Guaranteed Minimum Income

I will be making my case against the resolution within my rebuttals to Pro's arguments. I. POLICY == Counter-Plan: Reform the System == Pro spends a lot of space telling us about how dysfunctional our current welfare system is-- and I agree with him; however, this doesn't actually bring us to the conclusion that the best remedy to the problem is replacing it with a guaranteed minimum income (GMI) program. I propose that instead we simply reform the system. Reform has already been demonstrated to be a realistic and effective option; the 1996 welfare reforms passed under the Clinton administration enforced strict work requirements which were highly effective in increasing employment and reducing poverty, as can clearly be seen in the cited graphs [1]. This is further confirmed by one particularly expansive study conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which thoroughly accounted for relevant external variables [2]. On a related note, one of the main reasons that the current welfare system isn't producing tangible impacts is that these work requirements were removed under the Obama administration. There are also plenty of other opportunities for reform which have yet to be tried out. For example, Pro actually helps my case by pointing out that many potential welfare recipients are unaware of the benefits which are available to them. That is serious problem which is not particularly difficult to overcome (and it's non-unique because GMI is also futile if its intended beneficiaries don"t know it exists); in other words, simply doing a better job of publicizing welfare benefits could substantially improve upon the status quo. The point of all this is that reforming the system is most certainly a feasible option which can solve for many of the problems with the status quo which Pro has pointed out. And really, Pro is in no place to claim that the system is beyond repair, given his advocacy of a gradual "transition" to the GMI. Surely if the government is capable of transforming the status quo's byzantine bureaucratic monstrosity into something as simple as the GMI, then it is also capable of steadily reforming the system by implementing work requirements, abolishing subsidies which encourage single-parenting, scrapping/merging unnecessary programs, hunting down the various areas which facilitate inefficiency and corruption, placing regulations to prevent improper payments, etc. With the plausibility of a reformed welfare system established, we are left with the question of why we should prefer that to GMI. Here are a few reasons to prefer welfare reform... a. Accountability GMI doesn't include any sort of mechanism for holding recipients accountable for how they spend their money; it just blindly hands out sums of money to everyone who is earning under a certain income threshold, including drug addicts, high school drop-outs, and clients of prostitutes. Given that a substantial portion of tax dollars are going towards the cause of aiding the impoverished, it is only fair to the tax-payers that the government be able to guarantee that their money is actually going to be used to achieve that end. This desire for accountability is the main reason why all the bureaucratic processes involved in the welfare system were originally put in place. A reformed system still keeps the most essential of these processes in order to hold welfare recipients accountable, for the sake of the ones who are funding their paychecks. b. Dependency GMI does nothing to avoid creating a vicious cycle of dependency among the poor. While a reformed welfare system can include things like work requirements to discourage dependency and push them along the path to self-sufficiency, GMI allows people to simply live off of government hand-outs for their entire lives. And dependency *is* a real problem; according to CATO institute "only 18.3% of poor people receiving welfare benefits in 1987 moved out of poverty, while 45% of poor people who never received welfare escaped poverty" [3]. GMI can only give the artificial impression of eliminating poverty; welfare reform genuinely alleviates poverty by aiding people in becoming self-sufficient. c. Cost By Pro's own admission, GMI is already going to cost more than the current welfare system (about $288 billion more). However, the reformed system would be even *more* inexpensive than the current one. Pro has stated that 25% of welfare costs come from needless bureaucracy; since one of the primary goals of reform is to cut down on that and shut down unnecessary/redundant programs, we can expect to see a huge cut in costs from that aspect. In addition, dependency and a lack of accountability can both translate to financial harms, as they lead to more people feeding off the system for a longer period of time; since welfare reform avoids them, we can expect costs to be significantly cut down in that respect, as well. The cost savings add up, meaning that welfare reform is going to end up being a lot less expensive than GMI. == Case-Study: Quebec == GMI has already been experimented with in Quebec, and the results have been far from "abolishing poverty", as Pro seems to believe. Consider the conclusion reached by the following study on GMI there: "Simulations show that the original recommendation would have strong negative impacts on participation rates of low-earners and that its cost would exceed $ 2 billion... We find that contrary to what is usually assumed, guaranteed income schemes may increase the incidence of low-income rather than decrease it." [4]. This is nothing but empirical confirmation of the theoretical reasoning explained previously-- GMI is expensive, facilitates dependency, and offers no way to ensure that the money is even being used for the right reasons, thus failing to make much substantive progress in mitigating poverty. Rather than adopt such a policy, the US should turn to reforming its current welfare system to reach its full potential. II. PRINCIPLE == Libertarian Morality == The first objection I can make to Pro's philosophical arguments is that he fails to set forth any sort of ethical framework from which he can make any meaningful moral claims (e.g. that society "owes" us something). Since I am about to put forth an ethical framework of my own (libertarianism), my philosophical case automatically trumps his. All human beings have ownership over themselves. This is intuitively obvious-- since you are the sole user and occupier of your own body, you are the only one who can exert any sort of authority or control over it. Denying self-ownership results in a performative contradiction because simply the act of speaking/typing to do that requires you to have ownership over yourself. With self-ownership established, it logically follows that one should also be granted the same ownership over material property which they have rightfully acquired, since one's actions are an extension of their person. So we can conclude that all human beings have the rights to life, liberty, and private property ownership; note that these are all negative rights-- entitlements which prevent others from doing certain things to us (i.e. murder, slavery, rape, theft, etc). Given this, the only plausible role of the government is to accept tax money in order to protect the rights of the tax-payers from being violated. We can't really derive positive rights from self-ownership, since property has to be acquired by virtue of a person's actions (i.e. earned) in order rightfully be their own, and the government can never forcibly redistribute property (i.e. spend tax money on social programs), so all welfare expenditures, including the GMI, should be rejected on an ethical basis. == Robot Apocalypse == Pro argues that as technology advances, automation will continue to rapidly replace human labor and economically displace people, until eventually everyone is displaced. I have several objections to make... a. Cross-apply: (1) my libertarian moral argument; regardless of the circumstances, redistribution on the part of the government is never morally justified. (2) my entire economic case; a reformed welfare system can serve as a more effective safety net than GMI. b. Even if technology can really advance to the point which Pro predicts it will (which is a very big "if"), social barriers exist which will still prevent that new technology from replacing human labor much more than it already has. Currently, the technology exists to have a fully-automated fast food restaurant [5]. Yet not a single major fast food chain has made any serious attempt to adopt the new technology. Why? It's because businesses and customers alike don"t *want* everything to become automated; businesses want to keep up their public image by "giving back" to society via employment, and customers want to be able continue interacting with humans rather than machines when they go to buy from these businesses. Everyone gains from utilizing human labor. c. Even if things really did start going in the direction of full automation, the government could just place restrictions on the businesses' use of automation for the sake of national economic stability. Considering the dire consequences of allowing capitalistic innovation to take its course, it is likely that such a motion would be widely supported by the American people as well as by businesses (because the people want to keep their jobs, and businesses want their customers to have spending money). d. If all else fails and things do play out as Pro predicts, then we're all screwed anyways regardless of what safety nets we have in place, because as more people have to rely on GMI, there will be fewer people to fund it, until the whole system collapses and all hell breaks loose. Resolution negated! [1] http://tinyurl.com... [2] http://tinyurl.com... [3] http://tinyurl.com... [4] http://tinyurl.com... [5] http://tinyurl.com...