phased out? Which fields will need to be favoured and upon what grounds? Which kinds of work in which sectors are socially important and should therefore be organised differently, especially when altering the energy basis of work due to climate change mitigation which implies decentralised, locally specific, intermittent and less concentrated energy sources (Malm 2013)? These questions are decisive for future (un-)sustainability, and yet serious attempts at a solution are presently forestalled by the unquestioned sanctity that work, ‘jobs’ or ‘full employment’ enjoy (Frayne 2015b). Postwork is also conducive to rethinking the organisation of work. There are plausible arguments in favour of new institutions of democratic control over the economy, i.e. economic democracy (Johanisova and Wolf 2012). This is urgent and necessary to distribute a very tight remaining carbon budget fairly and wisely (IPCC 2018), to keep economic power in check, and to gain public sovereignty over fundamental economic decisions that are pivotal for (un-)sustainable trajectories (Gould, Pellow, and Schnaiberg 2004). An obstacle to this is one institution in particular which is rarely under close scrutiny: the labour market, a social construct linked to the advent of modern work in form of the commodity of labour (Applebaum 1992). It is an undemocratic mechanism, usually characterised by high levels of unfreedom and coercion (Anderson 2017; Graeber 2018; Paulsen 2015) that allocates waged work in a competitive mode as an artificially scarce, ‘fictitious’ commodity (Polanyi 2001 1944). 4 It does so according to availability of money and motives of gain on the part of employers, and appears therefore inappropriate for distributing labour according to sustainability criteria and related societal needs. As long as unsustainable and/or unnecessary jobs are profitable and/or (well-)paid, they will continue to exist (Gorz 1989), just as ‘green jobs’ must follow these same criteria in order to be created. An ecological postwork perspective allows to question this on ecological grounds, and it links to debates on different modes of organising socially necessary work, production and provisioning in a de-commodified, democratic and sustainable mode. Finally, postwork is helpful for ecological reasons because it criticises the cultural glorification of ‘hard work’, merit and productivism, and the moral assumption that laziness and inaction are intrinsically bad, regardless the circumstances. Postwork is about a different mindset which problematises prevailing productivist attitudes and allows the idea that being lazy or unproductive can be something inherently valuable. Idleness is conducive to an ecological agenda as nothing is evidently more carbon-neutral and environment-sparing than being absolutely unproductive. As time-use studies indicate, leisure, recreation and socialising have very low ecological impacts, with rest and sleep having virtually none (Druckman et al. 2012). Apart from humans, the biosphere also needs idle time for regeneration. In this sense, laziness or ‘ecological leisure’, ideally sleep, can be regarded as supremely ecofriendly states of being that would help mitigate ecological pressures. Moreover, as postwork traces which changes in attitudes towards time, efficiency and laziness have brought modern work culture and modern time regimes into being in the first place and have dominated ever since (Thompson 1967; Weber 1992 1905), it provides crucial knowledge for understanding and potentially changing this historically peculiar construction. It can thereby take inspiration from longstanding traditions throughout human history, where leisure has usually been a high social ideal and regarded as vital for realising genuine freedom and quality of life (Applebaum 1992; Gorz 1989). Conclusions: postwork politics and practices We argued that modern-day work is a central cause for unsustainability, and should therefore be transformed to advance towards sustainability. We have contributed to this field of research, firstly, by developing a systematisation of the ecological harms associated with work – comprising the factors Scale, Time, Income, and Work-induced Mobility, Infrastructure, and Consumption – taking those studies one step further which investigate the ecological impacts of working hours quantitatively. One of the analytical advantages of this approach is that it avoids the mystification of work through indirect measures of economic activity (such as per capita GDP), as in the numerous analyses of the conflict between sustainability and economic growth in general. Our second substantial contribution consists in combining these ecological impacts of work with an analysis of the various structural dependencies on work in modern society, which spells out clearly what the recurring jobs-environment-dilemma actually implies, and why it is so difficult to overcome. While this dilemma is often vaguely referred to, this has been the first more detailed analysis of the different dimensions that essentially constitute it. Reviewing the literature