Alt Fails

Resource AllocationOnly the market can allocate resources—it’s just a question of how much state regulation makes it effective Financial Express, Indian Business Newspaper, 2013 (The Financial Express, “Role of market and state in resource allocation,” July 18th, 2013, proquest, accessed 8-5-14)

For example, market cannot function fruitfully unless property rights are resolved by the state through enacting laws and enforcing contracts by courts and police. The state, in turn, is dependent on market for cost-effective resource generation. In the words of the authors, "Thus, no economy of any contemporary

significance operates without the state and the market. Differences in economic systems reflect a difference in the way in which the state and the market are combined, i.e. which aspects of economic activities the state is in charge of, which aspects are left to the market, and how strongly and widely market activities are controlled by the state's administrative

organisation - the government. It is a matter of degree. The question here is what combination of these two organisations would optimise the growth of developing economies." The orthodoxy of economics, from Adam Smith and the English Classical School to the neoclassical school, considered competition in a free market as the basis of socially optimum allocation of resources. Under these conditions, there should be no need of government interventions. Pareto optimum prevails and efficiency in resource allocation augers well under the aegis of 'invisible hand,' division of labour, or persuasion of personal interests. By and large, efficiency in resource allocation under market economy dominates deliberations of development economists - including that of the authors this writer

referred to earlier. However, in the book Development as Freedom, Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen lamented that the focus in assessing market mechanism has tended to be on the results it ultimately generates, such as the incomes or the utilities yielded by the markets. "That is not a negligible issue. But the more immediate case for the freedom of market transactions lies in the basic importance of that freedom itself. To deny that freedom in general would be in itself a major failing of a society." So much market matters as a field of freedom that Amartya Sen adduced the fall of socialism in economic inefficiency of the communist system as well as to the denial of freedom in a system where markets were ruled out. Despite allocative efficiency and the freedom fetched from market, market mechanism had been severely subject to criticisms on many grounds. Yujiro and Youhihisa present a few of them. First, market failure emerges in the supply of public goods where property rights are not specified to result in 'free riders.' Second, some private goods such as automobile could be 'public bad' because of air pollution, and market mechanism overlooks the social costs. Third, asymmetric information results in monopolistic competition, and finally, the market is the mechanism to promote economic efficiency but not to improve income distribution. Further, J. E. Stiglitz pointed to new market failures embracing costly information, transaction costs, and the absence of futures markets that extend the range of market failures beyond the earlier

attention to public goods and externality. After World War II, as we all know, the governments of Asia and Africa turned to economists in the US or the UK for a recipe to realise economic independence. At that time, grand models of development strategies that involved structural transformation and an extensive role of government, with an eye on raising the per capita income, lay at the heart of the approach. The suggested models and hypotheses, from the western advisers, highlighted the role of a

strong state sector on the heels of pervasive market failures that underdeveloped countries are faced with. To correct or avoid market failure, they advocated central coordination of the allocation of resources. The newly expanding subject of welfare economics also provided considerable rationale for government

action for facing market failures. Thus, the state emerged as the major agent of economic change to the first generation of development advisers in the wake of an unreliable price system, limited entrepreneurship, and the need for large structural adjustments to put developing countries on an even keel. They had the faith in the government in the spheres of promoting capital accumulation, utilising surplus labour, undertaking policies for industrialisation, relaxing foreign exchange constraint via import substitution, and coordinating the allocation of resources through programming and planning.

"Regulated capitalism" Best

Regulated capitalism is most productive—it helps cure the ills of capitalism, while ensuring a competitive US economy. Melancon 11--history at Southeastern Oklahoma State University[Glenn, “Concentrated Power: Why We Need Regulated Capitalism”, NOVEMBER 23, 2011, http://www.glennmelancon.com/?p=94\]RMT

Before the Great Depression the federal government let corporations grow relatively unchecked. It was a free market paradise. No minimum wage. No workers’ compensation plans. No unemployment tax. No

bookkeeping rules. No environmental laws. No safety regulations. If the free market myth were true, then this era should have been the greatest time in American history. It wasn’t. The Great Depression and the New Deal brought this corporate paradise to end. President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew unregulated capitalism hurts average Americans. He decided to limit the power of corporations. They had to open their books to investors. Companies had to deal honestly with labor unions. They had to pay taxes. Businesses had to pay their workers better. Did the American

economy crash? No. In fact regulated capitalism laid the foundation for the post war economic boom. After World War Two the federal government took an even larger role in the economy. It provided veterans with housing, education and health benefits. The federal government built the interstate highway system. It invested in aerospace, nuclear and computer technologies.

Federal regulations required the automobile industry to improve safety and fuel efficiency.

Industries were forced to stop polluting our air and water. The free marketeers screamed in protest. Liberals

were destroying America. Socialists were punishing the successful. Capitalists would go on strike and bring the economy to a standstill. Luckily, no one listened to these Chicken Littles. The sky didn’t fall. In fact regulated capitalism produced the world’s largest middle class . Unfortunately, the oil crisis of the 1970s opened the door for the Chicken Littles to gain power. Slowly and methodically the corporation elite reasserted their hold on political power. The geniuses on Wall Street started selling snake oil again-Free Trade, electricity deregulation and the grand daddy of them all, banking

deregulation. They told us that the “market” would regulate itself and no one would be hurt. Boy, were they

wrong. American jobs moved overseas. Electricity prices went through the roof. In 2008

American families lost $11 trillion worth of assets, setting them back by four years. Now what do we do? Do we turn to the arsonist and say, “Are you an expert firefighter too?” No, we don’t. Can the free market and more deregulation

magically fix the current financial mess? No, it can’t. We need to return to sensible regulations that check excessive corporate power. There is overwhelming bi-partisan support for this approach. Trade deals need to be fair, protecting American workers and the environment. We need affordable consumer technology to produce energy locally and allow for greater efficiency. Healthcare

insurance needs to be affordable for all Americans. Stockholders need a greater say in executive pay and long-term planning. Finally, hedge funds need to disclose their secret deals that threaten us all. Change will not be easy. It never is. Chicken Little will be screaming the whole time. The

sky will not fall. We’re Americans. We’ve been in situations like this before. If we learn from our past successes and failures, we can effectively limit corporate excess and create sustained economic growth.

Our founding fathers would be proud that we too learned the lesson that concentrated power hurts society and that we found a way to dilute it.

Status quo collapses allow a shift to an effective middle ground between socialism and capitalism—anything else guarantees a failed transition from forced policies that decimates US leadership. Newman 12--author of Rebounders: How Winners Pivot From Setback to Success and the co-author of two other books. [Rick Newman, “Why the Tension Between Socialism and Capitalism Will Intensify”, Dec 6, 2012, http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/rick-newman/2012/12/06/why-the-tension-between-socialism-and-capitalism-will-intensify]RMT

This year's presidential election included many bastardized references to both economic systems, which have been broadly mischaracterized for a long time. Many defenders of capitalism argue that the nation's economic system was more pure a

decade ago (or two, or three), but America hasn't had pure capitalism in well over a century. And when it did have a raw form of capitalism, the consequences were often disastrous for significant chunks

of the population, which is why public support grew for the kind of regulated capitalism we have now. In the 1800s, the federal government largely stayed out of the economy, with nothing like the regulatory apparatus we have now. That's one reason people like Andrew Carnegie, John

Jacob Astor, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan built vast fortunes — often from monopolies or

cartels--that still exist in various forms today. But unregulated capitalism also generated speculative bubbles, financial panics and destitution much more frequently than those things have occurred over the last 70 years. Public pressure led to a long series of reforms that morphed into the regulated free-market economy we

have today. In the early 1900s, Teddy Roosevelt started to break up some of the all-powerful monopolies that enriched a few while overcharging the masses. Congress created the Federal Reserve and the income tax in 1913. A slew of regulatory agencies grew out of the Great Depression. During the 20th century, presidents of both parties signed legislation creating new agencies to oversee food, medicine, the environment and Wall Street (ahem). We still have a capitalist system centered on private ownership and prices set by the free market, but it's layered with rules meant to prevent abuses. Some Americans obviously feel there are too many rules, with a vocal set of critics claiming that Obama in particular has ushered in a system that's more like socialism than capitalism. That's hyperbole.

Obama's new healthcare plan obviously will involve a lot more government involvement in the delivery of health care. But that happened because the prior system (which was itself

governed by a dense thicket of insurance-company rules) failed to keep medical costs at affordable levels or make healthcare available to everybody . As in the past, public pressure for something better led to government intervention. Anybody familiar with real socialism ought to know that it's not what we have in America today. If it were, the government would control most industries and own most of the

property, and most Americans would be paid similar wages determined by government bureaucrats. In reality, 84 percent of American workers are employed in the private sector, with just 16 percent employed in government. Most people's pay is determined by what they're able to convince a company or a group of customers to pay

them, with no upper limit. Anybody who has the money to buy private property can. More than 60 percent of American families own the home they live in. Still, the ideological battle between the forces of socialism and capitalism is far from over, and probably likely to intensify in coming years. For much of the time following World War II, the United States was characterized by "an economy of abundance and a psychology of scarcity," as the historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead has noted. In general, a

booming economy provided more than relatively humble Americans expected. But now, thanks to globalization, declining U.S. competitiveness and a swollen social-safety net, we may have an economy of scarcity and a psychology of abundance. Many Americans expect a better standard of living than they're likely to get. During the next decade or two, the U.S. government is going to have to stop living on borrowed money. The mushrooming cost of entitlement programs like Medicare,

Medicaid and Social Security is going to force some tough choices: Either working Americans will have to pay way more than prior generations to support seniors and the underprivileged, or those dependent upon government will get much thinner benefits. One approach is socialistic, transferring an increasing amount of wealth from one group to another. The other is capitalistic, in that it requires far greater self-reliance and provides less of a safety net for those who can't fend for themselves.

The ultimate outcome will be somewhere between pure capitalism and true socialism, which is where the U.S. economy always has always ended up. But it could be much closer to either extreme than it is now. Keep your dictionary handy.

Regulated capitalism solves all their impacts – progressive policies solve inequality, ecological practices, and economic growth.

Hindrey Jr, 8 (Leo, Leo Hindery, Jr. chairs the Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation, and is managing partner of a New York-based media industry private equity fund. Previously, he was CEO of AT&T Broadband and its predecessor, Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI). He is the author of "It Takes a CEO: It's Time to Lead With Integrity" (Free Press, 2005), “Senator McCain, Regulated Capitalism is Not Socialism,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leo-hindery-jr/senator-mccain-regulated_b_139736.html, AS)

Senator Obama's economic policies, however you want to describe them, would be the very best thing right now for American businesses, American workers and the American economy. His particular economic prescription would give us back vibrant, thoughtfully regulated capitalism of the sort that we know with certainty promotes and fosters economic growth from the bottom up. Growth which will give us back full employment, a pathway to ending poverty, and progress toward solving the problems associated with our current health care, education, trade, taxation and ecology practices.¶ The very best thing for America -- workers and businesses alike -- is and has always been a vibrant middle class that grows from the bottom up. And Senator Obama reminds us of this in almost every speech.¶ From vigorously enforcing our domestic labor laws to enabling all workers to have an unrestricted ability to join a union, a President Obama would provide all workers, but especially lower-wage workers, with the opportunities and the tools and the policies they need to realize again the American Dreams that, lately, have been torn from their futures.¶

Barack Obama's economic policies have the needed incentives for American companies to create and retain high-quality jobs that can't be offshored -- jobs in industries such as renewable energy, clean technology, and biotech that will comprise the next frontier of American economic growth. He will end tax breaks for companies which ship jobs overseas. And his elimination of all capital gains taxes on start-ups and small businesses will further spur innovation and job creation.¶ When it comes to trade agreements, Senator Obama will implement policies that better open up foreign markets to American exports and that eliminate the illegal subsidies and currency manipulations which have benefited foreign companies and governments at the expense of American companies and workers. And he'll use our trade agreements to encourage strong labor and environmental standards around the globe.¶ And last but certainly not least as we try to restore our economy, are Senator Obama's progressive tax policies, which would bring immediate benefit to 95% of American taxpayers, on the order of $1,000 per working family and also by eliminating income taxes

entirely for seniors making less than $50,000 per year. No individual making less than $200,000 and no family making less than $250,000 will see a nickel or a dime of tax increase, and even the wealthiest Americans will not see their taxes increase beyond Clinton-era levels.¶ Senator Obama's economic policies and his restoration of fairness and progressivity to the individual income tax are vital to getting our economy back on track and to getting back our own moral standing with American workers. And none of it, my dear friend Senator McCain, can or should ever be called "socialism", which you know is true, because when you really were "straight talking", you said so yourself.

Regulated capitalism avoids the problems of capitalismFoster 9 Nathan Foster SEPTEMBER 14, 2009 Regulated Capitalism vs. Socialism

http://open.salon.com/blog/nathan_foster/2009/09/14/regulated_capitalism_vs_socialism

On the other hand, there is at least a hair-thin distinction between socialism and regulated capitalism. Regulated capitalism, as I envision it, allows for the private ownership of capital, but regulates its use. I'll allow for progressive taxation—the rich can be taxed more than the poor, which is justified based on the idea that the rich really don't have anything important to do with 30% of their money anyway. I'll also allow for trust-busting, as this is a form of regulation.

The only possible argument that regulated capitalism is in fact socialism rests on the assumption that any law or regulation reflects a degree of public control, and therefore, in a sense, regulated capitalism is really some degree of public control of capital. But I think this argument falls apart because I'm speaking of laws which protect the safety of the public, not direct control of capital, and every nation on earth, no matter what system of government or socio-economic system you choose to identify it with, has laws to protect the safety of the public. You therefore can't use such laws to discriminate between different socio-economic systems or systems of government.

That said, I prefer regulated capitalism to socialism for a couple of reasons.

1) Having money and influence is just sweet. I know this sounds silly, but the idea should not be discarded. I think there is real public benefit to having a class of people who have more money than they know what to do with. It shows just how good life gets, and motivates the public to improve their position. It is also, obviously, beneficial to those people who have the money. They get to enjoy life, and I think that's good for everybody.

