Neg vs. Peninsula LL---St.

Mark’s---Semis
1NC
OFF
 OFF
POLITICS.
Ukraine aid passes now, but it’s close and PC is key.
Naomi Lim 10/13, reporter for the Washington examiner, 10/13/2023, "Slew of vexing international
crises confront Biden a year out from Election Day,"
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/biden-foreign-policy-president
Biden, a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman during his 36 years in the chamber as a Delaware Democrat, also had a
considerable foreign policy portfolio as vice president for eight years under President Barack Obama. And since
Russia's February 2022
invasion of Ukraine , Biden and his administration have steered U.S. foreign policy toward the beleaguered
Eastern European nation.
To be sure, these international crises have strong domestic components. With the Israel situation, there's a direct U.S. tie, with American
citizens among those being held hostage. And up to 25 Hamas attack casualties are dual Israeli-American citizens.

Convincing the American public of a direct interest in the U.S. to support Ukraine amid its defensive war
against Russia is a tougher sell . Though military aid to Ukraine commands majority support in
Congress , a deep isolationist streak runs through Hill Republicans. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Rep. M arjorie T aylor
G reene (R-GA), and a vocal minority of their GOP colleagues , fervent Trump supporters, contend Ukraine aid saps
financial resources needed for domestic concerns .

The Biden administration may try a workaround by including in its Israel military aid funding request materials for
Ukraine as well as Taiwan, which is facing a military threat from China. Funding to strengthen security of the U.S.-Mexico border could also
be included.

Border funding was a casualty of wrangling between the Republican majority House, Democratic Senate, and Biden White House during the
final days of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's (R-CA) nine-month tenure in his chamber's top job. McCarthy brought to the House floor a
"clean" funding bill, minus aid for Ukraine and the border. The measure passed but enraged some of the most conservative House Republicans,
who wanted much broader budget cuts. McCarthy soon was ousted, likely to be succeeded by House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), who
is a big Israel supporter but has been coy on Ukraine aid.

Biden , in a Tuesday speech, promised to ask Congress "to take urgent action to fund the national security
requirements of our critical partners."
Biden noted the cause's bipartisan support.

"This is not about party or politics," he said. "This is about the security of our world, the security of the United States of America."

Israel's Counteroffensive

It's an open question how these foreign policy crises confronting Biden come together. But it has the potential to be bad news for Biden, just
over a year out from Election Day.

Israel's war with Iran-backed Hamas, coupled with the slow progress of Ukraine's counteroffensive against Russia and uncertainty regarding
future Ukraine support, "paints a picture of an administration taking backwards steps in foreign and security policy," said retired Army Col. Rich
Outzen, an Atlantic Council senior fellow.

"Our friends remain under threat, Iran and Russia have not been deterred or adequately punished for their aggressive behaviors, and there is
little consistent vision or leadership coming from the White House," Outzen, a former State Department adviser, told the Washington Examiner.
"Instead, there are a lot of mixed messages."

Alexander Hamilton Society Executive Director Gabriel Scheinmann said Biden's foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, is in "shambles"
after he distanced himself from Israel and Saudi Arabia while he "sought to legitimize or acquiesce Iranian power."
"From the desire to re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, from the amount of sanctions relief that the administration basically gave the Iranians, not
just the hostage money recently, but the oil revenues are really the big one, over the course of two years," Scheinmann told the Washington
Examiner.

Ukraine's Fight for Survival

While there's somewhat less overt support for backing Ukraine , tying the two foreign crises together may
help achieve financial support for both .

Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the Israel-Hamas war will " complicate
matters more for those who are opposing funds for Ukraine ."
Goldberg added, "We now have two democracies under assault by anti-American forces, both in need of sustained U.S. military support, both
willing to do all the fighting without a single American soldier being put in harm's way."

Goldberg, who in the Trump administration was the director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction for the White House National
Security Council, said of the Biden administration funding strategy, "If the White House requests a
supplemental that combines emergency assistance for Israel with emergency assistance for Ukraine , the pro-
Putin caucus in the House will have a difficult time maneuvering."

A JG requires massive PC.

Annie Lowrey 18, journalist for The Atlantic, 5/11/2018, “A Promise So Big, Democrats Aren’t Sure
How to Keep It,” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/05/the-democratic-party-wants-to-
end-unemployment/560153/

There is also the cost. “It would take a level of funding for which we would have to very much alter our fiscal
outlook ,” Jared Bernstein, who was former Vice President Joe Biden’s chief economist and is now at CBPP, told me. Small pilot programs
aimed at stopping recidivism might pay for themselves. But a true jobs guarantee would cost something like $400 to $700 billion a year now,
and vastly more during a downturn. There are other sticky questions. How much should these jobs pay , and what
kind of benefits should they provide? Would a jobs guarantee foment inflation ? What would a jobs
guarantee do to our understanding of the interplay between inflation , employment , and growth
anyway? Would the government get rid of unemployment insurance ? Would the jobs be permanent? If not, is that
really a guarantee that ends joblessness, once and for all? If so, would that sap the country of some of the ingenuity of its private workforce?
What share of the economy would be involved in care work? How much would that represent a
movement from uncompensated, kitchen-table care work to compensated , workplace care work? For
some Democratic policy wonks, the trade-offs in both economic and political capital seem the most
salient. What do you give up by implementing a jobs guarantee ? What comes first: a public option for
health insurance , or a major jobs plan , or an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, or a universal child
allowance, or a major educational debt-relief plan , or postal banking —all of which are ideas being pushed by
Democratic presidential aspirants right now? “How much in life do you spend money on the last mile?” Gene Sperling, who was the director of
the National Economic Council under Obama, asked me. “There are big, long-term unemployment problems, right? That’s complicated. Those
are people who need a lot of help. They need a lot of support. Is that really the issue, or is the issue that the working poor are not making
enough money to support their families? If you’re going to spend a trillion dollars on something huge …There’s an element here of people not
thinking about what they’re actually trying to do.” In a technocratic sense, perhaps. But the technocratic problems that a jobs guarantee poses
are not impossible to solve. There are good models. RecycleForce, for instance, cuts the recidivism rate of recently incarcerated individuals to
26 percent, versus a national rate of 64 percent, Keesling told me. And it saves the taxpayer $1.20 for every dollar invested. Surveys show that
similar jobs programs have raised both earnings and employment rates for their participants, and also “decreased family public benefit receipt,
raised school outcomes among the children of workers, boosted workers’ school completion, lowered criminal-justice system involvement
among both workers and their children, improved psychological well-being, and reduced longer-term poverty,” a survey by the Georgetown
Law Center on Poverty and Inequality found. “There may be additional positive effects, such as increased child-support payments and improved
health.” Scaling up transitional jobs initiatives would be a good start, then. “There’s nothing resembling an entitlement that supports a person
coming home from prison right now,” Sam Schaeffer, the executive director of the Center for Employment Opportunities, a New York-based
nonprofit that provides jobs and training to the formerly incarcerated in 20 cities, told me. “To really tackle this challenge, there should be
some unifying mechanism, with a mix of workforce programs, anti-poverty programs, nutrition assistance, housing, and more. We’ll pay $82
billion a year to incarcerate people. We don’t make anything like a similar investment on reentry.” There are also models stemming from TANF-
EF. JobsNOW! in San Francisco offers a tiered program to help workers with different levels of readiness for a paid job. One tier pays
participants while they enroll in job-readiness or vocational training, or a high-school diploma program. It also pays participants to do relatively
low-skill work at a nonprofit. Finally, there is a wage-subsidy program, aimed at individuals with work experience. On top of that, the program
provides case management and wraparound services, helping ensure that participants have Medicaid and food stamps. All in all, it has
increased its 20,000 participants’ earnings by an average of 55 percent, and three in four no longer need cash assistance two-and-a-half years
after exiting the program. The evidence for what works is out there, and the need especially great in certain communities and with certain
individuals. Starting with pilots and scaling them up, as Booker wants to do, makes sense. So does Khanna’s model of directing state and local
governments to figure out what works for them, as TANF-EF did. So does Sanders’s idea of having “hundreds” of public-works initiatives. For all
the blue-sky thinking and talk of a national, public-jobs guarantee, Democratic policymakers do seem to be taking the idea
seriously, but not literally , to borrow a phrase. The idea is to indicate to the country that they want to tackle the biggest
challenges with the biggest solutions—not to figure out every detail, pay for every dollar, appeal to every voter, and pass a policy bar their
colleagues on the other side of the aisle have shown no interest in. That gives Democrats room to experiment. “This is not a panacea to solve
the jobs problem. It has to be attacked in multiple ways,” Khanna told me. “I would argue that this is a first, serious proposal that by my own
admission I would say is not intended to be perfect.” It avoids putting them in the position of negotiating themselves down. “I see it as really
opening the Overton Window in a way that is a quite useful for this debate,” Bernstein said. “I’m not in the business of negotiating with myself
at this point. Let’s let all the good ideas blossom.” It
vaults over the need to figure out the most difficult parts of the
legislation, like how much or how to pay for such a proposal. “I’m not gonna presume how we pay for it,” Tanden said. “I
do think the Republican tax plan indicates how little Republicans care about deficits when it comes to taxes. I’m not saying that we won’t care
about this. But obviously it makes that an easier conversation.” It also acknowledges that Republicans
are unlikely to get on
board with big Democratic ideas, freeing liberals to think bigger. “We live in the era of tribalism,” Tanden told me. “It’s
hard to think through a proposal if Republicans feel like doing any deal with Democrats is noxious. Ipso
facto, when a Democrat proposes something, they cannot support it because it’s the Democrats have
creating it. That does not allow for compromise.”