in environmental sociology and sustainability research more generally, we also found the work-environment-dilemma and the role of work itself are not sufficiently addressed and remain major unresolved issues. We proposed the field would benefit from taking up the long intellectual tradition of problematising modern-day work, through the approach of postwork or critiques of work. While the described problems of unsustainability and entrenched dependencies cannot easily be resolved, we discussed how postwork arguments can contribute to pointing out and understanding them, and to opening up new perspectives to advance sustainability debates. A third contribution is therefore to have introduced the concept of postwork/critiques of work into sustainability research and the work-environment debate, and to have conducted an initial analysis of the ways in which postwork may be helpful for tackling ecological problems. Besides being ecologically beneficial, it may also serve emancipatory purposes to ‘raise broader questions about the place of work in our lives and spark the imagination of a life no longer so subordinate to it’ (Weeks 2011, 33). In order to inspire such ‘postwork imagination’ (Weeks 2011, 35, 110) and show that postwork ideas are not as detached from reality as they may sound, in this last section we briefly outline examples of existing postwork politics and practices. The most obvious example is the reduction of working hours during the 19th and 20th centuries. These reforms were essential to the early labour movement, and the notion that increasing productivity entails shorter working hours has never been nearly as ‘radical’ as today (Paulsen 2017). As concerns about climate change are rising, there is also renewed awareness about the ecological benefits of worktime reduction, besides a whole range of other social and economic advantages (Coote 2013; Frey 2019). Worktime reduction is usually taken up positively in public debate. Carlsson (2015, 184) sees a ‘growing minority of people’ who engage in practices other than waged work to support themselves and make meaningful contributions to society. Frayne (2015b) describes the practical refusal of work by average people who wish to live more independently of the treadmill of work. Across society, the disaffection with work is no marginal phenomenon (Graeber 2018; Cederström and Fleming 2012; Paulsen 2014, 2015; Weeks 2011); many start to realise the ‘dissonance between the mythical sanctity of work on the one hand, and the troubling realities of people’s actual experiences on the other’ (Frayne 2015b, 228). Public debates are therefore increasingly receptive to issues such as industries’ responsibility for climate change, coercive ‘workfare’ policies, meaningless ‘bullshit jobs’, or ‘work-life-balance’, shorter hours, overwork and burnout; topics ‘that will not go away’ (Coote 2013, xix) and question the organisation of work society more fundamentally. 5 The debate about an unconditional basic income (UBI) will also remain. UBI would break the existential dependency of livelihoods on paid work and serve as a new kind of social contract to entitle people to social security regardless of paid economic activity. In addition to countless models in theory, examples of UBI schemes exist in practice, either currently implemented or planned as ‘experiments’ (Srnicek and Williams 2015). The critique and refusal of work also takes place both within the sphere of wage labour and outside it. Within, the notions of absenteeism, tardiness, shirking, theft, or sabotage (Pouget 1913 1898; Seyferth 2019) have a long tradition, dating back to early struggles against work and industrialisation (Thompson 1967), and common until today (Paulsen 2014). The idea of such deliberate ‘workplace resistance’ is that the ability to resist meaningless work and the internalised norms of work society, and be idle and useless while at work, can be recognised and successfully practised (Campagna 2013; Scott 2012). Similarly, there is a growing interest in productive practices, social relations, and the commons outside the sphere of wage labour and market relations, for example in community-supported agriculture. This initiates ways of organising work and the economy to satisfy material needs otherwise than by means of commodity consumption (Chamberlain 2018; Helfrich and Bollier 2015). For such modes of organising productive social relations in more varied ways, inspiration could be drawn from the forms of ‘work’ that are prevalent in the global South in the so-called informal sector and in non-industrial crafts and peasantry, neither of which resemble the cultural phenomenon of modern-day work with its origins in the colonial North (Comaroff and Comaroff 1987; Thompson 1967). This, however, contradicts the global development paradigm, under which industrialisation, ‘economic upgrading’, global (labour) market integration and ‘structural transformation’ are pursued. Modern work, especially industrial factory jobs and ideally in cities, is supposed to help ‘the poor’ to escape their misery (Banerjee and