The US Federal Goveronment should abolish 99%of its functions

Again my opponent hasn’t attempted to answer my objections to his national debt and constitution arguments. Since it’s the end of the debate, they are dropped. His entire argument has focused on an attack of my counterplan. Since Pro is the one affirming the topic, the burden of proof is on him and since he has failed to answer my objections, he has failed to uphold his burden of proof. Human Nature Again, my opponent has dropped a majority of my rebuttal. He dropped his argument about power checks and still has failed to respond to my other objections. He now is only dealing with the decision making process of an anarchist society. The analogy doesn’t make much practical sense. Why would anyone agree to live in a commune that permits stealing? It would make personal property meaningless and therefore very unsatisfying to live with. He also assumes decisions need to be resolved by warfare. This maybe the case under a state, but anarchism values decisions of the people. If no resolution can be reached, then the opposition is welcome to form a commune of their own. There is no overarching authority or laws in an anarchist society, just what is decided by its commune. If for some odd reason a group of people absolutely must have theft as commonplace, then who are we to exert authority over them if they aren’t hurting anybody who hasn’t consented? When their group fails and they understand the rationale for respect of personal property, then they will be welcomed back into the original commune or change their own. Contrasted to a republican government, if a minority is unhappy with a law, they must suffer. Being under the dictation of no man and deciding things in a naturally directly democratic way or being under the dictation of the majority and politicians, the former sounds much better. Defense My opponent totally ignores anarchist concepts of organization such as platformism. The RIAU, organized yet anarchistic never did something as stupid like attacking in two different ways without planning. And again for some reason he brings up the Semai tribe in regards to this point. The one and only reason I brought up the Semai tribe was to show human nature isn't inherently violent or oppressive. For some reason my opponent thinks this has something military defense. Establishing Power Pro’s solution to the government attempting to take power is to have people educated in the role of government, however people can still form their own opinions and interpretations about what it means to have a “more perfect union”. He has also ignored my point about the government officials having a vested interest in allowing themselves more power. There is also the chance that the government might complicate the voting and election process to make it easier to obtain power. He says an anarchist society would have the same problem, since what’s there to stop someone from creating a government under anarchism? This would be incredibly difficult to do because the mass of society would still be anarchistic. There simply wouldn’t be the huge hierarchical bureaucratic structure in existence for someone to easily create a government. They would be dissociating from the whole of society itself making it practically impossible. Furthermore, there is a huge difference here because wanting small government power and wanted large government power both assume the legitimacy of government. They both accept that core fundamental principle. But an anarchist society would reject that fundamental principle. Next he says my liberty argument is hypocritical because the government in limiting its features wouldn’t infringe on liberties. This is a straw man of my argument. I am stating that the very fact the government is hierarchical entails it lacks the same amount of liberty that would be present in an anarchist society. A hierarchy necessarily has those on the top and those who are commanded. Pro is also advocating for governmental oversight in regards to laws in the first place. Capitalism Pro has failed to answer my objection that this portion of the debate fundamentally doesn’t matter because I still allowed for the possibility of capitalism. Still my opponent shows a complete misunderstanding of my rebuttal, communism, capitalism, and revolutionary Spain. My rebuttal wasn’t as Pro states “economic growth and increased quality of living is a bad thing because the Nazis had it”. I never once claimed this, my argument was that increased quality of living isn’t a good reason for accepting capitalism. Not the strawman that Pro attacked. Hitler’s policy were fascist in nature and those fascist policies helped improve lives. He made people do the work which the government dictated or live in a forced labor camp [1]. Along with removing the employment of Jews and women [2]. I also don’t see how a slave-master relationship has anything remotely to do with capitalism, as Pro claims. Increased living standards don’t entail that we ought to accept the system in question. Next he claims capitalism doesn’t deprive people of liberty. However, he ignores the fact that under capitalism the workers don’t have control over their workplaces. It is the bosses that have a dictatorship over them. He ignores that under capitalism you can live according to how much money you have. How much money you make is determined by how much a private business owner sees you are worth. You have a choice between selling yourself to a boss and doing what he tells you to do or starving. Is that really liberty? Or is a system where you have freedom in what happens in your workplace and where you are paid according to how much you have worked (if we choose to have a wage system) actual liberty? Pro then makes a variety of totally unsourced claims about the Spanish civil war. He claims Spain wasn’t a good place to live despite my eyewitness testimony saying otherwise. He also asserts it was a dictatorship and that workers didn’t actually control the means of production…. What? This couldn’t be further from the truth. What about all of the evidence I provided just last round directly contradicting Pro’s claim here? "Industry is in the hands of the workers and all the production centres conspicuously fly the red and black flagsas well as inscriptions announcing that they have really become collectives. The revolution seems to be universal.” [3] …... "In Spain, during almost three years, despite a civil war that took a million lives, despite the opposition of the political parties . . . this idea of libertarian communism was put into effect. Very quickly more than 60% of the land was very quickly collectively cultivated by the peasants themselves, without landlords, without bosses, and without instituting capitalist competition to spur production. In almost all the industries, factories, mills, workshops, transportation services, public services, and utilities, the rank and file workers, their revolutionary committees, and their syndicates reorganised and administered production, distribution, and public services without capitalists, high-salaried managers, or the authority of the state." [ibid] My opponent's claims that the worker’s never controlled the workplace are outright false, he provides no citation for what he claims and then misconstrues the position of communism. For one, Catalonia wasn’t totally communistic nor have I set up a dichotomy between capitalism and communism. I clearly stated there were other alternatives such as mutualism and collectivism. So even if my opponent's misconstructions of communism are correct, it still doesn’t matter. Second, there wasn’t any totalitarian communist state in place. A “communist state” is an oxymoron and the revolutionaries in Spain where anarchists and therefore wouldn’t have supported state control over the means of production. Positions which advocate for communism come in many different shapes and sizes. It is wrong to point to the Marxist-Leninist concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat and claim that is communism and that everything and anything communistic falls under that banner. As Pro has done. He ignores the position many of the revolutionaries advocated for called for either direct communism sans any sort of dictatorship or transition to it using other anarcho-socialist philosophies such as collectivism or mutualism. I’m not exactly sure why my opponent includes the time period up to the 1960s, as the Catalonia was lost to Franco and his fascist army in 1939 [4]. He asserts that in the 60s capitalism improved living standards. Again, this is an assertion without citation nor gives any comparison to revolutionary Spain. It doesn’t appear to have anything to do with capitalism because the socialist revolution was long gone by then. Even if we are to assume this was true, it doesn’t prove anything. Any system of economics is going to be rough on the living standards in the midst of a civil war. Pro then goes to state nowhere in history has anarchism ever been practiced. This downright ignores every single piece of evidence of self-management in the spanish revolution which I provided. Along with ignoring all of the other times it’s happened before. Such as in the Shinmin Province [5] and the Free Territories of Ukraine [6]. Anyway, I could literally concede everything Pro said about capitalism and this still wouldn’t change a thing, because the origin of this rabbit hole included an exception for capitalism. Pro has dropped both of his positive arguments (leaving him with an unfulfilled BOP) and formed his rebuttals based on strawmen. Sources [1 ] http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk... [2] http://www.bbc.co.uk.... [3] http://www.infoshop.org... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org... [5] http://libcom.org... [6] https://anarchyinaction.org...