Amplified by the fact that it’s degrowth.

Funding Ukraine prevents US-Russia war.

Alan Yu 10/12, Senior Vice President, National Security and International Policy, 10/12/2023, "5
Reasons Why Congress Must Approve Aid to Ukraine Right Away,"
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/5-reasons-why-congress-must-approve-aid-to-ukraine-right-
away/
The failure of then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to include aid to Ukraine in a stopgap spending bill has sent an ominous signal, not
only to Kyiv but also to our European allies, calling into question our commitment to defend Ukraine “for as long as it takes.”

The Ukrainian people, beleaguered and under relentless and unjustified attack, have demonstrated remarkable resilience in a fight with
implications for America’s core values and interests. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in his December 2022 address to a joint session of
Congress, declared:

The battle is not only for life, freedom and security of Ukrainians or any other nation which Russia attempts to conquer. This struggle
will define in what world our children and grandchildren will live.

Now, decisions made in Washington will shape the trajectory of U.S. interests in Ukraine and in the world for years—if not
decades —to come. But not everyone in Washington is as clear-sighted. A small core of far-right extremists seeks to vacate the
U.S. commitment to Ukraine. This short-sighted push is oblivious to the long-term strategic benefits that a free
Ukraine provides to the United States and the world. Immediate assistance to Ukraine is a critical part of addressing core
American equities.
1.Immediate assistance is required to stand up to Russian aggression and prevent an escalation of U.S.
involvement in an overseas conflict

Continuing robust aid to Ukraine is a powerful deterrent to future Russian aggression . A Russian victory in
Ukraine could encourage President Vladimir Putin’s territorial ambitions , possibly leading him to target a
member of NATO . That could lead to a direct U.S.-Russia conflict that would put American lives at risk and
increase the possibility of a broader war . Funding Ukraine now is a strategic investment to prevent
greater costs later .

2. Immediate assistance would help meet Ukrainian security needs at an acute moment

The resilience and bravery of the Ukrainian people is buttressed in large part by the steady support of the
United States and its allies. But Ukraine’s military is under operational strain . Ammunition is depleting
rapidly , as troops fire 2,000 to 3,000 artillery shells daily. The United States has supplied more than 2 million 155mm artillery rounds,
but the demand persists . Russia’s extensive land mines have slowed the counteroffensive, pushing Ukraine to rely
even more on distant artillery targeting. Senior U.S. military officials warn that gaps in funding could delay essential military
supplies as Russia prepares for a winter offensive . A funding impasse now sends the wrong signal to the
Ukrainians amid brutal fighting.

3. Immediate assistance to Ukraine strengthens European resolve

Putin is taking a long-game approach to the war in Ukraine, hoping he can outlast the will of the United States
and other allies to continue help to Ukraine. The current dysfunction in House leadership and certain developments in Europe
may be validating the Kremlin’s bet.

Shifts in European politics underscore the urgency . Slovakia, for instance, recently saw the election of Robert Fico,
who campaigned on a pledge to end Slovak military assistance to Ukraine. Poland, one of Kyiv’s closest and most vocal
allies, announced it would cease weapons transfers to Ukraine after a dispute over Ukrainian grain exports to the European
Union. It is imperative that the alliance remains unified , and all members continue to move military assistance to
Ukraine at this critical moment, including the United States, Slovakia, Poland, the rest of NATO, and other allies and partners. The
United States is the fulcrum for this effort; our continued assistance is critical for fulfilling this role too.
It was U.S. leadership on Ukraine that first solidified and then strengthened the NATO alliance, demonstrated most notably by Sweden’s and
Finland’s swift moves to seek NATO membership as well as steps by Germany and other NATO allies to bolster their own military capabilities.
U.S. leadership continues to be central to sustaining and directing NATO’s strategic approach to countering
Russia’s aggression.

4. Assistance to Ukraine is a strategic and affordable investment

Ukraine stands as a bulwark against Russian aggression and absorbs most of the associated costs. As some critics lament a $76.8 billion tab in
total U.S. assistance to Ukraine, including $46.7 billion in military aid, it is essential to put this figure into perspective. The amount represents a
mere 0.65 percent of total federal spending over the past two years.

The U.S. approach to the Ukraine conflict is, in fact, smart strategically and fiscally . The United States provides
material and financial support to a partner as it counters and weakens a dangerous adversary. U.S. troops are not pulled into the conflict,
driving to zero the risk of American battlefield casualties as well as the financial burden required by U.S. military deployments. This is critically
important, as conflict escalates in the Middle East and as the Department of Defense faces China’s increasing military strength.