2) Strict regulation should be enough to prevent abuses of capital. You don't have to resort to public ownership to prevent these abuses

Serial Policy Success

Generic – Human GoodThe past 10 years were awesome – disproves the K.Kenny, 10 (Charles, author of Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding Aug 16, 2010 and contributor to Foreign Policy, “Best. Decade. Ever.¶ The first 10 years of the 21st century were humanity's finest -- even for the world's bottom billion,” http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/16/best_decade_ever?page=full)

The past 10 years have gotten a bad rap as the "Naughty Aughties" -- and deservedly so, it seems, for a decade that began with 9/11 and the Enron scandal and closed with the global financial crisis and the Haiti earthquake. In between, we witnessed the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, SARS and swine flu, not to mention vicious fighting in Sudan and Congo, Afghanistan and, oh yes, Iraq. Given that our brains seem hard-wired to remember singular tragedy over incremental success, it's a hard sell to convince anyone that the past 10 years are worthy of praise. ¶ But these horrific events, though mortal and economic catastrophes for many millions, don't sum up the decade as experienced by most of the planet's 6-billion-plus people. For all its problems, the first 10 years of the 21st century were in fact humanity's finest, a time when more people lived better, longer, more peaceful, and more prosperous lives than ever before.¶ Consider that in 1990, roughly half the global population lived on less than $1 a day; by 2007, the proportion had shrunk to 28 percent -- and it will be lower still by the close of 2010. That's because, though the financial crisis briefly stalled progress on income growth, it was just a hiccup in the decade's relentless GDP climb. Indeed, average worldwide incomes are at their highest levels ever, at roughly $10,600 a year -- and have risen by as much as a quarter since 2000. Some 1.3 billion people now live on more than $10 a day, suggesting the continued expansion of the global middle class. Even better news is that growth has been faster in poor places like sub-Saharan Africa than across the world as a whole.¶ There are still 1 billion people who go to bed each night desperately hungry, but cereal prices are now a fraction of what they were in the 1960s and 1970s. That, alongside continued income growth, is why the proportion of the developing world's population classified as "undernourished" fell from 34 percent in 1970 to 17 percent in 2008, even at the height of a global spike in food prices. Agricultural productivity, too, continues to climb: From 2000 to 2008, cereal yields increased at nearly twice the rate of population growth in the developing world. And though famine continues to threaten places such as Zimbabwe, hundreds of millions of people are eating more -- and better -- each day.¶ We're also winning the global battle against infectious disease. The 2009 swine flu has killed more than 18,000 people so far, according to the World Health Organization. But its impact has been far less severe than the apocalyptic forecasts of a few years ago, fueled by nightmare scenarios of drug-resistant, Airbus-hopping viruses overwhelming a hot, flat, and crowded world. The truth is that pandemics are on the wane. Between 1999 and 2005, thanks to the spread of vaccinations, the number of children who died annually from measles dropped 60 percent. The proportion of the world's infants vaccinated against diphtheria, whooping cough, and tetanus has climbed from less than half to 82 percent between 1985 and 2008.¶ There are dark spots still, not least the continuing tragedy of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. But though the 15 countries with the highest HIV prevalence still see life expectancies more than three years lower than their 1990 peak, at least the trend has started ticking back up in the last decade. The overwhelming global picture is of better

health: From 2000 to 2008, child mortality dropped more than 17 percent, and the average person added another two years to his or her life expectancy, now just one shy of the biblical standard of three score and 10.¶ We can thank improved literacy, which has played a role in spreading vital knowledge in low-income societies, for some of these health gains. More than four-fifths of the world's population can now read and write -- including more than two-thirds of Africans. The proportion of the world's young people who go on to university climbed from below one-fifth to above a quarter from 2000 to 2007 alone. And progress in education has been particularly rapid for women, one sign of growing gender equity. Although no one would argue the struggle is complete, the gains are striking -- the worldwide proportion of women parliamentarians, for instance, increased from 11 percent in 1997 to 19 percent in 2009.¶ Even the wars of the last 10 years, tragic as they have been, are minor compared with the violence and destruction of decades and centuries past. The number of armed conflicts -- and their death toll -- has continued to fall since the end of the Cold War. Worldwide, combat casualties fell 40 percent from 2000 to 2008. In sub-Saharan Africa, some 46,000 people died in battle in 2000. By 2008, that number had dropped to 6,000. Military expenditures as a percentage of global GDP are about half of their 1990 level. In Europe, so recently divided into two armed camps, annual military budgets fell from $744 billion in 1988 to $424 billion in 2009. The statistical record doesn't go back far enough for us to know with absolute certainty whether this was the most peaceful decade ever in terms of violent deaths per capita, but it certainly ranks as the lowest in the last 50 years.¶ On the other hand, humanity's malignant effect on the environment has accelerated the rate of extinction for plants and animals, which now reaches perhaps 50,000 species a year. But even here there was some good news. We reversed our first anthropogenic global atmospheric crisis by banning chlorofluorocarbons -- by 2015, the Antarctic ozone hole will have shrunk by nearly 400,000 square miles. Stopping climate change has been a slower process. Nonetheless, in 2008, the G-8 did commit to halving carbon emissions by 2050. And a range of technological advances -- from hydrogen fuel cells to compact fluorescent bulbs -- suggests that a low-carbon future need not require surrendering a high quality of life. ¶ Technology has done more than improve energy efficiency. Today, there are more than 4 billion mobile-phone subscribers, compared with only 750 million at the decade's start. Cell phones are being used to provide financial services in the Philippines, monitor real-time commodity futures prices in Vietnam, and teach literacy in Niger. And streaming video means that fans can watch cricket even in benighted countries that don't broadcast it -- or upload citizen reports from security crackdowns in Tehran.¶ Perhaps technology also helps account for the striking disconnect between the reality of worldwide progress and the perception of global decline. We're more able than ever to witness the tragedy of millions of our fellow humans on television or online. And, rightly so, we're more outraged than ever that suffering continues in a world of such technological wonder and economic plenty.¶

Nonetheless, if you had to choose a decade in history in which to be alive, the first of the 21st century would undoubtedly be it. More people lived lives of greater freedom, security, longevity, and wealth than ever before. And now, billions of them can tweet the good news. Bring on the 'Teenies.

Human life is improving in every aspect.

Brinsmead, 4 (Robert D., author, horticulturist, and local government politician Tweed Times, “THE CASE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL OPTIMISM,” http://www.bobbrinsmead.com/e_The_Case_for_Environmental_Optimism_indexed.html)

It is estimated that the 6.1 billion people now living represent about 10% of all the people that have ever lived on the earth. In terms of all the indicators of human well-being, humankind has never had it so good. In The Skeptical Environmentalist, the Bjorn Lomberg backs up this optimistic assessment with a mass of statistical data:¶ ¶ · In the last 100 years, the average human life span has more than doubled for both the developed and the undeveloped world.¶ · Human health has improved correspondingly. There are less infectious diseases. Better sanitation and water has played a huge part in reducing millions of premature deaths and illnesses. ¶ · With food production outstripping population growth, world food prices have fallen to 1/3rd of what they were in 1957. More than 90% of people in the world now have more food and are better nourished. ¶ · The race is becoming stronger and taller.¶ · People in the first world are 8 times wealthier than they were in 1800 and the real wealth of developing countries has tripled in the last 50 years.¶ · Most people in the world are better educated now than they have ever been throughout history, and they enjoy much more leisure time. Average working hours have halved in the last 120 years.¶ · People today have access to travel, communications, culture, entertainment and information undreamed of by people in the past. ¶ · In the developed world the average person uses energy that is equivalent to having 150 servants. Even the average Indian uses the equivalent energy of 15 servants.¶ · In the last 200 years, human life has vastly improved for most of the world in non-material ways such as in ordinary human freedoms (political, religious and economic), in liberal democracy, in less racial or gender discrimination and in a vast range of human rights.¶ ¶ Julian Simon summed up the evidence this way: “The material conditions of life will continue to improve, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today’s Western living standards. I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and to say that the conditions of life are getting worse.”

Climate ChangeExcluding middle-ground adaption strategies like the aff makes climate change worse- empirics prove action has prevented past apocalyptic predictions Ridley, British Science Writer and Doctorate in Zoology from University of Oxford, 2012

(Matt, Rational Optimist, “Apocalypse Not,” August 19th, 2012, http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/apocalypse-not.aspx, accessed 8/4/14 bh@ddi)

Over the past half century, none of our threatened eco-pocalypses have played out as predicted. Some

came partly true; some were averted by action; some were wholly chimerical. This raises a question that many find discomforting: With a track record like this, why should people accept the cataclysmic claims now being made about climate change? After all, 2012 marks the apocalyptic deadline of not just the Mayans but also a prominent figure in our own time: Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who said in 2007 that "if there's no action before 2012, that's too late … This is the defining moment." So, should we worry or not about the warming climate? It is far too binary

a question. The lesson of failed past predictions of ecological apocalypse is not that nothing was happening but that the middle-ground possibilities were too frequently excluded from consideration. In the climate debate, we hear a lot from those who think disaster is inexorable if not inevitable, and a lot

from those who think it is all a hoax. We hardly ever allow the moderate "lukewarmers" a voice: those who suspect that the net positive feedbacks from water vapor in the atmosphere are low, so that we face only 1 to 2 degrees Celsius of warming this century; that the Greenland ice sheet may melt but no faster than its current rate of less than 1 percent per century; that net increases in rainfall (and carbon dioxide concentration) may improve agricultural productivity;

that ecosystems have survived sudden temperature lurches before; and that adaptation to gradual change may be both cheaper and less ecologically damaging than a rapid and brutal decision to give up fossil fuels cold turkey. We've already seen some evidence that humans can forestall warming-

related catastrophes. A good example is malaria, which was once widely predicted to get worse as a result of climate change. Yet in the 20th century, malaria retreated from large parts of the world, including North America and Russia, even as the world warmed. Malaria-specific mortality plummeted in the first

decade of the current century by an astonishing 25 percent. The weather may well have grown more hospitable to mosquitoes during that time. But any effects of warming were more than counteracted by pesticides, new antimalarial drugs, better drainage, and economic development. Experts such as Peter Gething at Oxford argue that these trends will continue, whatever the weather. Just as policy can make the climate crisis worse-mandating biofuels has not only encouraged rain forest destruction, releasing

carbon, but driven millions into poverty and hunger-technology can make it better. If plant breeders boost rice yields, then people may get richer and afford better protection against extreme weather. If nuclear engineers make fusion (or thorium fission) cost-effective, then carbon emissions may suddenly fall. If gas replaces coal because of horizontal drilling,

then carbon emissions may rise more slowly. Humanity is a fast-moving target. We will combat our ecological threats in the future by innovating to meet them as they arise, not through the mass fear stoked by worst-case scenarios.

EconomyThere’s been serial policy success – economic restructuring has led to the best year in decades – proves the potential of regulated capitalism.Altman, 13 (Roger, writer for TIME Magazine, Aug 12, 2013, “Why the Economy Could... Pop!

Housing is coming back. Banks are lending again. Energy is booming. A prominent Democrat argues that the U.S. economy is finally coming back to life,” http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2148625-4,00.html)

It is easy to imagine that because Washington is mired in political gridlock, the rest of the country is stuck too. This may explain why surveys show deep pessimism over the nation's Economic Outlook. Such sentiment made sense after the scary financial collapse of 2008, but it doesn't anymore. In fact, after five years of struggling against headwinds triggered by that collapse, the U.S. is making a surprisingly strong comeback. It's the great untold story of the summer of 2013: a combination of

cyclical recovery forces and uniquely American strengths are revving up growth. The U.S. economic outlook is as strong as it has been in more than a decade.¶ Yes, too many Americans are out of work and have been that way for too long. And yes, household incomes, adjusted for inflation,

are still below 2007 levels. Indeed, this is the country's biggest job--to repair labor markets and get incomes moving up again. The U.S. needs growth in order to make that happen, and that's where the news is good. Confounding so many skeptics, the U.S. is actually shifting into higher gear. Growth for this year's second quarter, just reported at 1.7%, beat expectations but is well below the rate we should see at this time next year. Indeed, the Federal Reserve Board, not known for going out on a limb,

recently raised its 2014 forecast for real growth to the 3%-to-3.5% range. And the country will likely see two to three more years of good growth, which would produce millions of new jobs and begin to raise incomes. This is one reason

the U.S. stock market recently reached all-time highs.¶ The U.S. is the only developed country with a story like this to tell. Europe, unfortunately, is facing a long

period of economic stagnation. Its financial crisis came later, and southern Europe is laboring under the burdens of sick banks and weak competitiveness. Meanwhile, Japan, where the population is falling, hasn't seen meaningful growth in years and isn't likely to see it now.¶ What is allowing the U.S. to rev up when others cannot? For one thing, the 2008 financial collapse and the deep slump that followed forced this country to make big changes. A severe financial crisis, whether at a corner grocery store,

a multinational corporation or an entire nation, always leads to some restructuring. But the U.S. has restructured dramatically. Households have shed debt and are now ready to use their credit cards again. The banking system and the auto industry have been completely revamped. American business has become more efficient, and cost differentials with China are narrowing. U.S. manufacturing has stopped shrinking and is actually beginning to expand.¶ At the same time, the U.S. continues to enjoy built-in advantages that other nations lack: a growing population and the

prospect of further immigration, big and flexible housing and stock markets, the most dynamic energy sector in the world, a huge and resilient consumer market and unparalleled technology leadership.¶ Now, five years after the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the American economy is gathering steam. Over the medium term, Americans are going to see growing job opportunities, higher wages and better asset values. To understand how this economic rebirth will unfold, it's important to understand the five big factors driving it.¶ FACTOR NO. 1¶ HOW HOUSING CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD¶ A big driver of this Economic comeback will be the housing market, which is now entering a powerful, multiyear upswing. Housing works like a trampoline. When it is pushed down far enough and long enough, it will eventually snap upward very powerfully. That move is happening now.¶ You can see this in prices, which are 12% higher than they were a year ago, according to CoreLogic, an analytics and data-services firm. Each of the 20 largest metropolitan markets is registering year-over-year gains, something that hasn't happened since 2005. New housing construction and renovations don't just generate construction and