Duflo 2012; UNDP 2015). Many of these other forms of livelihood provisioning and associated ways of life are thus disregarded, denigrated or destroyed as underdeveloped, backward, poor, and lazy (Thompson 1967), and drawn into the formal system of waged work as cheap labour in capitalist markets and global supply chains – ‘improved living conditions’ as measured in formal pecuniary income (Rosling 2018; Comaroff and Comaroff 1987). There are indications that these transformations create structural poverty, highly vulnerable jobs and an imposed dependence on wage labour (while few viable wage labour structures exist) (Hickel 2017; Srnicek and Williams 2015). There is also clear evidence of numerous struggles against capitalist development and for traditional livelihood protection and environmental justice (Anguelovski 2015). These are aspects where a postwork orientation is relevant beyond the industrialised societies of the global North, as it puts a focus on the modern phenomenon ‘work’ itself and the conditions that led to its predominance, as it questions the common narrative that ‘jobs’ are an end in themselves and justify all kinds of problematic development, and as it allows to ask which alternative, postcolonial critiques and conceptualisations of ‘work’ exist and should be preserved. To conclude, we clearly find traces of postwork organisation and politics in the present. However, these ideas are contested; they concern the roots of modern culture, society and industrial-capitalist economies. Waged work continues to be normalised, alternatives beyond niches appear quite impractical for generalisation. Powerful economic interests, including trade unions, seek to perpetuate the status-quo (Lundström, Räthzel, and Uzzell 2015). Job creation and (global) labour market integration (regardless of what kind) are central policy goals of all political parties, and presently popular progressive debates on a Green New Deal tend to exhibit a rather productivist stance. There is one particular aspect that appears hopeful: the present socio-economic system is unsustainable in the literal sense that it is physically impossible to be sustained in the long run. It was Weber (19921905) who predicted that the powerful cosmos of the modern economic order will be determining with overwhelming force until the last bit of fossil fuel is burnt – and exactly this needs to happen soon to avert catastrophic climate change. 6 This is the battlefield of sustainability, and lately there has been renewed urgency and momentum for more profound social change, where it might be realised that a different societal trajectory beyond work and productivism for their own sake is more sustainable and desirable for the future.
11/6/21
ND-Pro Act CP
Tournament: USC Trojan Invitational | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harvard-Westlake AW | Judge: Ben Cortez PRO Act CP CP text: the US ought to pass the PRO act. The problem with worker organization isn’t the right to strike- it’s companies taking deliberate anti-union action. Means the aff can never solve. Heidi Shierholz, 20 - ("Weakened labor movement leads to rising economic inequality," Economic Policy Institute, 1-27-2020, 11-4-2021https:www.epi.org/blog/weakened-labor-movement-leads-to-rising-economic-inequality/)AW The basic facts ... in their workplace. The PRO act solves way better than the aff by making it easier for workers to unionize. Celine McNicholas and Lynn Rhinehart, 19 - ("The PRO Act: Giving workers more bargaining power on the job," Economic Policy Institute, 5-2-2019, 11-4-2021https:www.epi.org/blog/the-pro-act-giving-workers-more-bargaining-power-on-the-job/)AW Our economy is ... closing that gap.
12/11/21
ND-UBI CP
Tournament: USC Trojan Invitational | Round: 5 | Opponent: Mission San Jose AD | Judge: Samantha McLoughlin UBI CP CP Text: A just government ought to provide universal basic income Striking can’t solve layoffs when the employer doesn’t need their workers anymore – UBI would give workers a cushion to survive unemployment AND increase their ability to strike by providing a strike fund Tascha Shahriari-Parsa, 21 Tascha Shahriari-Parsa is a student at Harvard Law School. ("Why Universal Basic Income is a Labor Issue," OnLabor, 4-30-2021, https://onlabor.org/why-universal-basic-income-is-a-labor-issue/)//va For both Stern ... else that matters. ¶
Tournament: USC Trojan Invitational | Round: 3 | Opponent: Harvard-Westlake EJ | Judge: Jacob Nails Violence PIC Counterplan: A just government ought to guarantee the right to strike over environmental conditions except for violent strike tactics. Strikes can be violent, South Africa proves. This link turns the AC by harming the affected sector and decking the economy. Tenzam ’20 - Mlungisi Tenzam LLB LLM LLD Senior Lecturer, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2020, The effects of violent strikes on the economy of a developing country: a case of South Africa, http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttextandpid=S1682-58532020000300004 The Constitution guarantees ... economy and employment.