5. Sustained assistance to Ukraine influences China’s strategic calculus

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has pointed out that China is keenly watching the world’s response to Russia’s
aggression in Ukraine. Any perceived inconsistency in U.S. support for Ukraine risks emboldening China
for its far-reaching territorial ambitions, notably in Taiwan . Taiwan’s representative in Washington, Bi-khim Hsiao, contends that if
the West abandons Ukraine, that would signal to the Taiwanese people that they are alone, which plays
into Beijing’s propaganda .

Blinken has further highlighted the evolving China-Russia relationship, raising concern over how this authoritarian
axis is
threatening the rules-based international order. In this context, steadfast support for Ukraine is not just about a
single nation’s sovereignty; it is a strategic stance to reinforce global norms .

Conclusion

In moments of crisis, as seen in Ukraine—and now in Israel and Palestine—the world looks first to the United
States for leadership and help. In each case, there are core U.S. interests at stake as our partners seek support for their critical
security needs. Just as Congress has shown staunch historical support for America’s ally in Israel, now is the time for Congress to

demonstrate its support to our partner Ukraine in its time of greatest crisis .
 OFF
ASPEC.
The plan text should specify the federal branch that carries out the plan---they didn’t.
That’s key to agent counterplans and stable links to tradeoff and politics DAs. Reject
the aff.
 OFF
SOCIALIST GROWTH CP.
The United States federal government should adopt a federal jobs guarantee, financed
by fiscal policies designed to achieve socialist planned economic growth.
The counterplan solves---economic growth is only harmful because of the “anarchy of
production,” or the lack of rational, conscious planning forcing market participants to
account for negative externalities. Socialist growth harnesses the coming
technological revolution to solve the case while expanding the economic pie to
provide abundance for all
Brink Lindsey 9-28, senior vice president at the Niskanen Center, 9/28/23, “Thoughts on techno-
optimistic socialism,” https://www.niskanencenter.org/thoughts-on-techno-optimistic-socialism/ /jpb

In my lifetime, the political left’s

attitude toward technological progress has been decisively shaped by the
anti-Promethean backlash . The environmental consciousness that exploded onto the scene in the 1960s, with its strong
anti-capitalist animus and romantic embrace of the primitive, quickly took hold of the post-mass-affluence
New Left and from there proceeded to become progressive orthodoxy . As I’ve tried to explain it, the advent of mass
prosperity shifted the egalitarian focus of the left from economic have-nots, whose plight outside of isolated pockets of poverty no longer
seemed as pressing in the go-go 1960s, toward social and cultural “belong-nots” – historically marginalized groups that now sought acceptance
in a new, more inclusive mainstream. Solicitude for the ultimate “other” – non-human life – slotted easily into the new commitment to wider
moral horizons. (Ayn Rand had a less charitable interpretation, which I’ve always suspected played some role as well: By the 60s and 70s, it had
become undeniably clear that capitalism was massively outperforming actually existing socialism when it came to material betterment for
ordinary people. Accordingly, it was an especially convenient time for people hanging onto the socialist dream to call sour grapes on
materialism.)

Of course, the Old Left wore its materialism proudly . As Samuel Gompers, the founder of the American Federation of Labor, put
it, “ We do want more , and when it becomes more, we shall still want more .” Or recall Harry Truman’s line: “If you
want to live like a Republican, you’ve got to vote for a Democrat.”

As to the socialism of the radical left, materialism was of course central to the thought of that creed’s greatest prophet. It is striking how Marx
and Engels’ rhapsodic recitation of the bourgeoisie’s revolutionary accomplishments in The Communist Manifesto
offers a more stirring tribute than capitalism’s most ardent defenders have ever managed. Here’s just a taste:

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal
productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man,
machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole
continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a
presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

In the Marxist vision, the bourgeoisie’s fatal flaw wasn’t their Promethean ambition . On the contrary, it was that
their attachment to private property and the resulting “ anarchy of production ” stifled the full release
of productive forces that would be possible under the conscious planning of economic life.
Under the pressure of dramatically changed circumstances, the center-left is now in the midst of a wrenching reappraisal of its knee-jerk
antipathy toward moving atoms around at large scale. The
gathering climate crisis , along with deepening problems of
housing affordability plaguing metro areas across the United States and other advanced democracies, have revealed the
pressing need for (in Ezra Klein’s words) “a liberalism that builds .” The inertia of older attitudes, though, remains formidable:
yard signs proclaiming “in this house, we welcome all people” in neighborhoods zoned to exclude all but the rich have become a running joke,
while environmental groups can regularly be found among the opponents of badly needed new clean
energy projects. In my day job at the Niskanen Center, I am proud to be involved in the effort to fight this inertia and advance a
transpartisan “abundance agenda” that both progressives and conservatives can embrace on their own terms.

Here, though, I’m interested in exploring more radical ideas on the left: those of a
small circle of contemporary socialist
writer s who seek to reclaim and reimagine the left’s Promethean heritage . I’ll look in particular at three books from
the past few years: Four Futures by Peter Frase; Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani; and The People’s Republic of Walmart
by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski.

Frase’s book plays things closest to the vest, offering vignettes of four possible futures that might result from the intersection of two major
contemporary developments: climate change and AI-driven automation. For purposes of creating his scenarios, Frase assumes that we are
heading toward a highly automated future in which most work now done by people is handled by
computers and robots, and that this will end capitalism as we know it . So what comes next? To create his
four scenarios, Frase
throws in a pair of variables: climate change and the politics of inequality . Will we
achieve rapid decarbonization and enjoy the benefits of clean, abundant energy for all, or will collective
action fall short and leave us in a world hemmed in by scarcity and environmental ruin? And secondly, will
we devise rules that ensure that the productivity gains unlocked by widespread automation are widely
shared, or will we see another upward spiral of inequality as a plutocratic elite manages to siphon off
most of the benefits for itself?

Frase draws up a two-by-two matrix, with abundance versus scarcity as one dimension, and equality
versus hierarchy as the other. The four resulting possibilities he labels as “ communism ” (abundance and
equality), “rentism” (abundance and hierarchy), “ socialism” (scarcity and equality ), and “exterminism”
(scarcity and hierarchy). It’s clear enough from the label that exterminism is a hellscape of mass suffering that no person with any
humanitarian leanings would knowingly choose, and it’s equally clear that any book authored by a member of the Jacobin editorial board is
going to favor equality over hierarchy. What’s distinctive about this book, though, at least in our present era, is that Frase
distinguishes
between socialist shared scarcity and communist shared abundance and unequivocally favors the
latter.
Following the Marxist conception of communist abundance as a “realm of freedom” liberated from the need to work for extrinsic rewards,
Frase agrees with Marx’s dictum that “the shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite .” Much
of Frase’s discussion is devoted to simply making the case that this is a worthy ideal – that paid work is not necessary to a
flourishing life . (Yes, the unemployed in capitalist societies are miserable, but that is because work is the norm; retired people who aren’t
expected to work are happy enough.) Establishing the long-term goal then sets the agenda for intermediate
reforms: partially “decommoditizing” labor through universal basic income and expanded public
services.
In the delightfully titled Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Aaron Bastani goes into considerably more detail in fleshing out the vision of a
post-scarcity egalitarian utopia and the path from here to there. With exuberant techno-optimism, he sketches out the prospects for
breakthroughs that can radically reduce the cost of living in sector after sector: automation and robotics
that can do much of what humans now do but much more cheaply and effectively; clean energy that can
carry us past the dangers of climate change to the expanded possibilities of cheap energy abundance (though he
curiously neglects to mention either nuclear or geothermal options); asteroid mining , made possible by plummeting launch costs, that
can render scarcity of key mineral resources a distant memory; gene editing , anti-aging therapies , and
AI diagnostics that can greatly extend lifespans while reorienting medicine toward relatively cheaper
prevention and cures and away from the expensive management of chronic conditions ; and cultured
meat to ensure that feeding ourselves no longer threatens the rest of life on this planet with loss of
habitat.