related jobs. They also boost the manufacturing of appliances, pipes, wiring and other goods. And they drive services, including plumbing, electrical work, trucking and mortgage lending. This is why, according to Goldman Sachs, the housing rebound alone can add a half-point of annual GDP growth. And it could produce more than half a million new jobs a year over the next few years, according to Ameriprise Financial.¶ It was the depth of housing's fall that laid the foundation for this upturn. Single-family housing starts, for example,

averaged 1.5 million from 2000 to 2004, before the bubble. After the bust, housing starts plunged to an annual rate of about 500,000 for nearly three years. New-home sales fell to a third of what they had been before the collapse. In relative terms,

housing hadn't been so weak since the 1930s.¶ Now the tide has turned. On the supply side, the massive post-2008 overhang of unsold homes, which depressed prices and new housing construction, has finally been

resolved. The number of homes for sale is back to its long-term average of about 2 million nationwide. It's true that there remains a big inventory of foreclosed units that have not been maintained, but that number is falling too and isn't relevant to most

buyers. In other words, the excess supply is gone.¶ Demand is also helping goose the market. Census Bureau data implies that the U.S. population will grow roughly 8% over the next

decade, faster than either Europe's or Japan's. And the household-formation rate (people deciding to rent or buy for the first time) is snapping back. After dropping during the crisis, it has more than doubled from its nadir and is rising steadily. Pent-up formation may push it above the long-term average for some time. This means that residential investment may grow 15% to 20% annually over the next four years. The ripples of that will be felt through the entire economy.¶ FACTOR NO. 2¶ THE UNEXPECTED GOLD RUSH¶ This is the big story that no one saw coming: the U.S. oil-and-gas sector has staged an unexpected and stunning revival--a boom, really--that carries uniformly positive implications for growth, jobs, trade and capital flows. The U.S. has always been a major oil producer, but output had been declining steadily for decades. Production peaked in 1970 and fell to a 62-year low of 5 million barrels a day in 2008. But that decline curve has reversed. Seemingly overnight, production rebounded to nearly 7 million barrels a day and is projected to reach the astonishing level of 9 million to 10 million by 2020.¶ The natural-gas story is equally dramatic. Traditional gas fields were in long-term decline, and production had fallen to 48 billion cubic feet per day in 2006. Last year, the U.S. produced 65 billion cubic feet per day. Even more important, the U.S. is now believed to possess a 100-year supply of natural gas, and prices have fallen sharply, from $13 per million BTUs in 2008 to less than $4 now.¶ What explains this phenomenon? The answer is uniquely American technology--a breakthrough in horizontal drilling combined with advanced forms of hydraulic fracturing and seismic exploration. The ability to drill horizontally means that one traditional vertical drilling site can generate additional wells drilled horizontally and at great depth. Together with modern forms of fracturing, this has allowed oil and gas trapped in tight rock formations to be extracted cheaply at huge volumes for the first time. To date, the U.S. is the only nation taking full advantage of this technology.¶ Consider North Dakota: this quiet and often ignored state has seen its oil production skyrocket from 100,000 barrels a day only five years ago to 800,000 today. That makes it the second biggest oil-producing state in the U.S., behind only Texas. This output is coming from the Bakken Shale formation underneath the northern plains, which the U.S. Geological Survey has described as the largest continuous oil accumulation it has ever seen. The result is that North Dakota now has the lowest unemployment rate in the nation (3.2%) and a $1.7 billion budget surplus.¶ The national implications are profound too. According to the consulting firm IHS, unconventional oil and gas production currently supports more than 1.7 million jobs in the U.S., and that number will nearly double by the end of the decade. Meanwhile, these new gas reserves are pushing down the price Americans pay for energy to among the lowest in the world. Cheap natural gas is a big stimulus to petrochemical production and a meaningful one for all U.S. manufacturing. And it will provide something like a tax cut for households. As utilities convert from coal-fired power to gas power--and they are steadily doing so--household electrical bills will fall. Indeed, in a few years, average retail utility bills may be $1,000 per year lower than current levels.¶ Finally, the energy turnaround reduces energy imports, lowering trade deficits and generating large amounts of tax revenue for government at all levels. After decades of U.S. dependence, our oil imports have already dropped from 12 million barrels a day to 8 million and should continue to fall toward 6 million, which would be the lowest import total since 1987.¶ FACTOR NO. 3¶ THE SLEEPING GIANT STIRS¶ About 70% of U.S. Economic activity comes the old-fashioned way: from consumer spending, on everything from autos to apparel to food. The consumer's mood and pocketbook have big impact on the whole country's growth and jobs. And that pocketbook took a tremendous hit in 2008, so much so that it has taken five long years for American households, in aggregate, to recover from the financial damage. Americans conserved cash to pay down debt, and this process pushed down their spending even further.¶ It's hard to exaggerate the financial damage inflicted on consumers during the recession. Total net worth fell by $13 trillion, or 20%, from its level in 2007--a staggering loss. That hit came at a vulnerable moment when U.S. households were highly leveraged. When the bottom fell out, consumer debt had reached a remarkable 138% of income, a 35-year peak. Within a few months in 2008, household finances were crushed as asset values fell, millions of jobs were lost, countless credit cards were canceled and thousands of homes were foreclosed on. As the financial pressure on families reached acute levels, they had no choice but to cut spending and pay off debt.¶ Five years on, households have finally repaired their balance sheets. According to the International Monetary Fund, household debt has now fallen back to 105% of household income, a ratio near historical averages. Further, Federal Reserve data

shows that U.S. households spent only 10.5% of their after-tax income on debt payments in the early part of this year, the smallest portion since the Fed began keeping track in 1980. This reflects both lower levels of debt itself, given pay-downs, and lower interest rates on remaining debt, especially mortgages. The rise of

the stock market has also helped, as has the turnaround in home prices. Other Federal Reserve data shows that household net worth recently topped $70 trillion, a record high, which means that the financial losses of 2008, as a whole, have been recovered. (Achieving this recovery in household asset values has been a primary goal of the Federal Reserve's

hyperaggressive monetary policy for the simple reason that families need to feel financially healed before they will spend

normally.)¶ Americans are starting to open their wallets. Retail sales grew 5.7% in June compared with the same period last year. The consumer price index also strengthened in June, which suggests that demand is growing as

Americans feel more optimistic about the economy. And consumer confidence is near a five-and-a-half-year high.¶ FACTOR NO. 4¶ BANKS (WITH LOTS OF HELP) BOUNCED BACK¶ In September 2008 the overleveraged and undermanaged U.S. banking system suffered a terrifying collapse. And that, in turn, nearly took the whole country down. Short-

term, wholesale lending came to a stop, including from one bank to another. (Keep in mind that the core business of banking is to borrow at one rate, including through deposits, and lend at a higher rate. If banks can't borrow, they can't function.) So when banks got into trouble, lending to businesses and consumers essentially stopped and the whole economy cratered.¶ Federal authorities mounted a huge and heroic intervention. The Federal Reserve's support for the credit markets reached $13 trillion at its peak, according to Bloomberg. The FDIC provided billions of dollars in federal guarantees on new, long-term borrowings by banks and finance companies. Congress rushed through legislation that established TARP, which invested another

$475 billion in new stock issued by these financial institutions.¶ The rescue worked. Slowly and, at first, unsteadily, banks began to borrow again on their own. Then the regulators initiated a sweeping restructuring of the industry. Capital and liquidity levels were raised through wide-

scale divestitures of assets and sales of new stock at low prices. Balance sheets were further cleansed through aggressive write-downs of poor-quality loans and other assets. Improved disclosure practices were also imposed. Old leaders lost their jobs, and new management teams were put in place. It was probably the most successful rescue of private enterprise ever conducted.¶ Today, most large U.S. banks have the kind of clean balance sheets we last saw 10 years ago. They are again generating large profits, and almost all have resumed

paying dividends. Overall, this is now the healthiest banking system in the world, and it is lending strongly again. Total outstanding

bank loans to business, according to the Federal Reserve, have reached $1.54 trillion, up 30% from their post-2008 low and just below their historical peak. Consumer loans already have surpassed their previous high and are growing at a robust 8% rate

so far in 2013. A continuing soft spot is loans to small businesses, which is still $40 billion below the prior high. But overall, the lending recovery is boosting growth.¶ Nevertheless, American regulators have not finished turning the screws, nor should they. Some banks remain too big to fail, and that's why there are ongoing

regulatory efforts to shrink them. In fact, a set of even tighter capital requirements for banks was approved by the Federal Reserve on July 2.¶ FACTOR NO. 5¶ TECHNOLOGY IS STILL OUR BEST FRIEND¶ Not only has the U.S. retained its edge in technology, but its advantage has widened in several categories. According to Battelle, the U.S. contributed 29% of global R&D spending in 2012, compared with nearly 14% for China, the next largest contributor. And absolute levels of R&D have

grown impressively over the past five years, despite the recession.¶ Also, the rate of patenting by U.S. inventors is near an all-time high, according to the Brookings Institution. The value of such patents appears to be rising, based on how often these patents are cited or referenced by other patents. Most important, the

primacy of the U.S.'s research-focused universities remains unchallenged. According to most rankings, 25 to 27 of the world's 30 leading universities are in the U.S.¶ Despite claims that more engineering degrees are being awarded elsewhere, the quality of most overseas degrees is lower than that of their American counterparts. It's true, however, that U.S. junior and senior high schools must be strengthened for this technology edge to continue over the long term.¶ For the time being, the U.S. can readily

afford the investments to maintain its top technology ranking. By one measure, the U.S.'s fiscal condition actually is improving. The Congressional Budget Office now estimates that the 2013 budget deficit will come in at about $640 billion. This is still too large, but it

represents only 4% of GDP, down from more than 10% in 2009. Higher tax revenue from an improving economy, a slower rise in health care costs and three separate stabs at deficit reduction since

2011 are helping clean up our balance sheet.¶ By another metric, cash levels in the U.S. corporate sector

are at historical highs. That's one reason tech firms are pouring cash into R&D budgets. Microsoft spent $9.8 billion last year, Intel spent $10.1 billion, IBM spent $6.3 billion, and Google spent $6.8 billion. These are four of the five largest tech budgets in the world.

EnvironmentThe human condition is improving – every measurable indicator proves all environmental problems are getting better.

Brinsmead, 4 (Robert D., author, horticulturist, and local government politician Tweed Times, “THE CASE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL OPTIMISM,” http://www.bobbrinsmead.com/e_The_Case_for_Environmental_Optimism_indexed.html)

THE HUMAN CONDITION IS GENERALLY IMPROVING¶ ¶ Bjorn Lomberg (The Skeptical Environmentalist) is more comfortable wearing the label of an environmental realist than an environmental optimist. The aim of his book is to look at the state of environment across the world and to call the score after looking objectively at all the data. He doesn’t try to look at the world through the rose-coloured glasses of an incurable optimist. He knows only too well that there are environmental problems to deal with, whether in world population trends, cutting down the tropical rain forests, saving agricultural land, global warming, air pollution, water pollution, world poverty, hunger, and so on. Only a fool could look out on the world and say there were no serious environmental problems. But Lomberg looks at all the available statistics and finds

that Julian Simon was right in the following ways:¶ ¶ 1. In the first place, the data does not support the pessimistic assessments that say everything is getting alarmingly worse. The over-all trend is toward improvement on almost every front.¶ ¶ 2. The environmental problems facing society are not only solvable, but in the developed world at least, they are well on the way to being solved. For instance, within the lifetime of many still living, 64,000 people per year used to die from London’s polluted air. Today the air in London

is the cleanest it has been since the Middle Ages. There have been enormous strides in cleaning up the

water resources in most of the developed countries. The forests too are expanding considerably. The developed world is well on top of such problems as acid rain, the ozone layer and pesticide residues in food. The progress has been so astounding that Greenpeace was forced to admit, “The truth is that many environmental issues that we fought for ten years back are as good as solved. Even so, the strategy

continues to focus on the assumption that ‘everything is going to hell.” (Verdens Gang, 19/3/1998)¶ ¶ 3. In practically every measurable indicator, humankind’s lot has improved and continues to improve. In terms of longevity, infant mortality, nutrition, the cost of food, health and safety, education, leisure time and wealth, most human beings on the planet are better off now than they have ever been in the history of the earth. The human race is even becoming taller.¶ ¶ 4. The major environmental problems of the world – like over-population, air and water pollution, loss of forests, poverty, lack of education, nutrition and adequate food – call for critical concern only in developing countries, but even here

the progress is impressive. In 1970 the number of people in the world who didn’t get enough to eat was 35%. By 1996 it had dropped by half, and by 2010 the UN expects the figure to drop to 12%. In 1970 only 30% of people in the developing countries had access to good drinking water. In 2000 this figure had risen to 80%. Since 1950 developing countries have tripled their real per capita incomes. They now have the same infant mortality rate and longevity as the developed world had in 1950. There remains, of course, an urgent need to further reduce human misery on all these fronts, but enormous

improvements being made give us room for optimism on the basis that things are getting better rather than worse.

Capitalism is the ONLY solution to the environment.

