England Should Not Remain A Monarchy

Thanks to Pro for the debate :) - (1) Power Abuse Again, the monarch's veto power cannot be exercised without the Prime Minister's consent (and, by extension, the consent of the House of Commons & British populace as a whole). The bill which Pro cites was only vetoed by the Queen "upon the advice of her government", indicating that it was not an unchecked decision [1]. It is also plainly false that the monarch can freely waste tax-payers' money -- the use a public funds for monarchical maintenance is handled by an independent entity known as the "Keeper of the Privy Purse" [2]. Remember that the constitution only grants the monarch three rights: "the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn". The British Monarch simply doesn't have any power to abuse. (2) Symbolism I'm not sure why Pro is claiming that intangible, emotional factors shouldn't be included in cost/benefit analysis... utilitarian calculations are all about pleasure & suffering, which are fundamentally emotional in nature. Collective sentiments of cultural identity, political unity, historical continuity, etc. are all recognized as being positive, and Pro concedes that the monarchy plays a major role in maintaining those sentiments. Moreover, 80% of the British population approves of the monarchy, so there is a probably a good amount of emotional attachment involved [3]. Therefore, abolishing the monarchy would obviously generate substantial negative utility. It doesn't matter if it's not quantifiable -- it's just common sense that a mere $5 cost per person isn't enough to outweigh. The monarchy is a benign, ancient, and socially-significant institution, and upholding it is well-worth such a negligible price. Pro's opportunity cost objection isn't compelling because there is always going to be a "more important" cause -- Pro's reasoning just devolves into an infinite regress of "oh wait but we could spend the money there instead". As long as there is a legitimate governmental interest to pursue (in this case, it's preserving symbolic value), the government is justified in devoting public funds to it. (3) Economics But anyways, the monarchy generates a net *surplus* in the economy. Pro's only response to this is comparing my numbers to the amount of revenue from *all* tourism in Great Britain, but that's a complete red herring... the whole point of our clash here was to compare the cost of maintaining the monarchy vs. the revenue from *monarchy-related tourism* (not general tourism). Pro's initial rebuttal was that most monarchy-related tourism would survive even without the monarchy's continued existence, but he did not really extend that into his final round. Unfortunately, he seems to have inadvertently dropped much of what I said while he was busy getting caught up in refuting minutia. I advise Pro not to do that in future debates. - In conclusion, the monarchy has immense symbolic value and generates hundreds of millions of dollars for the British economy every year. And it all comes at no cost, given that none of Pro's alleged harms from keeping the monarchy around are real. There is literally no reason to abolish the monarchy. VOTE CON! - 1. http://tinyurl.com... * 2. https://en.wikipedia.org... 3. http://royalcentral.co.uk... * had to use tinyurl cuz of HTML formatting problems