Essential services should be socialized, and privatized services should be regulated.

Pro says, I am incorrect with regards to quality education & healthcare being provided by governments and bases this on a spending to GDP ratio. Simply using a healthcare spending to GDP ratio is not an accurate way to measure how well one country provides healthcare as compared with another because in wealthier countries people will tend to spend more on whatever they think will make their lives better, including healthcare. Next, pro implies we have more expensive healthcare because we spend more but use doctors and hospitals less. When one analyzes the situation though, it indicates that people in the U.S. on average are much healthier than those in countries with socialized healthcare because they don’t have to see doctors as often, nor do they have to go to hospitals as often or stay there as long. So perhaps it is more expensive for certain services but it is because they are higher quality services than in nations with national healthcare. Also, pro has agreed that in marketplaces, competition will cause quality to increase and prices to fall thus affirming my central premise for free markets. Pro agrees that, people who can afford U.S. healthcare will come. As to Americans travelling to countries with national healthcare, this is simply a way of gaming the system so that people who care a little less about the quality of their healthcare can get it for free. For those who actually live in these nations, the service is definitely not free, it comes from taxes paid by their citizens. Pro also indicated another problem with socialized healthcare, it encourages people to scam the system. If it were simply market based, then those who use the service pay and if they don’t pay, they either take on debt or don’t get served. Another problem with socialized healthcare is that there is no incentive to compete to improve operations. Also if capitalism is allowed to work unburdened, it creates wealth, employment, and low cost products which allows those who currently can't afford care, to be treated with high quality care in the future. On education, pro still ignores the fact that private education for lower income people would have become more affordable because of growing wealth and household income at the time (see comments for actual source) and because of an incentive for businesses to reach more of the growing education market. This also applies to pro’s argument regarding families who can’t afford education. Pro says that taxes are good to pay for someone in need. To answer this I point out an argument I made in the first round, public education is not cost effective and is detrimental. I would also like to quote here Ayn Rand, “Do not ever say that the desire to “do good” by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.” Also, the free market doesn't distribute wealth from the bottom up. The likely reason that pro thinks this is that he assumes a zero sum game. If economics were always a zero sum game of shared scarcity, then GDP would never grow, instead, GDP can grow and shrink. Also, under free market systems, like the U.S. during the industrial revolution, incomes of the “working class” grow (see comments for figures). Also, it is a good thing for these people dependent on the government to be cut off because if they aren’t, then they will likely go on being dependent. Cutting them off gives them an incentive to find work. Regarding monopolies, pro is incorrect when he says businesses will collaborate when unregulated to produce an oligopoly. If this happened in an unregulated market and the oligopoly became abusive of its power, all it would take to topple the oligopoly would be someone who could provide the same service at a reasonable cost. Even if this person began as a small business, he/she would begin to gain more customers and the profits would grow along with business thus re-introducing competition to the market. I explained this process in the very first round. Pro agrees that government will not always answer to the public but counters by saying that my examples of oppressive government never gave people a voice. While it is true that the DPRK, Iraq, and the USSR never had democracy to give people a voice, they still helped sweep their later oppressive leaders into power in these countries as well as in the PRC. Also, Hitler was made chancellor by the Weimar Republic, and Marcos was elected. The Roman Republic also saw public representation through the Senate, Tribunes, and popular election of proconsuls yet, by Caesar’s time, the state had so much power that he was able to start a chain of events leading to emperors such as Nero, Caligula, and Caracalla. Representative democracies and republics can clearly go awry if too much power is ceded to them. Even if my pro supports socialization of food and housing only for the needy, the problem still remains that it is a disincentive to work for your own food and housing (see con premise 1 round 2). Pro also claims that free markets are unable to provide food for the poor, yet lacks any evidence or logic to support this claim and, as mentioned earlier, agrees with my central free market premise (above). On wages, pro says I have misrepresented his argument to mean that businesses will underpay employees when possible but as this quote from his second round rebuttal reveals, I have not misrepresented it at all: “In his rebuttal to my third premise, my opponent claims that competition would cause businesses to not pay their workers pennies a day.” Thus implying that businesses will pay workers pennies a day absent regulation. Also, pro uses the pre-Progressive Era as an example of underpayment of workers but still forgets that income rose during that time by 75%(see comments). Thus pro’s claim that these people need protection against their employers falls. Pro also attacked the labor value argument by trying to say that low-wage professions are not subject to the same market forces as high-wage ones. This is simply illogical, supply and demand and the value of a product govern all free markets regardless of the industry. Also, pro did not actually counter that wages were initially low because of the initially slow growth of wealth. Neither the New Deal nor the Progressive era created more wealth or wealth creating jobs, they only served to take it from hard working Americans and business owners and run it through dead weight losses to wind up with less value than earlier in the pocket of someone digging a useless ditch or of someone who was not working at all. This does not end poverty, it only spreads it by punishing success, rewarding failure and bleeding wealth creators dry. Pro now affirms that the property rights system works to punish but fails to understand that it also serves as a deterrent because of the money that would have to be spent on lawsuits. It also creates an incentive to produce more efficiently. This means that environmental regulation would be unnecessary and as per my arguments from round 2, detrimental. In the next round, I would like pro to provide specific examples of the free nations referenced in his last rebuttal on this issue so that I may provide a proper answer. That being said, the development of oppressive government doesn’t happen instantly. It takes time for this to happen but to avoid unnecessary risk, government must be limited to the three tasks from my arguments on the first premise. While the market won't always prevent trusts, it will most of the time and when a natural monopoly occurs, it either does not last long or is nothing to worry about (first round). Antitrust legislation doesn't encourage competition by protecting businesses from more successful businesses, the very idea of protecting one business from another is antithetical to competition. If a business knew that it didn’t need to improve itself because all its competitors would be cut down by legislation, then there would be no incentive to do so.