Brinsmead, 4 (Robert D., author, horticulturist, and local government politician Tweed Times, “THE CASE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL OPTIMISM,” http://www.bobbrinsmead.com/e_The_Case_for_Environmental_Optimism_indexed.html)

The environmental doomsayers regard economic growth, the pursuit of prosperity, technology and capitalism as the enemy of the environment. The only way to save the planet, they say, is to lower income expectations, cut back on consumption, return to a more primal way of life and get rid of capitalism. Many of the participants in the deep green movement were refugees from the collapse of world-socialism. They found another expression for their far-Left leanings in environmental politics. There is no doubt that much of their doom and gloom was inspired as much by their desire to dance on the grave of capitalism as by their desire to save the planet.¶ ¶ The eco-pessimists have got it all wrong. More recent environmental research has been able to demonstrate quite conclusively that there is a direct correlation between a given country’s level of wealth on the one hand, and the investment it makes in the environment on the other. That is to say, development and the environment are not inimical as the eco-pessimists would have us believe, but they are complimentary and mutually supportive. This has been shown in two ways:¶ ¶ Firstly, both economists and environmentalists have been able to show that there is a direct link between a people’s income level and the condition of their environment. The greater the wealth, the better the level of environmental care. On the other hand poor societies put environmental concerns very low on their list priorities, if at all. It is only when people reach a certain level of affluence, that they can afford to start worrying about the environment.¶ ¶ The second strand of evidence is derived from comparing the state of the environment in the developed world with the state of the environment in the developing world. The four greatest environmental issues are air pollution, water pollution, de-afforestation and population growth. The developed world is well on top of controlling these problems. The air of its cities is improving. It does not lose millions of children every year to polluted water, nor just as many to dung smoke and wood smoke as the developing world does. The forests of most of the developed world have expanded enormously over the last 50 years, but de-afforestation continues to be of concern in the developing world. Population has stabilized in the developed world, but remains a concern in the developing world.¶ ¶ The conclusion from all this is inescapable: the only way to rid the world of its greatest environmental problems is to get rid of poverty by promoting development and economic growth.

Environment/Human Well-BeingEconomic development is good for the environment.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/16/best_decade_ever?page=full

Goklany, 7 (Indur M, Foreign Affairs, November/December 2007, “Better Lives?,”

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/63023/indur-m-goklany/better-lives)

I am pleased that in his review of my book The Improving State of the World: Why We're Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet ("Better and Better," July/August 2007), James Surowiecki agrees that from a historical perspective the state of the world has improved. However, I am disappointed that he missed some of my most important points -- as evidenced in particular by his claim that I believe progress is "inevitable." Nothing could be further from my views. I note on page 110 of my book, "Because economic growth and technological change are not inevitable, environmental cleanup and environmental transitions are, likewise, not a foregone conclusion." I reemphasize this point at other places, and the book

ends with these words: "But technology is not enough; we also need economic development. Although there are no guarantees, acting together, they -- more than anything else -- offer the best hope for technological progress, without which we cannot expand current limits to growth."¶ Surowiecki also claims that under my environmental transition hypothesis, environmental cleanup happens "naturally." He argues that such cleanup is not the "inevitable product of a strong economy" and may not occur without "a strong state that is accountable to its citizens." I say as much in my exposition of the hypothesis.

I note that one reason for the environmental transition that leads to cleanup is that "a democratic society, because it

has the political means to do so, will translate its desire for a cleaner environment into laws,

either because cleanup is not voluntary or rapid enough, or because of sheer symbolism. The wealthier such a society, the more affordable -- and more demanding -- its laws."¶ Surowiecki also declares that my own evidence shows that emissions of many air pollutants peaked around 1970, after that year's Clean Air Act was passed, and that afterward rivers and lakes became more swimmable and fishable. But this law was enacted after major gains in reducing the public health impacts of air and water pollution had already been secured; these laws did not accelerate improvements in environmental quality. Moreover, emissions are not the best measure of the impacts of air pollution, especially with regard to public health. That is why the Environmental Protection Agency's national ambient air quality standards, which specify whether outdoor air quality is in the healthy range, are measured in terms of concentrations of pollutants in the outdoor air, rather than emissions. Long-term data indicate that for the most significant pollutants, major improvements in outdoor and indoor air quality preceded the

1970 Clean Air Act.¶ Regarding water pollution, I note that federal laws did indeed improve fishability and

swimmability, but deaths due to water-related diseases had been reduced by 98-100 percent between 1900 and 1970, before the enactment of the Clean Water Act of 1972 and the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. Although the 1970s environmental laws did bring some benefits, some of the most significant cleanup had occurred before they took effect, and their "command-and-control" regulatory approach cost more than more flexible approaches (such as emissions trading or environmental taxes) would have.¶ Finally, I would dispute Surowiecki's characterization of me as a "wide-eyed" optimist. I am

no more convinced than he is about the inevitability of progress. Economic and technological progress are valuable because they advance environmental and human well-being. Unfortunately, they are not inevitable.

Tech21st century tech advances in medicine and governance reduce poverty, disease, war, growth and quality of life

Beauchamp, B.A.s in Philosophy and Political Science from Brown University and an

M.Sc in International Relations from the London School of Economics, 2013 (Zack, ThinkProgress, “5 Reasons Why 2013 Was The Best Year In Human History,” 12/11/2013, http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/12/11/3036671/2013-certainly-year-human-history/, accessed 8/4/14 bh@ddi)

The greatest story in recent human history is the simplest: we’re winning the fight against death. “There is not a single country in the world where infant or child mortality today is not lower than it was in 1950,” writes Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist who works on global health issues. The most up-to-date numbers on global health, the 2013 World Health Organization (WHO) statistical compendium, confirm Deaton’s estimation. Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of children who died before

their fifth birthday dropped by almost half. Measles deaths declined by 71 percent, and both tuberculosis and maternal deaths by half again. HIV, that modern plague, is also being held back, with deaths from AIDS-related illnesses down by 24 percent since 2005. In short, fewer people are dying untimely deaths. And that’s not only true in rich countries: life expectancy has gone up between 1990 and 2011 in every WHO income bracket. The gains are even more dramatic if you take the long view: global life expectancy was 47 in the early 1950s, but had risen to 70 — a 50 percent jump — by 2011. For even more perspective, the average Briton in 1850 — when the British Empire had reached its apex — was 40. The average person today should expect to live almost twice as long as the average citizen of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful country in 1850. In real terms, this means millions of fewer dead adults and children a year, millions fewer people who spend their lives suffering the pains and unfreedoms imposed by illness, and millions more people spending their twilight years with loved ones. And the trends are all positive — “progress has accelerated in recent years

in many countries with the highest rates of mortality,” as the WHO rather bloodlessly put it. What’s going on? Obviously, it’s fairly

complicated, but the most important drivers have been technological and political innovation. The Enlightenment-era advances in the scientific method got people doing high-quality research, which brought us modern medicine and the

information technologies that allow us to spread medical breakthroughs around the world at increasingly faster rates. Scientific discoveries also fueled the Industrial Revolution and the birth of modern capitalism, giving us more resources to devote to large-

scale application of live-saving technologies. And the global spread of liberal democracy made governments accountable to citizens, forcing them to attend to their health needs or pay the electoral price. We’ll see the enormously beneficial impact of these two forces, technology and democracy, repeatedly throughout this list, which should tell you something about the foundations of human progress. But when talking about improvements in health, we shouldn’t neglect foreign aid. Nations donating huge amounts of money out of an altruistic interest in the welfare of foreigners is historically unprecedented, and while not all aid has been helpful, health aid has been a huge boon. Even Deaton, who wrote one of 2013′s harshest assessments of foreign aid, believes “the case for assistance to fight disease such as HIV/AIDS or smallpox is strong.” That’s because these programs have demonstrably saved lives — the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a 2003 program pushed by President Bush, paid for anti-retroviral treatment for over 5.1 million people in the poor countries hardest-hit by the AIDS epidemic. So we’re outracing the Four Horseman, extending our lives faster than pestilence, war, famine, and death can take them. That alone should be enough to say the world is getting better. 2. Fewer people suffer from extreme poverty, and the world is getting happier. APTOPIX

India Maha Kumbh CREDIT: SAURABH DAS/AP PHOTO There are fewer people in abject penury than at any other point in human history, and middle class people enjoy their highest standard of living ever. We haven’t come close to solving poverty: a number of African countries in particular have chronic problems

generating growth, a nut foreign aid hasn’t yet cracked. So this isn’t a call for complacency about poverty any more

than acknowledging victories over disease is an argument against tackling malaria. But make no mistake: as a whole, the world is much richer in 2013 than it was before. 721 million fewer people lived in extreme poverty ($1.25 a

day) in 2010 than in 1981, according to a new World Bank study from October. That’s astounding — a decline from 40 to about 14 percent of the world’s population suffering from abject want. And poverty rates are declining in every national income bracket: even in low income countries, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty ($1.25 a day in 2005 dollars) a day gone down from 63 in 1981 to 44 in 2010. We can be fairly confident that these trends are continuing. For one thing, they survived the Great Recession in 2008. For another, the decline in poverty has been fueled by global economic growth, which looks to be continuing: global GDP grew by 2.3 percent in 2012, a number that’ll rise to 2.9 percent in 2013 according to IMF projections. The bulk of the recent decline in poverty comes form India and China — about 80 percent from China *alone*. Chinese economic and social reform, a delayed reaction to the mass slaughter and starvation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, has been the engine of poverty’s global decline. If you subtract China, there are actually more poor people today than there were in

1981 (population growth trumping the percentage declines in poverty). But we shouldn’t discount China. If what we care about is fewer people suffering the misery of poverty, then it shouldn’t matter what nation the less-poor people call home. Chinese growth should be celebrated, not shunted aside. The poor haven’t been the only people benefitting from global growth. Middle class people have access to an ever-greater stock of life-improving goods. Televisions and refrigerators, once luxury goods, are now comparatively cheap and commonplace. That’s why large-percentage improvements in a nation’s GDP appear to correlate strongly with higher levels of happiness among the nation’s citizens; people like

having things that make their lives easier and more worry-free. Global economic growth in the past five decades has dramatically reduced poverty and made people around the world happier. Once again, we’re better off. 3. War is becoming rarer and less deadly. APTOPIX Mideast Libya CREDIT: AP PHOTO/ MANU BRABO Another massive conflict could overturn the global progress against disease and poverty. But it appears war, too, may be losing its fangs. Steven Pinker’s 2011 book The Better Angels Of Our Nature is the gold standard in this debate. Pinker brought a treasure trove of data to bear on the question of whether the world has gotten more peaceful, and found that, in the long arc of human history, both war and other forms of violence (the death penalty, for instance) are on a centuries-long downward slope. Pinker summarizes his argument here if you don’t own the book. Most eye-popping are the numbers for the past 50 years; Pinker finds that “the worldwide rate of death from interstate and civil war combined has juddered downward…from almost 300 per 100,000 world population during World War II, to almost 30 during the Korean War, to the low teens during the era of the Vietnam War, to single digits in the 1970s and 1980s, to less than 1 in the twenty-first century.” Here’s what that looks like graphed: Pinker

CREDIT: STEVEN PINKER/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL So it looks like the smallest percentage of humans alive since World War II, and in all likelihood in human history, are living through the horrors of war. Did 2013 give us any reason to believe that Pinker and the other scholars who agree with him have been proven wrong? Probably not. The academic debate over the decline of war really exploded in 2013, but the “declinist” thesis has fared pretty well. Challenges to Pinker’s conclusion that battle deaths have gone down over time have not withstood scrutiny. The most compelling critique, a new paper by Bear F. Braumoeller, argues that if you control for the larger number of countries in the last 50 years, war happens at roughly the same rates as it has historically. There are lots of things you might say about Braumoeller’s argument, and I’ve asked Pinker for his two cents (update: Pinker’s response here). But most importantly, if battle deaths per 100,000 people really has declined, then his argument doesn’t mean very much. If (percentage-wise) fewer people are dying from war, then what we call “war” now is a lot less deadly than “war” used to be. Braumoeller suggests population growth and improvements in battle medicine explain the decline, but that’s not convincing: tell me with a straight face that the only differences in deadliness between World War II, Vietnam, and the wars you see today is that there are more people and better doctors. There’s a more rigorous way of putting that: today,

we see many more civil wars than we do wars between nations. The former tend to be less deadly than the latter. That’s why the other major challenge to Pinker’s thesis in 2013, the deepening of the Syrian civil war, isn’t likely to upset the overall trend. Syria’s war is an unimaginable tragedy, one responsible for the rare, depressing increase in battle deaths from 2011 to 2012. However, the overall 2011-2012 trend “fits well with the observed long-term decline in battle deaths,” according to researchers at the authoritative Uppsala Conflict Data Program, because the uptick is not enough to suggest an overall change in trend. We should expect something similar when the 2013 numbers are published. Why are smaller and smaller percentages of people being exposed to the horrors of war? There are lots of reasons one could point to, but two of the biggest ones are the spread of democracy and humans getting, for lack of a better word, better. That democracies never, or almost never, go to war with each other is not seriously in dispute: the statistical evidence is ridiculously strong. While some argue that the “democratic peace,” as it’s called, is caused by things other than democracy itself, there’s good experimental evidence that democratic leaders and citizens just don’t want to fight each other. Since 1950, democracy has spread around the world like wildfire. There were only a handful of democracies after World War II, but that grew to roughly 40 percent of all by the end of the Cold War. Today, a comfortable majority — about 60 percent — of all states are democracies. This freer world is also a safer one. Second — and this is Pinker’s preferred explanation — people have developed strategies for dealing with war’s causes and consequences. “Human ingenuity and experience have gradually been brought to bear,” Pinker writes, “just as they have chipped away at hunger and disease.” A series of human inventions, things like U.N. peacekeeping operations, which nowadays are very successful at reducing violence, have given us a set of social tools

increasingly well suited to reducing the harm caused by armed conflict. War’s decline isn’t accidental, in other words. It’s by design. 4. Rates of murder and other violent crimes are in free-fall. Britain Unrest CREDIT: AKIRA SUEMORI/AP PHOTOS Pinker’s trend against violence isn’t limited just to war. It seems likes crimes, both of the sort states commit against their citizens and citizens commit against each other, are also on the decline. Take a few examples. Slavery, once commonly sanctioned by governments, is illegal everywhere on earth.

The use of torture as legal punishment has gone down dramatically. The European murder rate fell 35-fold from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the 20th century (check out this amazing 2003 paper from Michael Eisner, who dredged up medieval records to estimate European homicide rates in the swords-and-chivalry era, if you don’t believe me).