Bastani refers to this dazzling set of possibilities as the “ Third Disruption ” (the invention of agriculture was the first,
industrialization the second). Its defining characteristic is a “tendency to extreme supply”: given the dramatic
and ongoing fall in the cost of information, and the centrality of information to all technological and organizational innovation
(which consists of new recipes for rearranging matter and combining the work of people), the effect is to render not only new
knowledge but also labor, energy, and material resources ever cheaper to produce.

These disruptions, meanwhile, are occurring at the same time that capitalism is undergoing a series of crises:
climate change ; broader problems of environmental degradation and resource depletion ; falling birth rates and an
aging population; a growing “unnecessariat” of marginalized workers; and the looming prospect of mass
technological unemployment.

Bastani sees this juxtaposition of events as the birth pangs of a new social order emerging out of the
wreckage of the old. The new order, fully automated luxury communism, is the world Marx dreamed of:
a post-work world of plenty where the distinction between labor and leisure has all but dissolved . “Amid
the changes of the Third Disruption the ‘fact’ of scarcity is moving from one of inevitable scarcity to political imposition.”

To midwife the transition to the realm of freedom, Bastani proposes a three-part program: re-localizing
production through municipal investment and protectionism; socializing finance through local and regional
investment banks; and free state provision of housing, transport, education, healthcare, and information
as universal basic services. (Bastiani prefers UBS to UBI, which he sees as vulnerable to being perverted into an excuse for rolling back
public provision elsewhere.) “ While automation will eliminate as much work as possible ,” Bastani explains, “those

jobs which remain … will increasingly be performed by worker-owned businesses, completely

transforming how we relate to society, work, and one another.”
The third book I want to discuss here is The People’s Republic of Walmart by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski. Phillips, a well-known science
writer and ardent techno-optimist, is the author of Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry
and Stuff; for shorter samples of his work and worldview, check out this celebration of the human population reaching 8 billion, this argument
that an ideal society would not ban private jets but instead provide them for everybody, and this fun interview with conservative techno-
optimist Jim Pethokoukis.

Here, though, Phillips and his co-author resurrect and reexamine the century-old “economic calculation debate” over the feasibility of socialist
central planning. The book’s argument is that Marx’s vision of a planned economy was ahead of its time: a bold imaginative leap into the future
that was simply unrealizable given the still-primitive state of overall technological development. According to Phillips and Rozworski, the world
has now caught up with Marx’s genius, as evidenced by corporate giants like Walmart and Amazon, which use advanced computer technology
to centrally plan sprawling production and distribution operations whose size and complexity rival that of national economies. Whatever one
makes of the merits of their thesis, along the way the authors offer lucid and entertaining discussions of the original calculation debate, the
logistical complexities of Walmart’s and Amazon’s business operations, the development of linear programming as a Soviet planning tool, the
crucial role of the Pentagon in promoting postwar U.S. innovation, the abortive Project Cybersyn under Salvador Allende in 1970s Chile, and
much more.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that I have my differences with these authors, but let me start with what I think they get right . First and
foremost is their recovery of Promethean ambition : they understand that scientific and tech nological
progress is essential to ongoing human flourishing , and they embrace with gusto the potential of new
technologies now under development to catapult humanity to a higher level of well-being. The most
basic criterion for judging members of any social movement is whether they seek to move in the right
direction . With their understanding of the inextricable connection between technological and social
progress, these socialist radicals score better on that test than many conventional progressives and
conservatives.

More specifically, I believe that Frase and Bastani in particular are correct in focusing on moving toward a post-work world – or at least a world
in which lives and livelihoods are much more independent from the labor market than they are today. Their “communism” bears more than a
passing resemblance to my “economic independence.” As I have written about extensively, for most of its participants the mass
labor market no longer functions reliably as a vehicle for human flourishing and is unlikely to regain
that function . My search for an alternative pathway for flourishing outside the workaday world has led me to focus on the possibility of
creating largely self-sufficient local communities whose advanced technology allows them to achieve abundance at human scale. There are
important overlaps between this idea and the communist dream of ending the distinction between labor and leisure.

Like Frase and Bastani, I see progress toward a post-mass-labor-market world as driven by both push and pull factors. On the one hand, the
widespread failure of labor market participation to guarantee access to a rewarding and fulfilling life
pushes us to look for alternative arrangements; at the same time, though, emerging technologies’ “tendency to
extreme supply” holds out the prospects for dramatically reduced costs of living – and therefore a
reduced need to sell labor services to cover those costs.

tech nologies of the “Third Disruption” cannot by themselves guarantee widespread

And I agree further that the
abundance and flourishing. New tools can create potential for progress, but whether that potential is realized
depends on politics and the resulting rules that structure how the benefits from innovation are
shared . And Frase zeroes in on what I regard as one of the decisive arenas of conflict: setting the rules for intellectual property. I haven’t yet
written about the subject on this blog, but I’ve written plenty for my day job – see here, here, and here.

Bundling the temporary monopoly privileges of patents and copyrights into the concept of “intellectual property” has to be regarded as one of
the great lobbying triumphs of all time, allowing patent and copyright interests to argue that they’re only trying to stop “theft” and “piracy.”
But as I’ve written, so-called intellectual property rights and rights in physical property are fundamentally dissimilar: the latter serve to allocate
natural scarcity by assigning exclusive rights to rivalrous physical objects (rivalrous in that consumption by one person or group precludes
consumption by anybody else), whereas the former create artificial scarcity by giving patent and copyright holders the power to stop others
from using nonrivalrous ideas without their permission.

There is a reasonable idea behind this creation of artificial scarcity – namely, that it is needed to address a market failure arising out of the
nonrivalrous nature of ideal objects (in other words, the fact that one person’s use of an idea in no way limits anyone else’s use). If some
invention is very costly to develop in the first place but easy to copy, the original inventor may be unable to recoup his investment before
imitators swoop in and swamp the market. Extending temporary monopoly privileges to inventors and artists by raising the return they earn
from developing new ideas thus promises to increase the overall stock of useful ideas.

The reasoning is valid to a point, but it’s important to recognize that patents and copyrights correct market failures only to the extent that they
allow original investments to be covered: beyond that point, they are generating windfall rents. Given the massive expansion in patent and
copyright protections over the past several decades, intellectual property law is now creating rents on a massive scale. It has degenerated into a
vehicle for upward redistribution of wealth and income that actually worsens the climate for innovation by making protected ideas less
accessible to downstream innovators.

