Deregulated Capitalism is Superior to Alternatives

1. My opponent's attempt at reducing my argument to an exercise in grammar is a red herring. He is trying to distract the voter from the real issue. Obviously if you read the rest of my argument you cannot replace the nouns in my thesis. A mailbox for example, does not provide people with goods and services and a house cannot establish boundaries for the way the mailbox should do business. This is also wrong because my opponent provided a definition of the free market and I am just arguing based on it. 2. A.) Again, this is another red herring. I never used an appeal to emotion to force anyone to apologize, I simply stated what would be rational to a provider in a free market system according to Anthony Down's "An Economic theory of democracy". My opponent is also giving me a false alternative by creating a false analogy. Let's define a socialist democracy as it is defined in the oxford online dictionary: A socialist system of government achieved by democratic means now let us define a free market: an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses. Now let us define communism: a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state. So even if my opponents arguments were true he would have to apologize because this definition of free markets is consistent with my arguments as well as my opponents definition of a free market (naturally since I am basing my arguments on his definition of the free market.) On the other hand the oxford dictionary's definition of communism is not consistent with what I am proposing because the definition of communism does not contain anything about democratic means. Thus my opponent's analogy breaks down and my system of a socialist democracy is not liable for any states that commit acts under the banner of communism. B.) Yes, people are "jerks" hence the reason why their should be laws against it. Society should and it does sanction you for being a jerk even based on your definition (depending on the degree of course a bully on the playground should not get the same sanctions as hitler should.) Yes the state has guns and so do the people if the people so decide hence the the definition of a social democracy. This is also a straw man since I never said people couldn't have guns to defend themselves against a coercive government. Yes the state can become a law monopolist hence the reason why these laws come to be through democratic means so the people can be a check on the federal government (through republican means or direct democracy, I didn't really specify and I suppose it doesn't really much matter so long as the people have a say.) C.) My opponent again is creating another straw man. I never said that they WILL because my argument went more like this "IF business does X given a certain set of circumstances government should do Y." Yes, I completely agree with you, businesses should restrain themselves. However, based on rational and historical arguments they don't hence the reason we are having this debate. Yes, I don't get to control a states behavior but a given people that make up a given government can and based on the net aggregate of pleasure over pain I am saying people would think it would be rational to regulate business. I think the incentives of a democracy are pretty self evident... you don't do your job you get voted out. D.) Again, I agree with my opponent but again a system of checks in balances in which the people are involved takes care of the state becoming an aggressive monopoly. A.) this doesn't even make sense given the definition of a monopoly, exclusive control of a commodity or service in a particular market, or a control that makes possible the manipulation of prices. If a firm has full control of a market and can manipulate the prices however they want, why would they allow the entry of new firms that could possibly lower prices? My opponent's effort to explain my argument away makes even less sense when we look at a real life example of a firm that is the closest to a monopoly in the US, Wal-mart. According to an Article written by Jeff Hwang says wal-mart is having a negative impact on competition. He writes: "According to Business Week, "for every Wal-Mart supercenter that opens in the next five years, two other supermarkets will close." And this is done without creating new jobs." According to this analysis, I would ask my opponent, if wal-mart (an old firm) is entering new markets why is it that so many super markets are closing and there are no new ones to replace them? I mean according to you're argument if X expands their should be more opportunities for little x to join the market? Why is this not the case for wal-mart? B.) Capitalism and the Profit motive: This argument is fallacious. My opponent's argument goes like this I use x to get y because it's of importance to me however since I have y, x is no longer important. However, what if y is sustained by x wouldn't I want to get the most of x as possible so that I could ultimately get more y? Again we see a straw man, I never said social democracies are immune to human greed (this would be illogical since greed is almost a necessary condition of being a human) , what I am arguing is that their could be regulations to ease suffering as a consequence of greed. - Yes states can become coercive if they have "guns" but citizens can arm themselves if they so choose that is why they are part of a democracy. If the democratic process no longer works society can turn against it's coercive government and start over again. C.) My opponent is leaving his argument incomplete to support his case. He forgets the part where a monopoly can create an artificial shortage of a given product to bring up their prices. So yes, they can expand their output and they could bring down the prices of their product or they could choose to create an artificial shortage to bring prices up. This would actually be more rational since the cost of manufacturing would be less and you would be getting more money. Don't bring the tired argument that socialist want to create a utopia. Yes, I do grant you that opec is made up of governments but this is a false analogy since most of these countries are either A. Dictatorships B. absolute monarchies. Obviously this is not what I mean by a social democracy. However, I do take responsibility for a bad example. The examples that I stated of monopolies in the 1800's were not an example of what my opponent has framed but merely an example of monopolies that can and will form in deregulated free market. However I do have examples of the abuse of standard oil's power as a monopoly, they include: (1) Temporarily undercutting the prices of competitors until they either went out of business or sold out to Standard Oil. (2) Buying up the components needed to make oil barrels in order to prevent competitors from getting their oil to customers. (3) Using its large and growing volume of oil shipments to negotiate an alliance with the railroads that gave it secret rebates and thereby reduced its effective shipping costs to a level far below the rates charged to its competitors. (4) Secretly buying up competitors and then having officials from those companies spy on and give advance warning of deals being planned by other competitors. (5) Secretly buying up or creating new oil-related companies, such as pipeline and engineering firms, that appeared be independent operators but which gave Standard Oil hidden rebates. (6) Dispatching thugs who used threats and physical violence to break up the operations of competitors who could not otherwise be persuaded. http://www.linfo.org... http://en.wikipedia.org... http://www.fool.com...