The decline has been especially marked in recent years. Though homicide crime rates climbed back up from their historic lows

between the 1970s and 1990s, reversing progress made since the late 19th century, they have collapsed worldwide in the 21st century. 557,000 people were murdered in 2001 — almost three times as many as were killed in war that year. In 2008, that number was 289,000, and the homicide rate has been declining in 75 percent of nations since then.

AT MS Globalization from Below

Empirically, globalization reduces inequality - countries rejecting economic integration are the cause of inequalityDollar 14 David Dollar, Former World Bank Country Director, China and Mongolia 2014

Making Globalization Work for the Poor http://live.worldbank.org/making-globalization-work-poor

It is true that corporations everywhere focus on maximizing profits. It is important to have a strong framework of laws and regulations if that profit-seeking is to produce social benefits. I do not accept that the tendency of globalization is to widen the gap between the rich and the poor. The fastest growing incomes in the world are in the developing countries, indicating that integration can be a powerful force for development that reduces worldwide inequality. The tendency toward inequality in the world today comes from the fact that about half of the developing world population lives in countries that are successfully integrating and catching up with the rich world, while half of the population lives in countries that are largely outside of globalization. Does the poor performance of Argentina, much of Sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan, Myanmar, and other countries result from their integration with the world economy or from their own poor governance? I think the evidence supports the latter.

Globalization increases environmental protectionDollar 14 David Dollar, Former World Bank Country Director, China and Mongolia 2014

Making Globalization Work for the Poor http://live.worldbank.org/making-globalization-work-poor

The most successful developing countries in the era of globalization - China, India, Chile, Uganda, Morocco, to name a few in different parts of the world - have not reduced environmental standards. Actually, most of them have increased environmental regulation over the past decade. There is no evidence that investment is attracted to dirty, polluted places - just the opposite. Integration can increase the economic pressure to deplete resources such as forests and fisheries, so it is important to complement openness with strong environmental regulation. The most globalized countries in the world (Netherlands, Singapore) have strong environmental regulation so clearly there is no necessary contradiction.

Globalization reduces poverty and does not increase inequalityDollar 14 David Dollar, Former World Bank Country Director, China and Mongolia 2014

Making Globalization Work for the Poor http://live.worldbank.org/making-globalization-work-poor

Globalization is about economic and social integration among countries. In the past 20 years the developing countries that have integrated the most with the global economy have seen the fastest growth rates and poverty reduction. Vietnam is a good example - it cut poverty in half in a decade. Integration raised the prices for the products of poor farmers - rice, fish, cashews - and also created large numbers of factory jobs in footwear and garments, jobs that paid a lot more than existing opportunities in Vietnam. It is not true in general that globalization leads to increased inequality within countries. In Vietnam there was no change is the distribution of income during its opening. There are countries where inequality has gone up, but also ones where it has gone down. While integration creates potential opportunities, poor people cannot take advantage of these unless they have education and access to assets such as land and credit. Many poor people are left out of globalization because their governments are not providing these basic services.

Bottom up destroys the environment – the poor are so economically desperate that they don't care about the environment; economic growth is the solutionNangammbi 7 Dianah Nangammbi, Cilla CSIR 3/05/2007 Conservation Biologuy POVERTY INFLUENCES ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION http://bcb706.blogspot.com/2007/03/poverty-influences-environmental.html

Poverty is considered as a great influence of environmental degradation. In many regions of the world, regional overgrazing has resulted in destruction of grazing lands, forest and soil. Air and water have been degraded [5]. The carrying capacity of the natural environment has been reduced. As the people become poorer, they destroy the resources faster [5]. They tend to overuse the natural resources because they don’t have anything to eat or any means of getting money except through the natural resources, they start to depend more on natural resources.

Poor people harvest natural resources for their survival or in order to meet their basic needs such as firewood, agricultural productions (such as maize), and water and wild plants for their medicine. All people regardless of being poor or rich depend on natural resources; the concern with poor people is that they are utilizing the resources directly. The rich people do depend on these resource but they do not go to the forest directly and harvest the resources.

Due to the lack of sufficient income people start to use and overuse every resource available to them when their survival is at stake. As desperate hunger leads to desperate strategies for survival, many trees are harvested for fire wood, timber and art craft. Most of the poor people use this fire wood as their source of income by selling them, and art craft products are also used for income generation. The roots of the trees are dug out for medicinal purpose. This leaves the soil exposed as the grasses are also grazed by animals and also collected for roofing the houses. When it rains the entire top and good soil are eroded which makes it difficult for that soil to produce better agricultural products.

Poor people often lack sufficient income and education to afford higher quality life where they can use electricity and also buy electric appliances to ease their domestic life. Instead of cutting trees for fire wood they can use electric stoves for cooking. They can also use electric heaters to warm themselves during winter month. Electricity can also slow down the firewood business as most people will no longer be relying on firewood as it takes time to prepare the fire using wood than just switching on the electricity. The use of electricity will make their lives simpler because it will save time, they won’t go

to the field to fetch wood. The chances of been bitten by a snake or get injured are high when they are in field.

They have no quality drinking water as they pollute the rivers by washing inside them and by also using a river as a dumping site for the bins. The lack of education also prohibits them from practicing environmentally sustainable agriculture; protect natural resources against degradation or rehabilitate degraded resources like rivers [6]

In the poorest regions it is estimated that one in five children will not live to see the fifth birthday due to environment-related diseases [7]. Statistics show that almost four million children are dying each year because of acute respiratory infection linked to indoor and out-door air pollution [7]. Other environment-related diseases killing the children are diarrhoea caused by lack of clean water and sanitation and also cholera, malaria and asthma [7].

The better solution which can rescue both the environment and poor people is through the government by increasing the rate of job creation for poor people. If they have jobs they can afford higher quality life which includes affording electricity, they can also afford nice roofing materials instead of using grasses and they can have somewhere to wake up to instead of harvesting the natural resources everyday. Many of poor people are very skilled in a way that a government can build a huge art and craft and timber structures where these people can be employed and still practice their art but in a professional way where the harvesting of plants can be done sustainably.

The government can export these products to other countries where a lot of money can be generated.

Some can also work in guarding the natural environment from culprits. Others can be employed only for harvesting the natural resources for different purposes like medicinal, art and craft, timber, fire wood etc under the supervision of ecologists. This can help in keeping the poor people busy, they will be earning a stable and reliable salary which will keep them away from the natural resources, and after all it will be difficult to access the resources as a close eye will always be kept on them.

Growth Good

PovertyPoverty happens because of low economic growth not unequal wealth distribution Lingle, Global Strategist for eConoLytics.com and author of The Rise and Decline of the

Asian Century and writer for Economic Times, 2002 (Christopher, Centre for Civil Society, “Blame it all on socialism,” April 2nd, 2002,http://ccs.in/blame-it-all-socialism, accessed

8/5/14 bh@ddi) The truth is that India's greatest problems arise from a political culture guided by socialist instincts. Diehard socialists proclaim that their dogma

reinforces certain civic virtues. A presumed merit of socialism is that it aims to nurture a greater sense of collective identity by suppressing the narrow self-interest of individuals. However, this aspect of socialism

lies at the heart of its failure both as a political tool as well as the basis for economic policy. This is because socialism provides the political mechanism for and legitimacy by which people identify themselves as members of groups. While it may suit the socialist agenda to create 'them-and-us' scenarios relating to workers and capitalists or peasants and urban dwellers, this logic is readily converted to other types of divisions. Asserting group rights over individual rights can lead to various injustices. In the case of India's socialist state, competition for power has increasingly become identified with religiosity or ethnicity. Political parties based upon religion are inevitably exclusionary. These narrow concepts of identity work against nation building since such political arrangement cannot accommodate universalist values. Socialism also sets the stage for populist promises of taking from one group to support another. And so it is that socialist ideology provided the beginnings of a political culture that has evolved into a sectarian populism that have wrought cycles of communal violence. Populism with its solicitations of political patronage, whether based upon nationalism or some other ploy, is also open to corruption. Like its evil twin populism, socialism creates false expectations among the poor that cannot be fulfilled. Suggestions that poverty can be decreased or that social justice served by taking away from the rich or by passing laws to raise wages misleads the poor into believing that their condition can and

should be legislated away. In response, the poor demand to be given ever more as a right arising from group identity. By promoting the misleading idea that income and wealth redistribution can reduce poverty, socialism ignores the fact that poverty arises from low economic growth and insufficient capital formation. As in most emerging market economies, India has too many policies that hinder private investments. One of the lessons of the

global economy is that only private initiatives can create sustainable economic growth and employment. Long-term investments by entrepreneurs are stunted by capricious actions of governments. Instead of listening to socialist denunciations of globalisation, poverty-stricken citizens around the world should realise that their economies suffer from failures of governance. Poor policy decisions are being made within a defective 'institutional infrastructure'. At issue is nothing less than the role of the state. Should the Indian state be used as a mechanism to protect the freedoms and rights of individuals living under a general law with shared allegiance to a secular state? Or should the state be a vehicle for groups to gain power who use it to further their own narrow ends? It should be clear the latter approach would lead to the destruction of India's democracy while the former will allow it to survive. It is undeniable that public policy based upon socialism has promoted divisions that contributed to social instability and economic destruction. This dangerous game has only served the

narrow interests of those who seek to capture or preserve political power. Socialism has wrought slower economic growth that harmed the poor and unskilled who lost access to economic opportunities. It also introduced forces that are destroying India's hard-earned democracy. A paradigm shift in the nature of Indian politics is needed whereby the state ceases serving as a mechanism for groups to gain power and becomes an instrument to secure rights and freedoms for individuals.

Environment Economic growth solves the environment—it’s not just about consumerism, but maintaining wellness factors like a healthy environment Kloor, freelance journalist and professor of journalism @ NYU, 2012

(Kieth, Discover Magazine, “The Limits to Environmentalism,” April 27th, 2012, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2012/04/27/the-limits-to-environmentalism/

#.U-F-ivldUoO, accessed 8-5-14 bh@ddi)

“Pro-technology, pro-city, pro-growth, the green modernist has emerged in recent years to advance an alternative

vision for the future. His mission is to remake environmentalism: Strip it of outdated mythologies and dogmas, make it less apocalyptic and more optimistic, broaden its constituency. In this vision, the Anthropocene is not something to rail against, but to embrace. It is about welcoming that world, not dreading it. It is about creating a future that environmentalists will help shape for the better.” The piece seemed to strike a chord. It was pinged around a lot on Twitter and generated some heated micro-conversations. A number of people said it was a breath of fresh air. Plenty others were critical. Some complained that I set up a false dichotomy, that I painted a simplistic, cartoonish picture of the green traditionalist, and that it was unfair to the many grassroots greens working at a local level, who have embraced technological and pro-market solutions. I can’t speak to that last charge, since my post was written on a large canvass, with environmentalism’s representative voices—the leading writers, scientists, and big NGO’s—in mind. Collectively, these are the driving forces that shape attitudes, public discourse, green politics and policy. If you pay close enough attention to media stories, what is said by mainstream green groups, and of course to big splashy reports put out by esteemed institutions like the Royal Society, you will notice that the beating heart of environmentalism belongs to the traditionalist, as I have characterized him/her. For example, let’s look at Worldwatch Institute’s 2012 State of the Earth, in a chapter titled, “The path to degrowth in overdeveloped countries.” I’m assuming this path is suggested for nations such as the United States, whose citizens are fond of big cars, big box stores, and Big Gulps at the 7/11. Though Americans are still recovering from the worldwide economic meltdown, here’s how the Worldwatch Institute aims to win them over: “The rapidly warming Earth and the collapse of ecosystem services show that economic “degrowth” in overdeveloped countries is essential and urgent. Degrowth is the intentional contraction of overly inflated economies and the dispelling of the myth that perpetual pursuit of growth

is good for economies or the societies of which they are a part.” Yes, mainstream greens are actually running on a platform of intentional economic contraction. Now, you might say, well, that’s just one environmental group. Fair enough. Let’s go to this manifesto by James Gustave Speth, in a recent issue of Orion magazine. Speth has been a leading American environmentalist for decades. He is the founder of the World Resources Institute, a co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council and currently on the faculty at Vermont law school. In his Orion essay, he writes: “Economic growth may be the world’s secular religion, but for much of the world it is a god that is failing—underperforming for most of the world’s people and, for those in affluent societies, now creating more problems than it is solving. The never-ending drive to grow the overall U.S. economy undermines families and communities; it is leading us to environmental calamity; it fuels a ruthless international search for energy and other resources; it fails at generating the needed jobs; and it rests on a manufactured consumerism that is not meeting our deepest human needs.” To understand why this is a pinched view of

economic growth that also conflates a number of legitimate issues, read this piece by Robert Reich. In truth, he writes, “economic growth isn’t just about more stuff. Growth is different from consumerism. Growth is really about the capacity of a nation to produce everything that’s wanted and needed by its inhabitants. That includes better stewardship of the environment as well as improved public health and better schools. (The Gross Domestic Product is a crude way of gauging this but it’s a guide. Nations with high

and growing GDPs have more overall capacity; those with low or slowing GDPs have less.)” Poor countries tend to be more polluted than richer ones, Reich says, “because they don’t have the capacity both to keep their people fed and clothed and also to keep their land, air and water clean.” Oh, and by the way, Reich is a longtime liberal luminary and currently a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkley.