Intellectual property law already causes serious economic distortions, but the situation could get far worse. As ideas continue to displace land
and capital as the economy’s most important assets, whether those assets are broadly or narrowly held will have increasingly large implications
for the overall structure of the economy. In a future where AI and robots have automated a great deal of the work people now do, whether
that future is one of mass prosperity or mass pauperization will turn to a considerable extent on whether the ideas that underlie the technology
have been set free or privatized.

Frase sees things in similar fashion. In his two-by-two matrix of possible futures, the
distinction between post-work abundance
and “rentism” (abundance and hierarchy) turns on i ntellectual p roperty rules:

“Who owns the robots,” says Harvard University labor economist Richard Freeman, “owns the world.” Hence the
alternative to the communist society of our last chapter is one where the techniques to produce
abundance are monopolized by a small elite …. When we talk about “owning the robots,” we’re not just talking
 about having control over a physical bundle of metal and wires. Rather, the
phrase metaphorically describes control
over things like computer software, algorithms, blueprints, and other kinds of information that
are needed to produce and reproduce the world we live in. In order to maintain control over the
economy, then, the rich increasingly need to control that information, and not just physical
objects.

Finally, I agree with Phillips and Rozworski that certain

forms of government planning are needed to reach a brighter
future, and the need is probably increasing over time. The coauthors make and remake this basic point repeatedly in their
book: “ What is profitable is not always useful , and what is useful is not always profitable .” It is an important
point, and its relative importance is edging steadily upward. When the world was poor, and most people were scrambling just to cover their
basic material needs, the overlap between profitable and useful was considerably higher than today. Now, absent
efforts by
government to push forward scientific knowledge and tech nological capacity, thereby opening up new
spaces for entrepreneurial exploration and commercialization, capitalist profit-seeking tends to settle
disproportionately into the comfortable and relatively unproductive ruts of real estate development and
financial speculation .

A further point: if, as looks likely, we

are facing a future with both declining populations and gradually falling
labor force participation, governments will need to compensate by appropriating relatively larger shares
of the economic pie to fund ongoing innovation. While I hope for a future where large numbers of people live in considerable
independence from the capitalist system, the other side of that coin is likely to be an organized capitalist system that relies more heavily on
public investment.

That said, Phillips and Rozworski are utterly misguided in trying to revive the socialist idea of replacing the entire price system with central
planning. The fact that computer technology has made enormous strides since Soviet days is completely irrelevant. Advocates of central
planning imagine that the fundamental challenge in guiding economic production is one of computation, and therefore that much faster
computers and much bigger databases make the problem more tractable. But in fact, the real fundamental challenge is one of discovering
information not known already – how producers will react to changes in input prices, how consumers will react to changes in the price or
quality or product features, and whether new products are useful and desirable. There is simply no way to incentivize this ongoing, incessant,
massive-scale discovery process without actually playing the specialization and exchange game with real money.

Of course, from the standpoint of the overlap between economic efficiency and human well-being, it’s
important to recognize two
important shortcomings of the private property and price system: (1) the market takes account of
consumer preferences only to the extent that they are backed by dollars , and thus overprioritizes the
preferences of the rich; and (2) the existence of external costs and benefits not accounted for by market
actors further reduces the overlap between the useful and the profitable . Both of these market
failures, though, are remediable : redistribution can make producers more responsive to people with lower
market incomes, while regulation or pricing of externalities can better align profit-seeking with
advancing well-being . Modifying the price system in this way isn’t easy to get right, but it’s doable;
replacing the price system altogether, on the other hand, is a will-o’-the-wisp .
 OFF
COERCION.
Taxation violates moral side-constraints, which justify the evisceration of all morality.
Vote neg to reject coercion.
Aeon Skoble 20 – Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute and professor of philosophy at Bridgewater
State University in Massachusetts. “The Essential Robert Nozick”, Fraser Institute,
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/essential-robert-nozick.pdf

Nozick begins Anarchy, State, and Utopia with the claim “Individuals
have rights, and there are things no person or
group may do to them (without violating their rights)” (p. ix). Incautious critics sometimes take this to mean that Nozick
simply assumes rights and then proceeds from there, but he does have an argument for rights. For better or worse, this doesn’t appear until the
third chapter of the book, but it is there. He understands rights as “ moral side constraints upon what we may do” (p.
33). If there were no other beings, we would be free to do whatever we wanted to do, constrained only by the laws of physics. Morality comes
into play when we are considering our interactions with others. Hence, the reality of other people creates limits on our actions. These limits are
not the same as the limits imposed by physics. Whether there are other people or not, I am not free to defy the laws of gravity or inertia, or to
be in two places at once. Those, too, are constraints on my action. Moral constraints are things I could do but that it would
be wrong to do. Saying “I can’t be in two places at once” and “I can’t murder Bob” are grammatically similar, but have very different
meanings: I physically could commit murder, but it would be bad if I did. So rights are a moral concept that establish the
boundary conditions of justified action (as opposed to the boundary conditions of physically possible action). Smith’s rights are
thus the boundary conditions on Jones’ actions.

Nozick understands this model of side-constraints as rooted in the “fact of our separate existences” (p. 33). As
distinct individuals with our own lives, no one could naturally have a claim over the life of another.
Individuals are not to be regarded as means to others’ ends; they are ends in themselves. A hammer, for
example, is a tool that exists in order to help people do things, it doesn’t have its own independent
reason for existing apart from this. It doesn’t exist for its own sake. But people do exist—they are ends in
themselves , not the means to another’s ends. “ Individuals are inviolable ” because each is a person
with his or her own life to live. So it is the fact that “there are different individuals with separate lives”
that produces the side constraint that no one is entitled to use another as a tool. Using a person as a
means to another’s ends “does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate
person and that his is the only life he has” (p. 33). So a person’s rights just are the flip side of the others’
constraints: That Jones is morally constrained to respect the separate personhood of Smith, and thus
can’t act upon Smith nonconsensually, implies that Smith has the right not to be used in this way . Since
Nozick sees rights as boundary conditions on the permissible treatment of others, he argues that to reject this conception of

rights would entail either a rejection of all morality entirely —no one has any constraints at all on how
they may treat others—or else a rejection of the idea of the reality of the uniqueness of each person.

One school of thought that might be inclined to reject this conception of rights is utilitarianism , a view on
which what is morally significant is total aggregate utility (understood as pleasure or happiness). For utilitarians, there aren’t constraints on the
permissible treatment of others per se, it’s just that the total goodness achieved must outweigh the bad. With such a theory, it would not make
sense to talk about the inviolability of persons, since we can easily imagine situations in which sacrificing one would benefit several others.
Nozick therefore explicitly addresses utilitarianism , arguing that it implies wildly counterintuitive results . Since
utilitarianism calculates utility subjectively, we can imagine a “utility monster ” who “gets enormously
greater gains in utility from any sacrifice of others than these others lose” (p. 41). This would make it
morally required to sacrifice everyone to the monster in order to maximize total utility . In addition to
running afoul of our intuitions about the equal dignity of all persons, this makes the theory self-
undermining ; implausible at least, if not internally inconsistent.

