Food Security

tenq yoo fer ur argz, bee ess aich wunThe problem with Pro's framework is very simple -- it barely contains any substantive ethical justification. Pro spends a large portion of his case telling us *what* human dignity is and explaining the normative claims that would stem from it, but he never tells us *why* we should morally value human dignity in the first place. What exactly is "dignity" anyways? It's an incredibly vague concept to be hinging one's entire case off of. Furthermore, Pro's reasoning is backwards -- he automatically presumes that humans have moral worth, rationalizes that moral worth with various human properties (e.g. rational agency, capacity to suffer), and then proceeds to group them all under one big undefined umbrella of human dignity. He has yet to put forth a single compelling reason to believe that humans actually have any moral worth under his framework. Contrast that with my framework -- I started from the bottom (self-ownership), justified its existence with three different lines of reasoning, and systematically worked my way up to the top (the non-aggression principle). Prefer my framework because it is actually warranted. Now, onto the biggest problem with Pro's case...TURN: Pro says "Respect for human dignity means creating conditions favorable for development and choice... we then attempt to construct a system that maximizes this dignity." I argue that government efforts to "ensure food security" and alleviate poverty in general are actually *detrimental* to this end, and that having the government abstain from intervening in such matters is what would result in the maximization of human dignity. Thus, the resolution will be negated even under Pro's own framework. For the sake of convenience (and ease of access to statistics), I will be using the US as a case-study.I. DependencyIt is fairly obvious why being economically self-sufficient is more "favorable for development and choice" than being impoverished and dependent upon government provision of resources. However, dependency is precisely what government food security programs and other such welfare-related efforts encourage -- what an absence of government-ensured security does is force people to become self-sufficient and usually escape poverty in the process. There is more than enough evidence affirming this to be true. One CATO study found that in 1987, only 18.3% of people receiving welfare benefits moved out of poverty, whereas out of the poor people who did *not* receive welfare benefits, *45%* of them ended up escaping poverty [1]. Moreover, in 1996, when reforms which basically disallowed dependency were introduced (e.g. work requirements, time limits, etc), self-sufficiency drastically went up -- "a 2011 Social Science Journal study analyzed the effects of the mid-1990s welfare reform on welfare caseloads. Using state-level data from 1992 to 2005... it found that during the study period, on average, 'welfare reform led to a 41 percent decline in welfare recipiency'" [2][3].On the other hand, government subsidizing of the poor is only associated with the creation of dependency cycles and the further perpetuation of poverty. One 2004 study on intergenerational transmission of dependency found that children who were raised in dependent families had their chances of receiving welfare in adulthood increased to almost 50% -- "nearly three times the probability (0.166) for respondents whose parents did not receive welfare" [3][4]. One particularly exhaustive study on the causes and effects of welfare dependency found that dependency does indeed have negative effects on "future economic outcomes such as poverty status, net family income, and number of hours worked" [5]. This may be because welfare dependency also tends to negatively impact students' education levels --"a 2003 Demography study found that... the likelihood of high school completion diminished by 14 percent for each year of welfare receipt" [3][6]. The takeaway from all this is exceedingly clear -- ensuring food security may be able to fulfill people's nutritional needs on a day-to-day basis, but in the long-term, it perpetuates poverty and thereby diminishes human dignity. Meanwhile, my evidence shows that removing social safety nets tends to result in increased rates of self-sufficiency and reductions in poverty, thereby advances human dignity. My next argument will provide even more warrant to this claim.II. EmploymentThe US government's attempts at ensuring alleviating poverty have cost enormous sums of money -- $454 billion, annually [7]. That means that if the government were to stop intervening in wealth & food distribution, it would result in $454 billion of the federal budget being freed up, which would inevitably lead to tax cuts -- with that big of a reduction in government spending, the corporate tax could be eliminated, and the average income tax rate could be reduced by up to 7% [8]. Due to the supply-side benefits of corporate tax cuts, this would lead to massive economic growth, and, by extension, huge increases in employment opportunities for the poor. One study reveals that "a cut in the corporate tax rate by 10 percentage points will raise the annual growth rate by one to two percentage points" [9]. That trend probably isn't linear (so it won't result in a 20% growth rate), but we can nevertheless assume an enormous increase in economic growth from eliminating the corporate tax. Economic growth directly leads to more employment: universal consensus among economists maintains that every 2% increase in GDP results in a 1% increase in employment rate [10]. Thus, the removal of safety nets wouldn't merely force poor people to become self-sufficient, it would also provide them with more than enough opportunities to become so.III. Private CharityEven if you don't buy that the economic growth from eliminating welfare spending & cutting corporate taxes would cover for all of the impoverished, private charities would easily be able to fill in to handle whatever poverty is leftover. The main reason for this is that abolishing public welfare would lead to a large increase in private philanthropy; there is solid evidence that welfare tends to crowd out philanthropists (i.e. people don't feel the need to donate much because there is already a social safety net in place) -- "The Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies compiled a ranking of private philanthropy in 36 countries from 1995 to 2002. Based on giving alone, the U.S. comes first, giving 1.85% of GDP, followed by Israel at 1.34% and Canada at 1.17%... Among developed nations, those with higher taxes and bigger social safety nets tend to have lower rates of giving. In charitable giving as a percentage of GDP, nations with cradle-to-grave welfare systems rank far down the Johns Hopkins list: Sweden 18th, France 21st, Germany 32nd" [11]. Thus, if government welfare programs were to be abolished, we would inevitably see a large rise in private charity. In addition, abolishing welfare comes with an average 7% income tax cut, and increased incomes are associated with more private charity too [12]. Furthermore, private charities are estimated to be *twice* as efficient as government welfare, thereby requiring relatively little in terms of donations : "Using government data, Robert L. Woodson (1989, p. 63) calculated that, on average, 70 cents of each dollar budgeted for government assistance goes not to the poor, but to the members of the welfare bureaucracy [i.e. overhead costs]... In contrast, administrative and other operating costs in private charities absorb, on average, only one-third or less of each dollar donated... [R]aising only half as much money through voluntary donations, the private agencies (and families) could deliver the same amount as the government" [13].== CONCLUSION ==Pro's framework is fallacious, ill-warranted, and clearly should be rejected in favor of my framework. Even if it does hold true, the resolution is still negated because, through the case-study of the US, we see that government programs aimed at mitigating poverty through subsidization (which include efforts to ensure food security) generally result in the long-term perpetuation and worsening of poverty via dependency, and are thus actually working *against* the goal of maximizing human dignity. In fact, we instead see that *abolishing* such programs would maximize human dignity.The resolution is negated. [1] http://www.cato.org...[2] Radha Jagannathan, "Welfare Reform"s Impact on Caseload Decline in the United States: An Application of Latent Trajectory Model," The Social Science Journal, Vol. 48, Issue 4 (December 2011), pp. 703"721. [3] http://familyfacts.org...[4] Marianne E. Page, "New Evidence on Intergenerational Correlations in Welfare Participation," in Generational Income Mobility in North America and Europe, ed. Miles Corak (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). [5] http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu...[6] Inhoe Ku and Robert Plotnik, "Do Children from Welfare Families Obtain Less Education?" Demography, Vol. 40, No. 1 (February 2003),pp. 151"170. [7] http://www.usgovernmentspending.com...[8] https://www.nationalpriorities.org...[9] https://www.sba.muohio.edu...[10] http://www.frbsf.org...[11] http://www.forbes.com...[12] http://pfr.sagepub.com...[13] http://www.theadvocates.org...