Environmental harm is only solved by regulated markets—the alternative to unenforced property rights in the tragedy of the commons DiLorenzo, economics professor at Loyola University Maryland, 1992

(Thomas J., Foundation of Economic Education, “Why Socialism Causes Pollution,” March 1,

1992, http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/why-socialism-causes-pollution, accessed 8-5-2014 bh@ddi)

The last refuge of those who advocate socialistic solutions to environmental pollution is the claim that it is the lack of democratic processes that prevents the Communist nations from truly serving the public interest. If this theory is correct, then the public sector of an established

democracy such as the United States should be one of the best examples of environmental responsibility. But U.S. government agencies are among the most cavalier when it comes to environmental stewardship. There is much evidence to dispute the theory that only private businesses pollute. In the United States, we need look no further than our own government agencies. These public sector institutions, such as the Department of Defense (DOD), are among the worst offenders. DOD now generates more than 400,000 tons of hazardous waste a year — more than is produced by the five largest

chemical companies combined. To make matters worse, the Environmental Protection Agency lacks the enforcement power over the public sector that it possesses over the private sector. The lax situation uncovered by the General Accounting Office (GAO) at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma is typical of the way in which many Federal agencies respond to the EPA’s directives. "Although DOD policy calls for the military services to … implement EPA’s hazardous waste management regulations, we found that Tinker has been selling…waste oil, fuels, and solvents rather than recycling," reported the GAO. One of the world’s most poisonous spots lies about 10 miles northeast of Denver in the Army’s Rocky Mountain Arsenal. Nerve gas, mustard shells, the anti-crop spray TX, and incendiary devices have been dumped into pits there over the past 40 years. Dealing with only one "basin" of this dump cost $40 million. Six hundred thousand cubic yards of contaminated soil and sludge had to be scraped and entombed in a 16-acre, double-lined waste pile. There are plenty of other examples of Defense Department facilities that need major cleanup. In fact, total costs of along-term Pentagon cleanup are hard to get a handle on. Some officials have conceded that the price tag could eventually exceed $20 billion.

Government-owned power plants are another example of public-sector pollution. These plants are a large source of sulfur dioxide emissions. The federal government’s Tennessee Valley Authority operates 59 coal-fired power plants in the Southeast, where it has had major legal confrontations with state governments who want the Federal agency to comply with state governments who want the Federal agency to comply with state environmental regulations. The TVA has fought the state governments for years over compliance with their clean air standards. It won a major Supreme Court victory when the Court ruled that, as a federal government enterprise,

it could be exempt from environmental regulations with which private sector and local government power plants must comply. Federal agricultural policy also has been a large source of pollution, in the past encouraging over utilization of land subject to erosion. Powerful farm lobbies have protected "non-point" sources of pollution from the heavy hand of regulation places on other private industries. III. Policy Implications These examples of environmental degradation throughout the world suggest some valuable lessons.

First, it is not free enterprise per se that causes environmental harm; if so, the socialist world would be

environmentally pristine. The heart of the problem lies with the failure of our legal institutions, not the free enterprise system. Specifically, American laws were weakened more than a century ago by Progressive Era courts that believed economic progress was in the public interest and should therefore supersede individual rights. The English common law tradition of the protection of

private property rights — including the right to be free from pollution — was slowly overturned. In other words, many environmental problems are not caused by "market failure" but by government’s failure to enforce property rights. It is a travesty of justice when downstream residents, for example, cannot hold an upstream polluter

responsible for damaging their properties. The common law tradition must be revived if we are to enjoy a healthy market economy and a cleaner environment. Potential polluters must know in advance that they will be held responsible for their actions. The second lesson is that the plundering of the

environment in the socialist world is a grand example of the tragedy of the commons. Under communal property ownership, where no one owns or is responsible for a natural resource, the inclination is for each individual to abuse or deplete the resource before someone else does. Common examples of this "tragedy" are how

people litter public streets and parks much more than their own yards; private housing is much better maintained than public lands but maintain lush pastures on their own property; the national forests are carelessly over-logged, but private forests are carefully managed and reforested by lumber companies with "super trees"; and game fish are habitually overfished in public waterways but thrive in private lakes and streams. The tragedy of the commons is a lesson for those who believe that further nationalization and

governmental control of natural resources is a solution to our environmental problems. These two pillars of free enterprise — sound liability laws that hold people responsible for actions and the enforcement of private property rights — are important stepping stones to environmental protection.

Market economies can identify who is responsible for environmental harm and incentivize change—the answer is regulation not rejection Gongol, WHO Radio of Des Moines, IA and entrepreneur, 2006

(Brain, Gogol.com, “Is socialism good for the environement?,” 2-5-2006, http://www.gongol.com/research/economics/socialismandtheenvironment/, accessed 8/5/14 bh@ddi)

It is sometimes claimed that free markets inevitably corrupt and destroy the environment and that the only way to protect the natural environment is to adopt a socialist economy. However earnest, the argument is categorically wrong. #1. Socialism Has Consistently Failed to

Protect the Environment The argument that "socialism protects the environment" ignores the titanic failure of the evidence. Many of the world's worst and most visible ecological failures happened under socialist, Marxist, or Communist

governments. To wit: The Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the catastrophic air pollution of Eastern Europe's "Black Triangle," and the destruction of the Aral Sea each were specifically caused by socialism and took place under socialist government supervision. #2. Socialism Ignores the Role of Property

Rights Market economies depend upon property rights; clear title to land, resources, and ideas makes it possible to efficiently and easily transfer goods and services between the people who create them and the people who want them. Property rights also make it possible to assign responsibility to individuals for the good and bad results of the things they create. A smokestack, for instance, belongs to someone -- whether a single individual or many individuals who together own a corporation which in turn owns the smokestack. If the smokestack bellows out pollution, private property rights make it very clear that the owners of the smokestack are also the "owners" of the pollution. Socialism suggests that the institution of private ownership is to blame for creating the pollution, rather than identifying that all productive activity creates some form of waste, regardless of the economic or political

system in which it takes place. Campfire smoke, automobile exhaust, and even the waste heat generated by factory workers' bodies are all examples of pollutants that happen regardless of the economic system; market economies, though, insist that the ownership of those "pollutants" belongs to someone. #3. Socialism Lacks the Market Feedback that Discourages Waste Market economies rely on an infinitely complex system of signals and feedback that combine to form the intersection of supply and demand. One set of signals from the supply side is the cost of producing goods and services. Since

a producer generally wants to make the most profit from the least amount of work at the lowest possible expense, it is to the producer's advantage to waste as little as possible. This is why paper companies plant new trees soon after they harvest forests and why trucking companies care about fuel efficiency. Under socialism, the feedback system is disrupted and distorted. #4. Socialist Planning is Plainly Inefficient Planning to produce enough Stuff Socialism assumes that someone or some group of people has the ability to predict and plan for the needs of the many. This kind of omniscience is plainly impossible. Pretend, for instance, that everything that people might need or want can be lumped together in a single category, called "Stuff." In any given planning period, the planner must determine how much Stuff people will want and how much Stuff must be produced. But there will inevitably be some difference between what the planner expects supply and demand for Stuff to be and what actually emerges. Even if the planner is occasionally correct, every deviation from the actual demand for Stuff causes waste -- when too little Stuff is produced to meet demand, people needlessly suffer. When too much Stuff is produced to meet demand, all that extra Stuff represents waste. Even a really, really good planner will be unable to accurately predict the vast fluctuations in day-to-day demand for Stuff, leading to huge amounts of either waste or suffering. Yet this planning function is routinely achieved with great efficiency by the feedback systems of a market economy, in which freely-moving prices effectively tell everyone in the market whether too much or too little of anything is being produced. #5. Socialism Doesn't Encourage the Production of Pollution-Reducing Technologies Just as they offer signals about demand for every other good,

market economies offer signals about the demand for pollution-reducing technologies. If people want cleaner air, markets reveal that preference by signalling demand for things like hybrid-fuel vehicles, wind power, and HEPA air filters. The market rewards those who can deliver clean-air technologies, since they profit from selling what people demand. Socialist economies, on the other hand, aren't known for rewarding those who create pollution-reducing technologies; China, for instance, is trying to curb pollution by mandate, but with limited success. Simultaneously, because the socialist government there can do whatever it wants, it is ejecting 1.2 million people from their homes in order to build a massive

dam. Socialism Isn't the Answer to Environmental Problems Pollution is an inevitable byproduct of human activity; limiting the harm, however, is best done not by shutting down markets, but rather by fixing those occasional market-related problems with light government regulation or incentives. Rejecting market economies because of environmental problems not only throws the baby out with the bathwater, it ignores the plain fact that socialism and other alternatives to markets are categorical environmental failures in their own right.

PermutationThe permutation solves – even if the aff is neoliberal, economic engagement can be repurposed to create new social relations – the permutation turns neoliberal techniques against themselves to create social justiceFerguson, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford, 11

(The Uses of Neoliberalism, Antipode, Vol. 41, No. S1, pp 166–184)

If we are seeking, as this special issue of Antipode aspires to do, to link our critical analyses to the world of grounded political struggle—not only to interpret the world in various ways, but also to change it—then there is much to be said for focusing, as I have here, on mundane, real- world debates around policy and politics, even if doing so inevitably puts us on the compromised and reformist terrain of the possible, rather than the seductive high ground of revolutionary ideals and utopian desires. But I would also insist that there is more at stake in the examples I have discussed here than simply a slightly better way to ameliorate the miseries of the chronically poor, or a technically superior method for relieving the suffering of famine victims.¶ My point in discussing the South African BIG campaign, for instance, is not really to argue for its implementation. There is much in the campaign that is appealing, to be sure. But one can just as easily identify a series of worries that would bring the whole proposal into doubt. Does not, for instance, the decoupling of the question of assistance from the issue of labor, and the associated valorization of the “informal”, help provide a kind of alibi for the failures of the South African regime to pursue policies that would do more to create jobs? Would not the creation of a basic income benefit tied to national citizenship simply exacerbate the vicious xenophobia that already divides the South African poor,¶ in a context where many of the poorest are not citizens, and would thus not be eligible for the BIG? Perhaps even more fundamentally, is the idea of basic income really capable of commanding the mass support that alone could make it a central pillar of a new approach to distribution? The record to date gives powerful reasons to doubt it. So far, the technocrats’ dreams of relieving poverty through efficient cash transfers have attracted little support from actual poor people, who seem to find that vision a bit pale and washed out, compared with the vivid (if vague) populist promises of jobs and personalistic social inclusion long offered by the ANC patronage machine, and lately personified by Jacob Zuma (Ferguson forthcoming).¶ My real interest in the policy proposals discussed here, in fact, has little to do with the narrow policy questions to which they seek to provide answers. For what is most significant, for my purposes, is not whether or not these are good policies, but the way that they illustrate a process through which specific governmental devices and modes of reasoning that we have become used to associating with a very particular (and conservative) political agenda (“neoliberalism”) may be in the process of being peeled away from that agenda, and put to very different uses. Any progressive who takes seriously the challenge I pointed to at the start of this essay, the challenge of developing new progressive arts of government, ought to find this turn of events of considerable interest. ¶ As Steven

Collier (2005) has recently pointed out, it is important to question the assumption that there is, or must be, a neat or automatic fit between a hegemonic “neoliberal” political-economic project (however that might be characterized), on the one hand, and specific “neoliberal” techniques, on the other. Close attention to particular techniques (such as the use of quantitative calculation, free choice, and price driven by supply and demand) in particular settings (in Collier’s case, fiscal and budgetary reform in post-Soviet Russia) shows that the relationship between the technical and the political-economic “is much more polymorphous and unstable than is assumed in much critical geographical work”, and that neoliberal technical mechanisms are in fact “deployed in relation to diverse political projects and social norms” (2005:2).¶ As I suggested in referencing the role of statistics and techniques for pooling risk in the creation of social democratic welfare states, social technologies need not have any essential or eternal loyalty to the political formations within which they were first developed. Insurance rationality at the end of the nineteenth century had no essential vocation to provide security and solidarity to the working class; it was turned to that purpose (in some substantial measure) because it was available, in the right place at the right time, to be appropriated for that use. Specific ways of solving or posing governmental problems, specific institutional and intellectual mechanisms, can be combined in an almost infinite variety of ways, to accomplish different social ends. With social, as with any other sort of technology, it is not the machines or the mechanisms that decide what they will be used to do.¶ Foucault (2008:94) concluded his discussion of socialist government- ality by insisting that the answers to the Left’s governmental problems require not yet another search through our sacred texts, but a process of conceptual and institutional innovation. “[I]f there is a really socialist governmentality, then it is not hidden within socialism and its texts. It cannot be deduced from them. It must be invented”. But invention in the domain of governmental technique is rarely something worked up out of whole cloth. More often, it involves a kind of bricolage (Le vi- Strauss ́�1966), a piecing together of something new out of scavenged parts originally intended for some other purpose. As we pursue such a process of improvisatory invention, we might begin by making an inventory of the parts available for such tinkering, keeping all the while an open mind about how different mechanisms might be put to work, and what kinds of purposes they might serve. If we can go beyond seeing in “neoliberalism” an evil essence or an automatic unity, and instead learn to see a field of specific governmental techniques, we may be surprised to find that some of them can be repurposed, and put to work in the service of political projects very different from those usually associated with that word. If so, we may find that the cabinet of governmental arts available to us is a bit less bare than first appeared, and that some rather useful little mechanisms may be nearer to hand than we thought.

War Stops TransitionEconomic collapse causes global transition wars and xenophobia—destroys any transition

Panzner 8 Michael J. Panzner, faculty at the New York Institute of Finance, 25-year veteran of the global stock, bond, and currency markets who has worked in New York and London for HSBC, Soros Funds, ABN Amro, Dresdner Bank, and JPMorgan Chase, 2008, Financial Armageddon: Protect Your Future from Economic Collapse, Revised and Updated Edition, p. 136-138

Many will wonder whether the United States might renege on some of its financial obligations or even declare an outright default on its once AAA securities. Likely adding to a widespread sense of panic will be the exodus from an array of global fiat currencies into gold, silver, property, and other tangible assets, which can hold

their value in a world of government finances run amok. Needless to say, systemic financial pressures and domino-like bank failures will make preservation of capital the utmost concern .

Rising angst will also wreak havoc with links among markets, financial systems, economies, and countries.

Many people could find themselves subject to stricter government controls or even find avenues closed off as a result of attempts to stem contagion effects. The widespread urge to withdraw will feed rising xenophobia , already inflamed by illegal immigration, unfair trade

practices, and leaking borders. Playing to populist sentiment, politicians around the country will respond enthusiastically to calls for restrictions on foreigners. This will feed a brain drain, as scientists, students, and other temporary visa holders are left with little choice but to uproot and go elsewhere, further sapping America's economic resiliency.