It won’t even do, Nozick adds, to think in terms of aggregating amounts of respect for persons, such that
we respect the rights of some large group at a cost of failing to treat some other group of persons as
inviolable. Rather, each individual person is to be regarded as an end and not a means , and no person
should be used as a tool for others’ purposes. He gives the example of violating the rights of an innocent
person to prevent a mob rampage which would itself yield many rights violations . He argues that this is to
misunderstand the point of side constraints. It’s not that we figure in the rights of others while
evaluating end states in which the rights of some are traded off for the rights of others; rather the rights
of others determine how you may treat them. Otherwise, they are not actual moral side constraints .
Ultimately, Nozick argues that we can ground the inviolability of persons in the human capacity for self-directedness. “A person’s shaping his
life in accordance with some overall plan is his way of giving meaning to his life; only a being with the capacity to so shape his life can have or
strive for a meaningful life” (p. 50). So it is our capacity for formulating life plans and acting on them that the moral side constraints protect.
This is why recognizing the reality of other persons implies the impermissibility of using them as means to others’ ends. Minimally, we would
each see this as implying our own inviolability, and it takes only a little maturity to see why this must extend to others.

So, the claim advanced on the first page of Anarchy, State, and Utopia’s preface is not without foundation after all: people have rights
as a matter of their status as distinct individual human beings with the capacity for self-directedness,
and that means that some things that one might do to another will be in violation of those rights, which,
while physically possible, are morally impermissible . The connection between “rights” as a moral concept and “rights” as a
political concept is found in Nozick’s observation that groups of persons cannot be morally justified in doing something that the individuals that
comprise the group are not justified in doing. That is, if Smith is not morally justified in violating Jones’ rights, then a large group of which Smith
is a member (or leader) will also be not morally justified in violating Jones’ rights. Although it is true that an individual may sacrifice something
for the sake of her own greater good (say, skipping a party to study for an important exam), “there is no social entity with a good that
undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using
one of these people for the benefit of others uses him and benefits the others” (pp. 32-33). Individuals acting jointly can’t be
justified in doing something they couldn’t morally do on their own . So the rights that people have as
moral side constraints against the predation of other individuals will turn out to be the rights that
delineate the proper scope of government as well.
Chapter 2

The Minimal State

A robust theory of rights such as the one Nozick outlined poses a significant challenge to political philosophy. If people’s rights cannot be
overridden, then most forms of government we’re familiar with lack moral legitimacy. This might imply the moral necessity of
anarchism. While for some people, that sounds like a conclusion so obviously wrong it requires no answer, Nozick thinks it worth taking
seriously. “The state” seems like it necessarily violates rights: rulers of various stripes lay down the law and force people to comply on
pain of fine, imprisonment, or death. Some laws might map onto some people’s predispositions anyway, but the coercion is there nonetheless.
For example, maybe I think it is prudent to wear a seat belt when driving and would do it even if there were no laws compelling it, but as it
happens, there are laws compelling it, which means coercion is being deployed even if my choices are not in this instance coerced. I could not
change my mind, and others who think differently are coerced already. And the state’s operations are financed coercively, via
taxation . Since this, too, is coercive, individualist anarchists have a point which we cannot simply ignore: the state is coercive in its very
nature, and this is morally problematic for anyone who takes rights seriously. So Nozick sees it as incumbent on himself to explain how some
sort of state could be possible without violating people’s rights.
 OFF
T TAXES.
Interpretation---fiscal redistribution requires transfers funded by personal income
taxes or Social Security contributions---indirect taxes are distinct
SSC = social security contribution

Orsetta Causa 17, Senior Economist, Inclusive Growth Work-stream, OECD Economics department,
10/16/17, “Income redistribution through taxes and transfers across OECD countries,”
https://www.inps.it/content/dam/inps-site/pdf/istituto/progetti/eu-china-archive/1925KEY-
orsetta_causa_inps.pps /jpb

How is redistribution defined and measured?

By comparing household income inequality (Gini coefficients) before and after taxes and transfers:

𝑅𝐸=(𝐺^𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡−𝐺^𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒)/𝐺^𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡

Micro data allow for identifying/separating the respective inequality-reducing effect of various fiscal
instruments:

Cash transfers

Insurance (e.g. unemployment & sickness benefits)

Assistance (e.g. social assistance, means-tested)

Universal (e.g. family and child benefits)

Personal income taxes and employee’s SSC

Coverage of tax and transfer systems:

Taxes covered are only income taxes and employee’s ssc, no indirect taxes and property taxes

Transfers covered include cash transfers, no in-kind transfers (e.g. education & healthcare)

Violation---the plan raises revenue from a non-income tax

Vote neg:
1) Limits---their interp explodes the topic to include revenue from any source of
taxation---carbon, data, financial transactions, literally any activity can be taxed, each
of which could be its own topic
2) Ground---including non-income taxes radically inflates aff ground by creating
advantages based on discouraging the object of the tax---that’s disconnected from
core objections to redistribution which focus on income exclusively
 OFF
STATES.
The fifty states and relevant territories should establish and implement an interstate
agreement to
 abolish balanced budget requirements;
 create Reserve Bank systems;
 adopt a jobs guarantee financed by border-adjusted fiscal policies
designed to facilitate degrowth.
Interstate agreements solve economic inequality and avoid federal sabotage which
tubes the aff.
Jon Michaels and Emme M. Tyler 23 – Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law, and Attorney, "Just-
Right Government: Interstate Compacts and Multistate Governance in an Era of Political Polarization,
Policy Paralysis, and Bad-Faith Partisanship," Indiana Law Journal: Vol. 98: Iss. 3, Article 5. Available at:
https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ilj/vol98/iss3/5

3. The Need (and Public Mandate) for Aggressive, Impactful Government Action Is Greater Now Than It
Was in 1925

Another difference is that the

need (and mandate) to legislate and regulate today is far more urgent . The costs of
health care and higher education continue to spiral out of control. We’ve been overdue for major immigration reform for
several decades. Economic inequality is greater now than at any time since the Census Bureau started

tracking such data more than five decades ago.160 We need a more durable infrastructure to address
health and energy crises. And the moral imperative to advance long-needed racial justice initiatives can no longer be ignored. There is, we hasten
to add, popular support for each of these measures;161 such support may well be a function of American society, despite the extant

efforts to disenfranchise various communities, being a more racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse (and inclusive)

polity than ever before162—and thus collectively far more attentive to the way in which legislators and regulators

need to play a role in countering, among other things, the vagaries and at times cruelties of the market economy ,
civil society, and the criminal justice system.

The same could not readily be said about life in 1925. This is not to say that there weren’t grave and acute challenges when it came such things as racial justice,
health care, education, and workers’ rights. It is just that those challenges were not nearly as politically pressing. Again, by no means are we trying to shortchange
the array of difficulties Americans faced in 1925, particularly people of color, women, wage laborers, and those with various disabilities. We are making a narrower,
but (we hope) still salient, point—namely, because there really was not the political will among then-enfranchised citizens to take such steps, the gap between what
the electorate demanded and what elected officials were willing and able to deliver was considerably smaller. Put slightly differently, the failure to address at least a
good percentage of the racial and socioeconomic ills back then could be explained for reasons other than the states being too small or to the federal courts striking
down national legislation. We’re not sure that the same is true today.

