Resolved: Oppressive government is more desirable than no government.

Thanks to my opponent. I'll first provide a case of my own, then attack Royals arguments. I'll address them more comprehensively in round 3. My caseMy opponent failed to define oppressive, so I'll define oppression as: "the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner[1]". An oppressive state is then one that engages in oppression by abusing its authority in some manner, generally by violating its citizens rights.I. ImpactsYou can presume a neg vote. It's hard to outweigh the 169,202,000[2] people murdered by oppressive states in the 20th century alone (this number excluding hundreds of millions of war victims forced to fight and to kill other men). Royals arguments, even if you take them at face value and ignore everything I say, just are nowhere near the magnitude to outweigh the sheer genocide that occurs from oppression. Moreover if you add in the victims of the wars of just the 20th century perpetrated by oppressive governments well over 100 million more bodies are added[3].Oppressive governments and their leaders are driven by a drive for absolute power[4]. This means that they will not only attack and ruin the lives of citizens within their country, but will do everything possible to extend their power into other regimes through any means necessary. Throughout modern history oppressive governments (most notably the USSR) have attempted to gain the most deadly of weapons--nuclear weapons. Since then the defining moments of international relations have been a series of close calls. It was only wise leadership in the United States, for example, that prevented the world from descending into a nuclear holocaust in 1962 when the USSR threatened it by moving missiles that could destroy it. The USSR is long gone, but modern oppressive governments have taken its place and are pursuing nuclear weapons in earnest[5][6]. The impact here is mankind being engulfed a nuclear holocaust. Even a world where society breaks down and there is no law (Royals impact) is preferable to such a scenario because mankind can rebuild from that. Moreover even a small scale nuclear war (like one between India and Pakistan) could drive mankind to extinction or mass famine as Alan Robock, a Professor of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University explains[7], the ash and smoke from a nuclear war would suddenly cool down the Earth and shorten growing seasons substantially for over five years. Oppressive governments are uniquely suited to starting a nuclear war because dictators are almost always characterized as having brash, vain behavior[4] and delusions of their own abilities and power.FeudalismContra oppression, we have most of a thousand year period of Western history where there was no state as defined by my opponent (public purpose, monopoly on violence). As the French philosopher Bertrand De'Jouvenel explains[8] in the ancien regime power was: "shared, limited, and above all it was not sovereign." He goes on to explain that "The distinguishing characteristics of a Power which is sovereign are: its possession of a legislative authority; it's capacity to alter as it pleases its subjects' rules of behaviour...Power in medieval times was very different, it was tied down, not only in theory but in practice..."Indeed power was divided between aristocracy, church, and state. Nisbet explains[9] that feudal relationships are "private, personal, and contractual" and that feudalism was "an extension and adaptation of the kinship tie with a protective affiliation...Contrary to the modern political state with its principle of territorial sovereignty...rights, welfare, authority, and devotion inhered in a personal, not a territorial tie. To be the 'man' of another man, in turn the 'man' of still another man and so on up to the very top of the feudal pyramid, each owing the other either service or protection, is to be in a feudal relationship."Yet these impacts Royal asserts didn't happen. Prefer my sound impacts to her baseless conjecture. Royals caseFrameworkAn oppressive state is not defined as simply as royal asserts. This is far too broad and gives us no way to decide what kind of government is oppressive and what isn't. The Articles of Confederation contained an institutional failure and some would argue they were oppressive (some wanted even less government), but certainly this is untrue. Refer to my definition of oppressive. This means you can throw out my opponents ridiculous consequentalist framework--I intend to win the debate on both grounds, but to decide if a government is oppressive we must first understand what is constituted by "burdensome, cruel, or unjust", aka a deontological outlook. Another flaw with the radical consequentalism Royal wants is that if there are no underlying deontological values, there's no way to measure what does or does not provide the most "good" (whatever that means). Anarchy untenableRoyals argument is essentially that without a unifying set of laws many things, specifically the acquisition and holding of property, become difficult to sustain. Ignoring the fact that she's failed to assign any huge impact to this and that she fails to give a single example of these impacts happening in a stateless society, the arguments she's making are unsound. For example, she misunderstands why men (under social contract theory) create governments to begin with, which is to protect their rights. If for some reason they cannot have a government as the resolution presumes, they'll protect their rights in some other kind of way such as private competitors. She argues that people could simply renege on their agreements, but the problem is every firm has an incentive to fulfill their agreements or else they'll suffer harms to their reputations and become unprofitable. One of the fundamental rules of international relations is that states are in a state of anarchy to each other, and even so they still manage to make mutually beneficial contracts and rarely go back on them as it will damage their reputation and bring about harms. This principle applies even more to private producers as all the costs and benefits are forced onto themselves directly rather than taxpayers.Her arguments about how there would be no "universal law" are flawed because even if we presume that a state is necessary to acquire a universal idea of rights (a dubious prospect at best since the legal heritages of most countries derive from privileges existing in eras where there was no central state) there's no warrant on the argument that a state is necessary to keep this idea. Royal absurdly argues that the government, rather than the mores of the people, is what allows for people to resolve conflicts through mutual understanding, except that the VAST majority of conflicts are resolved outside of government. Indeed people in every society have conflicting ideas about what rights exist and which don't, the government doesn't provide any universal idea of law, it simply enforces whichever policies whoever is in power prefers. Recall also that despite asserting we need to look to consequentalism, Royal doesn't cite any examples or statistics.Just governmentRoyals strongest argument, but still a deeply flawed one. I'll address it more in my next round, but the very social contract theorists she cites would argue that government arose from anarchy, from a state of nature. Royal gives no warrant for why a just government can't arise from anarchy, except that there would be no common enemy and there would be under an oppressive government. First of all, the common enemies that unify people in oppressive governments are usually scapegoated minorities/classes or people of other countries. A common enemy is more likely to exist under anarchy, the enemy would be the criminals that Royal argues would be more common in anarchy. Politicians use this enemy all the time (see tough on crime rhetoric).Vote Con.Sources: http://tinyurl.com...