Continuing calls for curbs on the flow of finance and trade will inspire the United States and other nations to spew

forth protectionist legislation like the notorious Smoot-Hawley bill. Introduced at the start of the Great Depression, it triggered a series of tit-for-tat economic responses, which many commentators believe helped turn a serious

economic downturn into a prolonged and devastating global disaster, But if history is any guide, those lessons will have been long forgotten during the next collapse. Eventually, fed by a mood of desperation and

growing public anger, restrictions on trade, finance, investment, and immigration will almost certainly intensify.

Authorities and ordinary citizens will likely scrutinize the cross-border movement of Americans and outsiders alike, and lawmakers may even call for a general crackdown on nonessential travel. Meanwhile, many nations will make transporting or sending funds to other countries exceedingly difficult. As desperate officials try to limit the fallout from decades of ill-conceived, corrupt, and reckless policies, they will introduce controls on foreign exchange, foreign individuals and companies seeking to acquire certain American infrastructure assets, or trying to buy property and other assets on the (heap thanks to a rapidly depreciating dollar, will be stymied by limits on investment by noncitizens. Those efforts will cause spasms to ripple across economies and markets, disrupting global payment, settlement, and clearing mechanisms. All of this will, of course, continue to undermine business confidence and consumer spending.

In a world of lockouts and lockdowns, any link that transmits systemic financial pressures across markets through arbitrage or portfolio-based risk management, or that allows diseases to be easily spread from one country to the next by tourists and wildlife, or that otherwise facilitates unwelcome exchanges of any kind will be viewed with suspicion and dealt with accordingly.

The rise in isolationism and protectionism will bring about ever more heated arguments and

dangerous confrontations over shared sources of oil, gas , and other key commodities as well as factors of

production that must, out of necessity, be acquired from less-than-friendly nations. Whether involving raw materials used in strategic

industries or basic necessities such as food, water, and energy, efforts to secure adequate supplies will take increasing precedence in a world where demand seems constantly out of kilter with supply. Disputes over the misuse, overuse, and pollution of the environment and natural resources will become more commonplace. Around the world, such tensions will give rise to full-scale military encounters, often with minimal provocation.

In some instances, economic conditions will serve as a convenient pretext for conflicts that stem from cultural and religious differences. Alternatively, nations may look to divert attention away from domestic problems by channeling frustration and populist sentiment toward other

countries and cultures. Enabled by cheap technology and the waning threat of American retribution, terrorist groups will likely boost the frequency and scale of their horrifying attacks, bringing the threat of random violence to a whole new level.

Turbulent conditions will encourage aggressive saber rattling and interdictions by rogue nations running amok. Age-old clashes will also take on a new, more healed sense of urgency. China will likely assume a n increasingly belligerent posture toward Taiwan, while Iran may embark on overt colonization of its neighbors in the Mideast. Israel, for its part, may look to draw a dwindling list of allies from around the world into a growing number of conflicts. Some observers, like John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, have even speculated that an

"intense confrontation" between the United States and China is "inevitable" at some point.

More than a few disputes will turn out to be almost wholly ideological. Growing cultural and religious differences will be transformed from wars of words to battles

soaked in blood. Long-simmering resentments could also degenerate quickly, spurring the basest of human instincts

and triggering genocidal acts . Terrorists employing biological or nuclear weapons will vie with conventional forces using jets, cruise missiles, and bunker-busting bombs to cause widespread destruction. Many will interpret stepped-up conflicts between Muslims and Western societies as the beginnings of a new world war.

Transition from neolib causes massive violence – counter-revolutionary interventionsAnderson ‘84

professor of sociology – UCLA,

(Perry, In the tracks of historical materialism, p. 102-103)

That background also indicates, however, what is essentially missing from his work. How are we to get from where we are today to where he point us to tomorrow? There is no answer to this question in Nove. His halting discussion of “transition” tails away into apprehensive admonitions to moderation to the British Labor Party, and pleas for proper compensation to capitalist owners of major industries, if these are to be nationalized. Nowhere is there any sense of what a titanic political change would have to occur, with what fierceness of social struggle, for the economic model of socialism he advocates ever to materialize. Between the radicalism of the future end-state he envisages, and the conservatism of the present measures he is prepared to countenance, there is an unbridgeable abyss. How could private ownership of the means of production ever be abolished by policies less disrespectful of capital than those of Allende or a Benn, which he reproves? What has disappeared from the pages of The Economics of Feasible Socialism is virtually all attention to the historical dynamics of any serious conflict over the control of the means of production, as the record of the 20th century demonstrates them. If capital could visit such destruction on even so poor and small an outlying province of its empire in Vietnam, to prevent its loss, is it likely that it would suffer its extinction meekly in its own homeland? The lessons of the past sixty-five years or so are in this respect without ambiguity or exception, there is no case, from Russia to China, from Vietnam to Cuba, from Chile to Nicaragua, where the existence of capitalism has been challenged, and the furies of intervention, blockade and civil strife have not descended in response. Any viable transition to socialism in the West must seek to curtail that pattern: but to shrink from or to ignore it is to depart from the world of the possible altogether. In the same way, to construct an economic model of socialism in one advanced country is a legitimate exercise: but to extract it from any computable relationship with a surrounding, and necessarily opposing, capitalist environment—as this work does—is to locate it in thin air.

Turn: Attempting to move away from capitalism will cause transitional conflicts that will end in increased domination and unsustainable exploitation. Mark Avrum Gubrud @ the Center for Superconductivity Research, 1997, “Nanotechnology and International Security”, a/online

With molecular manufacturing, international trade in both raw materials and finished goods can be replaced by decentralized production for local consumption, using locally available materials. The decline of international trade will undermine a powerful source of common interest. Further, artificial intelligence will displace skilled as well as unskilled labor. A world system based on wage labor, transnational capitalism and global markets will necessarily give way. We imagine that a golden age is possible, but we don’t know how to organize one. As global capitalism retreats, it will leave behind a world dominated by politics, and possibly feudal concentrations of wealth and power. Economic insecurity, and fears for the material and moral future of humankind may lead to the rise of demagogic and intemperate national leaders. With almost two hundred sovereign nations, each struggling to create a new economic and social order, perhaps the most predictable outcome is chaos: shifting alignments, displaced populations, power struggles, ethnic conflicts inflamed by demagogues, class conflicts, land disputes, etc. Small and underdeveloped nations will be more than ever dependent on the major powers for access to technology, and more than ever vulnerable to sophisticated forms of control or subversion, or to outright domination. Competition among the leading technological powers for the political loyalty of clients might imply reversion to some form of nationalistic imperialism.

Rebelling against neoliberalism inevitably leads to a violent struggle characterized by the struggle to meet basic needs.Ceceña, Professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, 2009(Ana Esther, National Autonomous University of Mexico; Director of the ObservatorioLatinoamericano de Geopolítica and active in the Americas Demilitarisation Campaign, “Postneoliberalism and its bifurcations” Development Dialogue Issue 51, http://rosalux-europa.info/userfiles/file/DD51.pdf#page=35)//CS

Both things have happened after 30 years of neoliberalism. The voraciousness of the market took the appropriation of nature and the dispossession of human beings to the extreme. Territories were ravaged by desertification and their inhabitants driven out. People revolted, and ecological catastrophe, which had reached

an extreme point of irreversibility, started to manifest itself in a violent way. People rebelled against the advance of capitalism, blocking the ways that were taking it towards even greater appropriation. Armed insurgencies impeded access to the rainforest; civil revolts put an end to the building of dams, to intensive mining, to the construction of heavy-load roads, to the privatisation of oil and gas, and to the monopolisation of water. The market, by itself, was not able to defeat those people who were already out of its reach because they had been expelled; and from there, from the non-market, they were struggling for human and natural life, for life’s essential elements, for another relationship with nature, for an end to the pillaging. The end of neoliberalism begins when the extent of dispossession arouses the fury of the people and compels them to burst onto the scene.

Ken Strange AddendumPermutation do the plan and reject capitalism in all other instances. Only the perm guanantees the affirmative advantages. A floating PIC is abusive.

Violent backlash precludes the altAlexander ’12, [Dr. Samuel Alexander is co-director of the Simplicity Institute and a lecturer in ‘Consumerism and Sustainability’ at the Office for Environmental Programs, University of Melbourne. Aug 6, 2012 Degrowth, Expensive Oil, and the New Economics of Energy http://simplicitycollective.com/degrowth-expensive-oil-and-the-new-economics-of-energy]

Needless to say, the powers that be are not willing even to entertain this ‘degrowth’ diagnosis or its radical implications, for it implies establishing fundamentally new economic systems that operate on much lower energy inputs. Empire, we can be sure, will not contemplate self-annihilation; it will struggle for existence all the way down. In much the same vein, consumerist cultures are very unlikely to accept any proposal to voluntarily reduce levels of consumption. Overcoming or dealing with these forms of resistance is the near impossible task that lies before those of us who seek a radically alternative, post-carbon economy (Trainer, 2010b; Heinberg and Leach, 2010; Alexander, 2011c).

Market economies are the only way to effectively allocate resources -- the alternative means mass suffering from resource shortagesGongol 9—owner Gongol.com[Brian, “Is Socialism Good for the Environment?”,http://www.gongol.com/research/economics/socialismandtheenvironment/]RMT

Socialism assumes that someone or some group of people has the ability to predict and plan for the needs of the many. This kind of omniscience is plainly impossible. Pretend, for instance, that everything that

people might need or want can be lumped together in a single category, called "Stuff." In any given planning period, the planner must determine how much Stuff people will want and how much Stuff must be produced. But

there will inevitably be some difference between what the planner expects supply and demand for Stuff to be and what actually emerges. Even if the planner is occasionally correct, every deviation from the actual demand for Stuff causes waste -- when too little Stuff is produced to meet demand, people needlessly suffer. When too much Stuff is produced to meet demand, all that extra Stuff represents waste. Even a really, really good planner will be unable to accurately predict the vast fluctuations in day-to-day demand for Stuff, leading to huge amounts of either waste or suffering. Yet this planning function is routinely achieved with great efficiency by the feedback systems of a market economy, in which freely-moving prices effectively tell everyone in the market whether too much or too little of anything is being produced.

Their indictment of pure capitalism is irrelevant – the political process guarantees regulated capitalism which avoids all of the problems the K claimsNewman ’12, Rick Newman, author of Rebounders: How Winners Pivot From Setback To Success. December 6, 2012 USNEWS.com HEADLINE: Why the Tension Between Socialism and Capitalism Will Intensify lexis

This year's presidential election included many bastardized references to both economic systems, which have been broadly mischaracterized for a long time. Many defenders of capitalism argue that the nation's economic system was more pure a decade ago (or two, or three), but America hasn't had pure capitalism in well over a century. And when it did have a raw form of capitalism, the consequences were often disastrous for significant chunks of the population, which is why public support grew for the kind of [ENJOY: Political Cartoons on the Republican Party] In the 1800s, the federal government largely stayed out of the economy, with nothing like the regulatory apparatus we have now. That's one reason people like Andrew Carnegie, John Jacob Astor, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan built vast fortunes -- often from monopolies or cartels--that still exist in various forms today. But unregulated capitalism also generated speculative bubbles, financial panics and destitution much more frequently than those things have occurred over the last 70 years. P ublic pressure led to a long series of reforms that morphed into the regulated free-market economy we have today. In the early 1900s, Teddy Roosevelt started to break up some of the all-powerful monopolies that enriched a few while overcharging the masses. Congress created the Federal Reserve and the income tax in 1913. A slew of regulatory agencies grew out of the Great Depression. During the 20th century, presidents of both parties signed legislation creating new agencies to oversee food, medicine, the environment and Wall Street (ahem). We still have a capitalist system centered on private ownership and prices set by the free market, but it's layered with rules meant to prevent abuses.

NEXT ARGUMENT IS OPTIONAL

Regulated capitalism –LIKE THE PLAN --avoids the problems of capitalismFoster 9 Nathan Foster SEPTEMBER 14, 2009 Regulated Capitalism vs. Socialism

http://open.salon.com/blog/nathan_foster/2009/09/14/regulated_capitalism_vs_socialism

On the other hand, there is at least a hair-thin distinction between socialism and regulated capitalism. Regulated capitalism, as I envision it, allows for the private ownership of capital, but regulates its use. I'll allow for progressive taxation—the rich can be taxed more than the poor, which is justified based on the idea that the rich really don't have anything important to do with 30% of their money anyway. I'll also allow for trust-busting, as this is a form of regulation.

The only possible argument that regulated capitalism is in fact socialism rests on the assumption that any law or regulation reflects a degree of public control, and therefore, in a sense, regulated capitalism is really some degree of public control of capital. But I think this argument falls apart because I'm speaking of laws which protect the safety of the public, not direct control of capital, and every nation on earth, no matter what system of government or socio-economic system you choose to identify it with, has laws to protect the safety of the public. You therefore can't use such laws to discriminate between different socio-economic systems or systems of government.

That said, I prefer regulated capitalism to socialism for a couple of reasons.

1) Having money and influence is just sweet. I know this sounds silly, but the idea should not be discarded. I think there is real public benefit to having a class of people who have more money than they know what to do with. It shows just how good life gets, and motivates the public to improve their position. It is also, obviously, beneficial to those people who have the money. They get to enjoy life, and I think that's good for everybody.

2) Strict regulation should be enough to prevent abuses of capital. You don't have to resort to public ownership to prevent these abuses.

Regulated capitalism means serial policy success

Brinsmead 11 gender paraphrased Robert D. Brinsmead ‘The Environmental Optimist’ A Series of 20 Short Essays 4-25-11 http://www.greatnewstory.com/home/sustainability/economic/the-environmental-optimist-robert-brinsmead/

3. In practically every measurable indicator, [hu] mankind’s lot has improved and continues to improve. In terms of longevity, infant mortality, nutrition, the cost of food, health and safety, education, leisure time and wealth, most human beings on the planet are better off now than they have ever been in the history of the earth. The human race is even becoming taller.

