Socialism

INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY My opponent claims that you don't have to work for a capitalist, but how long can someone actually decide to live outside of a capitalist world before some greedy business owner comes along and takes the land you're living off of and forces you out? If someone is not participating in a capitalist society, they wouldn't purchase land, because to purchase it requires you to participate in the capitalist economy. Therefore, anyone can come along and buy the land and make you, in turn, be kicked off of it. This can happen to the point where there is no more valuable and livable land left and you have nowhere else to go. So, again, either you participate in the capitalist world or you die. This is why private property is dangerous: the fact that someone can kick people off of land by buying it, means people will die since there is then no more valuable land left. This is pretty much what happened to the native Americans who didn't have a concept of private property. Eventually, the natives were forced to take part in capitalism in order to survive. WORKING FOR AN EMPLOYER When I called it slavery, I was referring to actual slavery, I wasn't calling the arrangement between the workers and employers slavery. My opponent claims that workers know how much their employer makes, but I don't see why they would. Why is it in the interest of the employer to willingly give out that information? It's in their interest to keep that private and to take in as much money as they possibly can by themselves. This whole scenario where my opponent said an employer offered something where the workers would double their income seems rather unlikely. Why would an employer let the workers take that money, and not instead pay the workers minimal amount? Again, the 1800s showed a history of where employers would pay employees as little as possible. Why wouldn't it just result in that? The right to say no traditional businesses should be allowed comes from the people themselves. The people would choose not to work for capitalists. The whole point of socialism is for it to be people-based and not based around a few people gaining. MORALITY I would actually say yes, that organized religions should be taken down by the people too. That's an entirely different debate though. Hierarchy is immoral because it puts people above others for no good reason. What right does a person have to have other people under them? What gives them proper authority to govern over those people? It harms the rights of other people because as soon as we accept someone to have power over us, then they can take rights from us. Capitalism does cause harm to others, as we've seen in the 1800s. The capitalist has no interest to make sure working conditions are safe, or to compensate their workers with enough money to do well in society. EXAMPLES: I never claimed Yugoslavia had the highest quality of living in Europe, what I said was it "had the highest standard of living of any Eastern European nation." which is true. They did in fact have higher standards of living than any East European nation. Theirs was lower than western European nations though. What my opponent did here is a classic example of a strawman fallacy. In addition, if you look at the trade deficit graph my opponent provided, their deficit wasn't going up tremendously until the mid 1970s. This coincides with the time that NATO chose to target Yugoslavia, and try to collapse their economy, through trade. Again, look into my sources. Reagan helped with the collapse of Yugoslavia, but please note that I didn't say he was the sole person targeting them. NATO targeted them earlier. The graphs my opponent uses for Yugoslavia's GDP to in fact show they had a higher GDP than other eastern European nations, that was my argument. My opponent misunderstood my argument. I never claimed they had a higher GDP than western nations. Yugoslavia's GDP growth was still a good amount, much better than America's GDP growth has been in the last two decades, and same for the UK. [1][2] And in fact, while other nations did have a better GDP growth than them, they still had a good gdp growth amounting to over 5% a year for most of their existence(see the previous round's debate for this source) My opponent then tries to dismiss Bolivia's GDP growth on oil, but there are lots of reasons for GDP growth of capitalist nations that my opponent ignores. It's not due to capitalism that these nations are doing well, but because of their resources. It's much the same that it's not due to socialism that Bolivia is doing better, but because of their new-founded resources. My point in showing the economy of these countries was just to show that countries can do well under socialism as well, which they do show. Sources: [1] http://www.tradingeconomics.com... [2] http://www.tradingeconomics.com...