4. Compacts and Agreements Have Many More Permutations Today

Today’s interstate arrangements and compacts can bring together political communities in many more
combinations than were practicable before. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (and surely throughout the 1920s when
Frankfurter and Landis were pressing their claims), regulatory compacts pretty much had to be between and among contiguous or otherwise proximate states. This
was a function of the limited mobility of labor, capital, and culture—and also the nature of the challenges we faced back then compared to today. In the 1920s,
California, Maryland, Minnesota, and Connecticut would have been an absurd regulatory community. But now bicoastal
compacts and other
non-contiguous configurations are eminently plausible and, indeed, potentially quite sensible
whenever those states share a common vision for such things as environmental justice, police reform, education
policy, or labor protections—and are more closely connected and interconnected through shared markets
for labor , capital, and culture.163
And, of course, the nature (and urgency) of environmental regulation has changed. Just a generation or so ago, officials were understandably focused on what we
now consider to be old-school pollutants, ones that were fairly geographically concentrated.164 Today our biggest threat comes from greenhouse gases and those
we know, circulate broadly and diffusely. That is to say, New Yorkers may not benefit greatly from California’s restrictions on particulate matter—and vice versa. But
those East Coasters are inescapably part of California’s ecosystem when it comes to the latter’s carbon emissions.

5. A Fresh Start

Beyond the far greater number of possible interstate spatial permutations, compacts and other agreements provide administrative lawyers and public
administration experts opportunities for a fresh start. In the 1920s, there was not any concern, or likely even a vague apprehension, about federal (or state)
administration being hopelessly saddled by outdated and ill-suited procedural requirements—let alone that agencies would be especially parsimonious when it
came to requirements to ensure robust democratic engagement. Yet that is the world we encounter today, with a federal Administrative Procedure Act (APA) that,
however transformative and however much celebrated,165 has very serious limitations. Meaningful public notice and participation are often sorely lacking, leaving
well-heeled special interests with ample room and opportunity to wield disproportionate influence.166 Longstanding and bipartisan focus on cost-benefit analysis
systematically overvalues certain interests and interest groups over others.167 Judicial challenges (increasingly the exclusive province of parties alleging economic
injuries168) wind their way through, up, and down the court system, posing tremendous costs on agencies and leaving many regulatory landscapes underregulated
or subject to rules and policies sorely in need of updating.169 And, now, litigants are persuading courts to revisit longstanding commitments to agency
deference,170 Congress’s authority to set the conditions for the appointment and removal of high-ranking agency officials,171 and Congress’s delegation power.172
For these reasons, many (across the political spectrum) label the federal administrative state as captured, sclerotic, ossified, and undemocratic173— not to mention
deeply imperiled.174

In addition, in spaces where we had long privileged expertise and a modicum of independence, political appointees, presidents, and, more recently, the courts
themselves have worked to shred the layers of insulation and undermine the central role of apolitical experts that many see as the backbone of a vibrant,
knowledgeable, and truth-seeking bureaucracy.175 Witness the decades-long efforts to contract out the work of federal bureaucrats176 and to reclassify career
civil servants as at-will employees (subject to politically motivated hiring and firing decisions);177 witness, too, recent political moves to force out some of the most
talented civil servants.178

Similarly, most states have created civil service workforces roughly in league with what exists at the federal level; 179 and they their own versions of the APA (and
draw upon a Model State Administrative Procedure Act).180 Not surprisingly, that means many states are experiencing the same political efforts—couched as
reforms—to outsource and politicize rank-and-file bureaucrats.181

Add to these longstanding efforts a new wave of populist attacks. These attacks have reached a fever pitch starting in 2020 with wholesale attacks on educators
(surrounding COVID-19 protocols, support for Black Lives Matter, and the implementation of antiracist curricula,182 and most recently, for recognizing and
supporting the equal dignity of trans children), public health officials,183 and election officials. If anything, states are in a lot worse shape than the federal
government. As the recent and trenchant work by Miriam Seifter illustrates, compared to the feds, most state agencies are less well funded, less expert, less legally
independent from elected officials and insulated populist hostility, and less closely monitored by interest groups and journalists.184

We are bringing this up for the sole but, we think, important reason that the extant federal and state administrative structures are hardly ideal instruments for
democratic or expert policymaking. While it should of course be a priority to bolster federal and state workforces, administrative structures, and processes,185 we
are, again, not optimistic that efforts in that direction will gain any traction.186 So, with all that in mind, consider
interstate governance an
opportunity to create administrative structures and procedures anew—stripped of the baggage of
good-faith attempts that haven’t worked out or that have been directly and sometimes shamelessly
sabotaged .187 (This is all in addition to the various requirements intentionally imposed to slow down
and disrupt the regulatory processes from the outset.188)

On this tabula rasa of interstate public administration, more expert , more democratic , and (perhaps in time) more
legitimate processes and policies can be crafted. 189 We won’t drill down on specifics other than to note that interstate
bodies need not follow the blueprint of other, mid-to-late twentieth century compacts that have been
subject to justifiable criticism190—and could, instead, adopt some of the reform proposals that are, for a variety of
reasons, too difficult or cumbersome for legacy agencies at the federal and state levels to adopt. Today’s agreements
can incorporate such things as proportional representation based on such metrics as member states’ relative populations and the relative allocation of

responsibilities, etc. Technocratic responsibilities can be better insulated from political, partisan overseers.191
Experts can be recruited and retained through the assurances of competitive pay and, crucially,
protection from partisan arm-twisting. Meaningful public participation can be secured through any number
of measures more contemporary and comprehensive than simply posting dense notice of meetings and opportunities for comment
on websites monitored only by white-shoe lobbyists. Compacting entities may even call for groups of empaneled
administrative jurors— ensuring virtual public representation—something leading scholars and government reformers have
hoped would take root at the federal level.192

What’s more, the development of interstate bodies with substantial responsibilities right now would have the
incidental, but arguably highly salutary, effect of deemphasizing and decentering the federal courts .193
Interstate regulatory bodies would, as we see it, take some pressure off agencies and Congress to do
as much heavy lifting—allowing them time to prioritize challenges of a truly national or international
character while still regrouping and rebuilding administrative capacity after decades of disparagement
and what David Noll calls sabotage .194 One byproduct of this shift away from centralized federal regulation is that disputes arising
out of regulation and enforcement by interstate compacting entities can be handled by newly
constituted adjudicatory bodies (thus circumventing the whole “pack the courts/strip the courts of power” political campaigns that seem
increasingly futile).195

Surely, it
is conceivable that disputes arising out of interstate compacting would find their way into federal
courts under diversity jurisdiction. But the substance of those challenges would then turn principally on the new
laws of interstate administrative agreements—perhaps more akin to contract law or the law of
corporations. And, of course, we’re aware of the challenges associated with circumventing federal law and federal courts; we certainly don’t think anything
akin to mandatory commercial arbitration should be the default for interstate bodies. Nor do we think that what, for instance, Facebook has set up in the form of its
private oversight board, is necessary or appropriate.196 But we
are, again, open to thinking about the bypassing of an
increasingly unrepresentative and out-of-touch federal bench as a fortuitous consequence of interstate
governance.197 Indeed, we can imagine rotations of judges from the benches of member states or (if the agreement is capacious enough to so warrant) a
new court—chosen in ways that prioritize expertise and democratic equity—to take on the solemn duties of judging.