4. The major environmental problems of the world, like over-population, air and water pollution, loss of forests, poverty, lack of education, poor nutrition and inadequate food, call for critical concern only in developing countries, but even here the progress is impressive. In 1970 the number of people in the world who didn’t get enough to eat was 35%. By 1996 it had dropped by half, and by 2010 the UN expects the figure to drop to 12%. In 1970 only 30% of people in the developing countries had access to good drinking water. In 2000 this figure had risen to 80%. Since 1950 developing countries have tripled their real per capita incomes. They now have the same infant mortality rate and longevity as the developed world had in 1950. There remains, of course, an urgent need to further reduce human misery on all these fronts, but enormous improvements being made give us room for optimism on the basis that things are getting better rather than worse.

Studies proves that capitalism reduces war – the alt makes war 14 times more likelyGartzke, 5 Erik Gartzke, Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, and a member of the SaltzmanInstitute of War and Peace Studies.   2005

Chapter 2: Economic Freedom and Peace               Economic Freedom of the World: 2005 Annual Report            http://www.cato.org/pubs/efw/efw2005/efw2005-2.pdf

The substantive effects of Economic Freedom and the Democracy Score on international disputes can be seen in Figures 2.1 and 2.2, respectively. In both figures, the horizontal axis lists the ordinal scales for the respective explanatory variable (either the Index of Economic Freedom or the Polity Democracy Index), while the vertical axis reports the probability of a MID in a given year for states with a given level of either of the two explanatory variables. The solid line sloping down and to the right in Figure

2.1 is the relationship between Economic Freedom and militarized disputes, as estimated by the regression in Table 2.1. In Figure 2.2, the effect of the Democracy Score variable on conflict also appears as a solid line, which slopes slightly down and to the right. In Figure 2.1, the two light dashed lines that appear to run in parallel above and below the line for Economic Freedom represent confidence intervals. Ninety-five percent of all the solid lines estimated from regressions on similar data would be contained within the interval bounded by the two dashed lines. In other words, the relationship depicted in the figure between Economic Freedom and an absence of militarized violence is very likely to be at least approximately correct.

As can be seen from the figure, the impact of free markets and limited government is substantial. The least free states have about a 7% chance of experiencing a dispute, while the freest states experience disputes in only about half of 1% of the years examined. Making economies freer translates into making countries more peaceful. At the extremes, the least free states are about 14 times as conflict prone as the most free.

Empirically, capitalism reduces absolute povertyKlein 12 Joe Klein Dec. 03, 2012 Time Magazine Campaign 2012: The Report Card

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2129804,00.html

I checked the dictionary. And socialism languishes there, just as it always has: "a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state." Is that what 49% of young people favor? I don't think so. If it is, count me on Bennett's team. That sort of socialism has been an utter failure, and regulated capitalism has been the greatest eradicator of poverty in the history of the world. But I suspect--and this would be wonderfully ironic, if true--that all those blacks and young people got their definition of socialism from Rush Limbaugh and the other wing-nut foghorns: socialism is when the government helps people out.

What we've decided in this election is that most people are comfortable with a regulated free-enterprise system in which the government helps provide education and health care for everyone and financial support for those who need it most, especially the elderly. What we'll continue to debate is how extensive those regulations and supports should be. But there is no question--except in the minds of the deluded--that any of our truly basic freedoms, especially the freedom to make money, are threatened in any significant way. In the real world, there is less drama to all this than meets the eye. Lessons have been learned. I remain optimistic that the professional politicians who lead the Republican Party will find a way to close a budget deal long before we reach a cliff, since they know they'll be blamed by a voting majority of Americans for any impasse.

Empirically, globalization reduces inequality - countries rejecting capitalism are the cause of inequalityDollar 14 David Dollar, Former World Bank Country Director, China and Mongolia 2014

Making Globalization Work for the Poor http://live.worldbank.org/making-globalization-work-poor

It is true that corporations everywhere focus on maximizing profits. It is important to have a strong framework of laws and regulations if that profit-seeking is to produce social benefits. I do not accept that the tendency of globalization is to widen the gap between the rich and

the poor. The fastest growing incomes in the world are in the developing countries, indicating that integration can be a powerful force for development that reduces worldwide inequality. The tendency toward inequality in the world today comes from the fact that about half of the developing world population lives in countries that are successfully integrating and catching up with the rich world, while half of the population lives in countries that are largely outside of globalization. Does the poor performance of Argentina, much of Sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan, Myanmar, and other countries result from their integration with the world economy or from their own poor governance? I think the evidence supports the

Empirically, capitalism is better for the environmentGongol 6 Brian Gongol 2.5.2006 Is Socialism Good for the Environment?

http://www.gongol.com/research/economics/socialismandtheenvironment/

It is sometimes claimed that free markets inevitably corrupt and destroy the environment and that the only way to protect the natural environment is to adopt a socialist economy. However earnest, the argument is categorically wrong . #1. Socialism Has Consistently Failed to Protect the Environment The argument that "socialism protects the environment" ignores the titanic failure of the evidence. Many of the world's worst and most visible ecological failures happened under socialist, Marxist, or Communist governments. To wit: The Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the catastrophic air pollution of Eastern Europe's "Black Triangle," and the destruction of the Aral Sea each were specifically caused by socialism and took place under socialist government supervision.

Capitalism's economic growth is key to environmentalism Taylor 3 Jerry Taylor, director of natural resource studies at the Cato Institute. April 23, 2003

Happy Earth Day? Thank Capitalism This article was published in the New York Sun, April 22, 2003. http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3073

Earth Day (April 22) is traditionally a day for the Left -- a celebration of government's ability to deliver the environmental goods and for threats about the parade of horribles that will descend upon us lest we rededicate ourselves to federal regulators and public land managers. This is unfortunate because it's businessmen -- not bureaucrats or environmental activists -- who deserve most of the credit for the environmental gains over the past century and who represent the best hope for a Greener tomorrow.

Indeed, we wouldn't even have environmentalists in our midst were it not for capitalism. Environmental amenities, after all, are luxury goods. America -- like much of the Third World today -- had no environmental movement to speak of until living standards rose sufficiently so that we could turn our attention from simply

Market mechanisms promote environmentalismAdler 5 - JONATHAN ADLER Prof. of environmental law at Case Western, writes for the Case research series: [“Back to the Future of Conservation: Changing Perceptions of Property Rights & Environmental Protection” Case Research Paper Series in Legal Studies Working Paper 05-16, July 2005]

The problem with the dominant approach to environmental policy is its reliance upon centralized political mechanisms. The limitations of such mechanisms-whether regulations, fiscal instruments, or direct management of environmental resources-hamper the effectiveness of existing environmental programs. As environmental problems become ever more complex, these limitations will only become more severe. The answer is not greater government control or manipulation of the marketplace, but a greater reliance upon property rights and voluntary arrangements. By encouraging a more efficient use of resources, responsible stewardship, and technological innovation, property rights in environmental resources provide a sounder foundation for the advancement of environmental values than the modem regulatory state.¶ Property-based environmental protection- commonly referred to as "free market environmentalism" 60 or "FME"- rejects the "market failure" model. "Rather than viewing the world in terms of market failure, we should view the problem of externalities as a failure to permit markets and create markets where they do not yet - or no longer - exist." 61 Where environmental problems are most severe it is typically a lack of markets, in particular a lack of enforceable and exchangeable property rights, that is to blame. Resources that are privately owned or managed and therefore are incorporated into market institutions are typically well-maintained. Environmental problems, therefore, are "essentially property rights problems" which are solved by the extension, definition, and defense of property rights in environmental resources. 62¶ Resources that are unowned or politically controlled, on the other hand, are more apt to be inadequately managed. In his seminal essay on the [a] "tragedy of the commons," Garrett Hardin gave an illustration of this principle, stating that there is no incentive for any individual to protect the commonly owned grazing pasture in a rural village. Indeed, it is in every shepherd's self-interest to have his herd overgraze the pasture and before any other herd. Every shepherd who acquires additional livestock gains the benefits of a larger herd, while the cost of overusing the pasture is spread across all members of the village. The benefits of increased use are concentrated, while the costs are dispersed. Inevitably, the consequence is an overgrazed pasture, and everyone loses. The shepherd with foresight, who anticipates that the pasture will become barren in the future, will not exercise forbearance. Quite the opposite: he will have the added incentive to overgraze now to capture gains that otherwise would be lost. Refusing to add another animal to one's own herd does not change the incentive of every other shepherd to do so. The world's fisheries offer a[n] contemporary example of the tragedy of the commons. Because oceans are unowned, nofishing fleet has an incentive to conserve or replenish the fish it takes, but each has every incentive to take as many fish as possible lest the benefits of a larger catch go to someone else.64¶ Efforts to control access through prescriptive regulations do relatively little to change this equation.0 Shorten the fishing season, and the

fishing merely becomes more intense. Limit the use of certain gear, and fishermen will simply employ more hands to maximize the catch. Private ownership overcomes the commons problem because owners can prevent overuse by controlling access to the resource. As Hardin noted, "The tragedy of the commons as a food basket is averted by private property, or something formally like it."66 In the case of fisheries, the creation of property rights, whether in fisheries themselves or portions of a given catch, promotes sustainable fishing practices.' With property rights, the incentives faced by fishing fleets are aligned with the long-term sustainability of the underlying resource. As conservation scholar R.J. Smith explains: Wherever we have exclusive private ownership, whether it is organized around a profit-seeking or nonprofit undertaking, there are incentives for the private owners to preserve the resource.... [P]rivate ownership allows the owner to capture the full capital value of the resource, and self-interest and economic incentive drive the owner to maintain its long-term capital value.0¶ For incentives to work, the property right to a resource must be definable, defendable, and divestible. Where property rights are insecure, owners are less likely to invest in improving or protecting a resource. In many tropical nations, for example, the lack of secure property rights encourages deforestation as there is no incentive to maintain forest land, let alone invest in replanting. 69 Where existing environmental regulations undermine the security of property rights, they discourage conservation. The foremost example of this is the ESA, which effectively punishes private landowners for owning habitat of endangered species by restricting land-use. As Sam Hamilton, former Fish and Wildlife Service administrator for the State of Texas, noted, "The incentives are wrong here. If I have a rare metal on my property, its value goes up. But if a rare bird occupies the land, its value disappears."" This economic reality creates a powerful incentive for landowners to destroy present or potential habitat on private land. Thus, in North Carolina, timber owners are dramatically shortening their cutting rotations and cutting trees at a much younger age-at significant economic cost-so as to avoid regulatory proscriptions that could force them to lose their investments altogether.'

Bottom up politics will destroy the environment – the poor are so economically desperate that they don't care about the environment; economic growth is the solution to environmental problemsNangammbi 7 Dianah Nangammbi, Cilla CSIR 3/05/2007 Conservation Biologuy POVERTY INFLUENCES ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION http://bcb706.blogspot.com/2007/03/poverty-influences-environmental.html

Poverty is considered as a great influence of environmental degradation. In many regions of the world, regional overgrazing has resulted in destruction of grazing lands, forest and soil. Air and water have been degraded [5]. The carrying capacity of the natural environment has been reduced. As the people become poorer, they destroy the resources faster [5]. They tend to overuse the natural resources because they don’t have anything to eat or any means of getting money except through the natural resources, they start to depend more on natural resources.

Poor people harvest natural resources for their survival or in order to meet their basic needs such as firewood, agricultural productions (such as maize), and water and wild plants for their medicine. All people regardless of being poor or rich depend on natural resources; the concern with poor people is

that they are utilizing the resources directly. The rich people do depend on these resource but they do not go to the forest directly and harvest the resources.

Due to the lack of sufficient income people start to use and overuse every resource available to them when their survival is at stake. As desperate hunger leads to desperate strategies for survival, many trees are harvested for fire wood, timber and art craft. Most of the poor people use this fire wood as their source of income by selling them, and art craft products are also used for income generation. The roots of the trees are dug out for medicinal purpose. This leaves the soil exposed as the grasses are also grazed by animals and also collected for roofing the houses. When it rains the entire top and good soil are eroded which makes it difficult for that soil to produce better agricultural products.

Poor people often lack sufficient income and education to afford higher quality life where they can use electricity and also buy electric appliances to ease their domestic life. Instead of cutting trees for fire wood they can use electric stoves for cooking. They can also use electric heaters to warm themselves during winter month. Electricity can also slow down the firewood business as most people will no longer be relying on firewood as it takes time to prepare the fire using wood than just switching on the electricity. The use of electricity will make their lives simpler because it will save time, they won’t go to the field to fetch wood. The chances of been bitten by a snake or get injured are high when they are in field.

They have no quality drinking water as they pollute the rivers by washing inside them and by also using a river as a dumping site for the bins. The lack of education also prohibits them from practicing environmentally sustainable agriculture; protect natural resources against degradation or rehabilitate degraded resources like rivers [6]

In the poorest regions it is estimated that one in five children will not live to see the fifth birthday due to environment-related diseases [7]. Statistics show that almost four million children are dying each year because of acute respiratory infection linked to indoor and out-door air pollution [7]. Other environment-related diseases killing the children are diarrhoea caused by lack of clean water and sanitation and also cholera, malaria and asthma [7].

The better solution which can rescue both the environment and poor people is through the government by increasing the rate of job creation for poor people. If they have jobs they can afford higher quality life which includes affording electricity, they can also afford nice roofing materials instead of using grasses and they can have somewhere to wake up to instead of harvesting the natural resources everyday. Many of poor people are very skilled in a way that a government can build a huge art and craft and timber structures where these people can be employed and still practice their art but in a professional way where the harvesting of plants can be done sustainably.

The government can export these products to other countries where a lot of money can be generated.

Some can also work in guarding the natural environment from culprits. Others can be employed only for harvesting the natural resources for different purposes like medicinal, art and craft, timber, fire wood etc under the supervision of ecologists. This can help in keeping the poor people busy, they will be earning a stable and reliable salary which will keep them away from the natural resources, and after all it will be difficult to access the resources as a close eye will always be kept on them.