European Constitutional Monarchies Ought to be Dissolved

ROUND 3 I would first off like to apologise for the delay for my response. Procrastination for my Biology lab resulted in procrastination for this debate. I am stuck in the everlasting circle of procrastination. Oh well. Anyways, let us return to the debate!ECONOMIC BENIFITS OF A MONARCHYThe major flaw with my opponents argument is that it is not the royal family itself that produces tourism, but the historical attractions that do. Therefore it is plausible to remove the royal family and the monarchy, without damaging the tourism. This was described well by journalist Hamilton Nolan, who was quoted [1]:"The Royal Family does not "work" for that money. The Royal Family does not sit inside Buckingham Palace from 9-5 every day, posing for pictures with tourists for $25 a pop. And even if they were, we certainly wouldn't pay them $50 million a year for that". This quote addresses several issues with the tourism argument. For one, it is not the Royal Family that is working to produce the tourism money. It is mainly the actual landmarks themselves (i.e. Big Ben, Tower of London, British Museum) that produce the money. The other is that the British people pay the royal family $50 million a year for what? To restore the historical landmarks? This can be considered a legitimate argument, however if we are going to look back at Graph A from round one it is shown that only about 1/4 of that tax money actually goes towards the upkeep of castles and such. Instead, the remaining 3/4 of the taxes go towards keeping the royal family in luxury. Nolan also notes that even if the royal family did work in the tourism business they still wouldn't be worth $50 million a year. Generally I do not quote my opponents, however in this scenario I would like to dissect a particular quote from my opponents opening argument. My opponent also is quoted saying: "Would tourists keep visiting the Palaces, Tower of London and other monarchy-associated sites even if the royal family themselves had been dissolved? The answer to this question is maybe, but nowhere near as many. Having said that, why should the UK take the risk anyway, as we have proved that the Royal Family more than make up for themselves economically!" There are several flaws with this claim. For one, how can my opponent possibly know that less tourists will be drawn to the tourist destination if there is no longer a royal family? In my mind, the connection between a tourist destination and the royal family is nearly nonexistent and therefore will hardly affect the tourist industry. For example, if, hypothetically of course, Peru changed its government to a communist system as opposed to a republic, would people stop visiting Machu Pichu? Absolutely not. Therefore I would like to conclude that the UK can gain more money by abollishing the royal family because they would get all of the tax money designated to the queen while the tourism industry would hardly suffer at all. However, it is important to note that this debate is not solely about the British royal family, as it is also about the rest of Europe's monarchies. To get an accurate sense of the effect of royal families on tourism, let us look at the top ten countries in the world in money generated from tourism in graph C. (appologies for the overly large graph) Graph C If we look at these countries, only two of them currently has an active monarch, which is the UK and Australia. For Australia, however, the connection between the monarch and the tourism industry is completely nonexistent given that the queen is never even in Australia anyways. This shows that having a monarch does not necessarily mean that your country will have a brilliant tourism industry. To further support this, in the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report in 2013 only four countries with monarchies listed in the top 30 [2]. Therefore it can be concluded that it will not harm the majority of countries with monarchies tourism industry hardly at all if the monarchy is abolished. Now on to the rebuttal about my graph from the first round. I acknowledge the argument about Luxembourg and agree with my opponent full heatedly, and therefore will not rebut his points. However, the comparison between Spain and Germany is a separate situation entirely. My opponent claims that the monarchies have no impact on taxes due to the fact that Spain's per capita cost is lower than that of the non-monarchical Germany. The error with this claim is that the Spanish government has been maniacally cutting taxes so that they can halt their economic down spiral and bring the country back on track [3]. Had Spain had a normal economy (or whatever is normal for Europe) I predict that the per capita cost would be higher than that of Germany's in order to compensate for the unnecessary monarchy.ROLE IN SOCIETYMy opponent claims that my analogy with the monarchy and the dying dog is irrelevant due to the fact that the monarchy is not actually harming the UK in any way. I have rebutted this claim successfully and therefore must conclude that we must be killing some dogs during this section of the rebuttals (sadly). The monarchy in the UK is costing them an additional $50 million for largely unnecessary things such as travel, paying servants, etc. This is similar to the dog analogy as it is costing the owner large amounts of money to simply keep their pet alive, despite its impracticality. My opponents next point about foreign affairs is equally flawed. While it is true that the Queen may speak with foreign countries without political consequence, it is unlikely that she will actually get anything done due to the fact that she has absolutely zero political influence. Thus the proposition is highly illogical. I will acknowledge that the royal family can do some good, through the work of charity and what not. However, I would like to ask my opponent if they could not do so without getting the lofty titles of Queen, or Prince, or Duke, etc. Essentially, my point is that since the royal family has an ungodly sum of money, and not to mention fame, they would easily be able to continue their charity work without still having any technical political role.And finally, onto the satisfaction ratings. The reason why monarchs are inevitably going to have higher satisfaction ratings is because they themselves never do anything or make any decisions that affect the people. Therefore the comparison to Obama is illogical because he actually represents the American people while Elizabeth and Harald simply look pretty (or as pretty as they can be) on their thrones. CONCLUSIONIn this debate I have shown that monarchies overall are expensive and do not pay for themselves through the tourism industry. Due to their expense and their complete lack of political power I would like to conclude that their role in "power" is unnecessary and therefore should end. On a side note, I would like to thank my opponent for a fun and intellectual debate. SOURCES[1] http://www.theatlantic.com...[2] http://www3.weforum.org...[3] http://www.ft.com...