12/11/21
ND-WSDE CP
Tournament: USC Trojan Invitational | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harvard-Westlake AW | Judge: Ben Cortez WSDE CP Plan text: Firms should be transformed into worker self-directed enterprises. Wolff ND - Richard D. Wolff professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a visiting professor at the New School in New York City. He has also taught economics at Yale University, the City University of New York, and the University of Paris I (Sorbonne), “Start with Worker Self-Directed Enterprises,” The Next System Project. https://thenextsystem.org/sites/default/files/2017-08/RickWolff.pdf AT We therefore propose ... the capitalist sector. Empirics prove that self-directed firms are more democratic and successful. Jerry Ashton, 13 - ("The Worker Self-Directed Enterprise: A "Cure" for Capitalism, or a Slippery Slope to Socialism?," HuffPost, 1-2-2013, accessed 11-16-2021, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/worker-self-directed-enterprise_b_2385334)//MS Decidedly so, Wolff ... benefits and risks." ¶
12/11/21
Russia Fill-In DA
Tournament: Woodward | Round: 6 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart Wegmann-Gatarz | Judge: Sarah Sherwood 3 Russia and China are in a space arms race- the plan causes China to bow out and Russia wins. This independently turns case because their Bowman and Thompson + Rogin cards are not about a Russian-Sino alliance, but about an arms race between the countries. Bowman and Thompson 20: Bradley Bowman, Jared Thompson {Bradley Bowman, the senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Jared Thompson, a U.S. Air Force major and visiting military analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, }, 20 - ("Russia and China Seek to Tie America’s Hands in Space," Foreign Policy, 11-12-2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/03/31/russia-china-space-war-treaty-demilitarization-satellites/)//marlborough-wr/ Consider the actions of the United States’ two great-power adversaries when it comes to anti-satellite weapons. China and Russia have sprinted to develop and deploy both ground-based and space-based weapons targeting satellites while simultaneously pushing the United States to sign a treaty banning such weapons. To protect its vital space-based military capabilities—including communications, intelligence, and missile defense satellites—and effectively deter authoritarian aggression, Washington should avoid being drawn into suspect international treaties on space that China and Russia have no intention of honoring. The Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space and of the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects (PPWT), which Beijing and Moscow have submitted at the United Nations, is a perfect example. PPWT signatories commit “not to place any weapons in outer space.” It also says parties to the treaty may not “resort to the threat or use of force against outer space objects” or engage in activities “inconsistent” with the purpose of the treaty. On the surface, that sounds innocuous. Who, after all, wants an arms race in space? The reality, however, is that China and Russia are already racing to field anti-satellite weapons and have been for quite some time. “The space domain is competitive, congested, and contested,” Gen. James Dickinson, the head of U.S. Space Command, said in January. “Our competitors, most notably China and Russia, have militarized this domain.” Beijing already has an operational ground-based anti-satellite missile capability. People’s Liberation Army units are training with the missiles, and the U.S. Defense Department believes Beijing “probably intends to pursue additional anti-satellite weapons capable of destroying satellites up to geosynchronous Earth orbit.” That is where America’s most sensitive nuclear communication and missile defense satellites orbit and keep watch. Similarly, Moscow tested a ground-based anti-satellite weapon in December that could destroy U.S. or allied satellites in orbit. That attack capability augments a ground-based laser weapon that Russian President Vladimir Putin heralded in 2018. In a moment of candor, Russia’s defense ministry admitted the system was designed to “fight satellites.” To make matters worse, both countries are also working to deploy space-based—or so-called “on-orbit”—capabilities to attack satellites.
Unchecked Russian influence in space will inevitably lead to war – the asymmetric advantage given to them by the plan is key for Russian space heg. They are uniquely more aggressive than China, and the CP is the only way to limit them. Don’t let them say Russia needs China – Stent only says that Russia supports Chinese aggression, not that they’re dependent on it, which means Russia heg independently turns case. Boulègue and Unal 20: Mathieu Boulègue, Beyza Unal {Unal is Deputy Director, International Security Programme, Boulègue is a Research Fellow, Russia and Eurasia Programme}, 20 - ("Russia’s Behaviour Risks Weaponizing Outer Space," Chatham House – International Affairs Think Tank, 7-27-2020, https://www.chathamhouse.org/2020/07/russias-behaviour-risks-weaponizing-outer-space)//marlborough-wr/ Russia’s use of outer space Russia is not the only state investigating anti-satellite weaponry capabilities. There is a wider trend (e.g. China, India, US) to demonstrate advanced space capabilities with nefarious, if not directly offensive, intent. But, for the past few years, Russia in particular, has been provocative in testing its space weapon capabilities. For example, in April 2020, Russia launched and tested into low orbit the PL-19 Nudol direct-ascent anti-satellite (DA-ASAT) interceptor missile system from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome demonstrating its space assets with potential offensive capabilities, in particular, Russia’s capacity to destroy satellites in Low Earth Orbit. In addition, the satellites, Kosmos-2535 and Kosmos-2536, launched in July 2019, are also suspected to be operating beyond their official mission of studying Russian orbital assets. It is reported that these satellites conducted a close proximity activity, coming within one kilometre from each other, which led to the creation of orbital debris. Russia’s space strategy By exploiting asymmetric advantages in space, Russia seeks to leverage its capabilities against competitors in space and in other domains, falling in line with its wider military strategy as well as its current Federal Space Programme for 2016 to 2025. Russian space activities also have a cyber and electronic warfare angle. With the help of remote-sensing capabilities, Russian spy satellites potentially seek to disrupt military and civilian satellite communications and navigation systems. Indeed, in 2018, French authorities publicly accused Russia of seeking to intercept communication satellites for French and Italian armed forces putting data transmission through Western civilian and military satellites at risk of interception. Furthermore, earlier this year, both Kosmos-2542 and 2543 came within 160 kilometres of a US spy satellite, US KH-11, similarly to Russia ‘buzzing’ around the British Isles or submarine surveillance that Norway and Sweden have been subjected to recently. Shadowing and tailing in space is regarded as spying and this recent anti-satellite weapon test is part of a trend which demonstrates Russia’s persistent space strategy for close-proximity operations with foreign countries. Orbital hypocrisy Despite Russia’s calls for a treaty to prevent the placement of weapons in outer space, there remains little international trust in Russia’s behaviour in space so far with a US-Russia Space Security Exchange meeting scheduled to take place in Vienna on 27 July to discuss outer space stability and security. This is amid a backdrop of bilateral nuclear arms control talks on the extension of the extant nuclear weapons reduction treaty, New START, which is scheduled to expire in February 2021. There is no guarantee, however, that the talks will achieve anything especially since the future of outer space requires a wider multilateral dialogue with all parties involved – including China. Anti-satellite tests (ASATs) are a particularly dangerous form of weapon. Not only do they create major vulnerabilities in a domain where so much of humanity depends on for navigation, communications and environmental monitoring, they are also primarily a target for destabilization and undermining global positioning information in times of crisis. And, perhaps most significantly, they possess the highly destructive potential to create even more space debris in Earth’s orbits that endanger the peaceful use of satellites and could do serious damage to large parts of the economies of developed and developing countries. Avoiding space warfare Space is for all but there is a risk that it is being hijacked by a few. It is time to re-assert and reinforce the rules, principles and norms of responsible state behaviour in outer space enshrined in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and its associated international agreements. And, because the treaty specifically prohibits stationing nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies, it is necessary to build on it to ban other types of weapons in space. Space has been militarized since 1957 with the launch of Soviet satellite Sputnik. But the increasing weaponization of space adds more uncertainty, and unveils more vulnerabilities, that states need to address before space warfare becomes a reality.
3/19/22
SO-Covid Funding CP
Tournament: Heart of Texas Invitational | Round: 1 | Opponent: Coppell SK | Judge: Leigh Walters Covid CP Counterplan: High-income country governments, backed by the United States, should provide all necessary funding to purchase COVID-19 vaccines developed by drug companies at any reasonable cost and distribute them as requested world-wide. Lindsay 6/11 - Brink Lindsay, Brookings, 6-11, 2021, Why intellectual property and pandemics don’t mix, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/06/03/why-intellectual-property-and-pandemics-dont-mix/
What is needed... of future crises
10/16/21
SO-Innovation DA
Tournament: Heart of Texas Invitational | Round: 1 | Opponent: Coppell SK | Judge: Leigh Walters Future Pandemics – Short NC Shell COVID has kept patents and innovation strong, but continued protection is key to innovation by incentivizing biomedical research – it’s also crucial to preventing counterfeit medicines, economic collapse, and fatal diseases, which independently turns case. Macdole and Ezell 4-29:
Thousands of IP-enabled... other serious diseases
The DA outweighs on time-frame and magnitude: Need to sustain effective research now to avoid future pandemics Lander 8/4/21 Eric Lander, President Biden’s Science Advisory and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy) “Opinion: As bad as Covid-19 has been, a future pandemic could be even worse—unless we act now” 8/4/21, The Washington Post RM