We recognize these are abrupt and incredibly costly departures from the status quo. Goldilocks didn’t have to build a just-right bed or prepare just-right porridge

the cost of inaction , of otherwise continuing to countenance

from scratch. And that’s precisely what we’re calling for. But

huge amounts of corporate welfare to pass highly watered-down legislation, and of waiting and hoping
the federal courts don’t invalidate new laws and rules, are themselves already intolerably high . And, on
the substance of interstate governance laws and policies, we hesitate to label any of what we’ve just suggested as particularly
radical. Though such administrative features suggest a sharp break from much of federal and state administrative law, there is nothing—ideologically

speaking—radical about anything we just proposed.

B. Model Compacts: A Blue New Deal

Whether and how to enter into interstate agreements is a tricky question. When it comes to considering interstate agreements versus federal interventions, we
might be tempted to insist, as a threshold matter, that before opting for the former, it ought to be established that a national (that is, federal)
solution is
unlikely to be forthcoming any time soon. Though that might make sense as a presumption, we recognize that a preference for
superior public administration may, by itself, justify circumventing the extant federal and state
pathways . Indeed, it may well be the most salient longterm reason, assuming that those federal pathways do not remain permanently bottled up. What’s
more, it also may be the case that regional governance—not fully mediated or directed by federal agencies, as is currently the case198—stands as an independent
and completely valid reason for compacting.

Reasons for bypassing the states are even more numerous; they follow directly from the discussions as to why states are often the wrong loci for addressing

complex problems. Specifically, we understand four discrete but often overlapping bases for seeking interstate solutions: to internalize
spillover effects , to cancel or at least reduce races to the bottom , to increase economies of scale , and to
take advantage of cross-border efficiencies. Mindful of those four bases, we propose four corresponding sketches.199 These sketches—two
of which are ambitious and capacious and two of which are narrow and modest—are tentative; we intend them to be simple, rough, and open-ended templates.

1. Climate Change Agreement200

Participating states agree to act swiftly and decisively to combat climate change. Consistent with applicable federal laws, member states agree to:

•Set and enforce emission reduction goals (no less than the applicable federal standards) for firms and industries operating within any and all of the member states;
•Accord preferential contractor status (for all state, local, and interstate administrative contracts) for firms operating anywhere within the jurisdiction of interstate
agreement that exceed the agreement’s prescribed reductions by ten percent or more over a specified period of time;

•Provide state and local tax credits for firms that exceed the agreement’s prescribed reductions by fifteen percent or more over a specified period of time;

•Provide grants to colleges and graduate schools that develop or broaden their programs on climate change abatement and environmental justice;

•Subsidize student tuition for those enrolled in climate change or environmental justice programs;

•Plan multistate reforestation and wetlands preservation initiatives that take advantage of the best spaces for such initiatives anywhere within the agreement’s
boundaries;

•Establish a legal-aid-like program for lawyers, scientists, and public health experts committed to combating climate change or advancing environmental justice; and

•Increase opportunities and public funding for transporting people and goods across the member states in vehicles powered by renewable energy.

Among the interstate parties, we could imagine agreements of this sort along the West Coast and Hawaii (“Pacifica”), a Mid-Atlantic (“Amtrak Corridor Agreement”),
and perhaps even the Upper Midwest, with the possibility that, down the road, each of those groupings adds new members or two or more of the groupings merge
(or essentially adopt reciprocal standards).

Note that an agreement of this sort seeks to capture spillover effects, as emissions of traditional pollutants and also greenhouse gases disperse across state lines.
But internalizing externalities is hardly the only reason to prefer interstate governance of this sort. Like-minded states all agreeing to tighten environmental
standards are, most assuredly, preempting races to the bottom vis-à-vis recruiting and retaining businesses and high-wealth families. There are also cross-border
efficiencies built into this particular agreement. Not every state college needs to invest in the same environmental programming. The different flagship universities
can agree to divvy up the specialties, allowing students from anywhere within the agreement to receive the benefits of in-state tuition (and, perhaps, admissions
preferences).201 Likewise, if all states benefit from tree reforestation efforts or wetlands expansion, but not all states have climates or terrain conducive to either
forests or wetlands, those inconducive states can still do their part by helping to underwrite those out-of-state projects.

2. Workers, Working Families, and Economic Justice Agreement

Participating states agree to act swiftly and decisively to improve the economic and social conditions
of work. Consistent with applicable federal laws, member states agree to:
•Set and enforce payment of a minimum wage (no less than twenty percent above the federal minimum) for all employees;

•Set and enforce a guarantee of up to two months’ paid leave for all employees eligible under current federal law for an unpaid leave of absence;

•Provide child-care tuition assistance (on a sliding scale) to all working parents earning less than twice the federal poverty line;

•Provide a guarantee of two years of tuition-free community college (anywhere within the zone of agreement) for all high school graduates; and a guaranteed two
years of additional tuition-free university education at all state schools within the agreement for those who maintain a B or higher grade while earning an
Associate’s degree at any community college within the agreement;

•Create a no-minimum basic (deposit-and-checking) public banking option, administered through each agreeing state’s DMV or other such widely accessible facility;
and

•Provide a one-time housing relocation assistance for any individual or family moving anywhere within the boundaries of the party states.

Similar in many respects to the Climate Agreement, the Economic Justice Agreement mitigates races to the bottom (while
simultaneously reducing welfare magnets) and captures cross-border efficiencies . This Agreement also
enjoys economies of scale , specifically in terms of spreading the benefits and pooling the risk of
economic downturn across a larger, more diversified political economy.
 OFF
CALAMITY K.
Extinction impacts justify genocide and interpersonal callousness---vote negative to
reject the plan’s naïve attempt to permanently contain existential risk.
Derek Woods 21, assistant professor of English at the University of British Columbia; and Joshua
Schuster, associate professor of English and core faculty member of the Centre for the Study of Theory
and Criticism at Western University, 12/08/2021, “Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk,”
Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk, https://muse.jhu.edu/book/97552, cc

Bostrom’s foundational 2002 essay on existential risk begins by setting the bar incredibly and unnecessarily high for a risk
to be existential according to his “typology of risk.”1 The definition al standard for a danger to be existential is “one where an adverse
outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential” (ER, 2). Bostrom
claims that a risk needs to be both global and terminal to constitute an existential risk. In this model, “global endurable risks” that would create

mass suffering but not lead to human extinction do not constitute true existential risks . In Bostrom’s typology,
planetary-scale historically violent events are consigned to the less risky category of “catastrophe.” A terminal existential event means either total ex- tinction or
some kind of irreversible change that would structurally prevent humans from achieving their collective potential. In this classification system,
genocide is by definition not an existential risk since it is only supposedly localized at the level of the “genos” or a kind of human life, not the whole of
humanity. According to Bostrom, “An example of a local terminal risk would be genocide leading to the annihilation of a people (this happened to several Indian

[sic] nations)” (ER, 2). World wars , the enslavement of vast proportions of the world, and bacterial and viral epidemics like the black plague and
AIDS (and COVID-19 ) also would not register in existential terms since neither the entirety of humanity nor the whole structure
that facilitates human potential or “Earth- originating intelligence” are at risk. As Bostrom states, “Tragic as such events are to the people immediately affected, in
the big picture of things—from the perspective of humankind as a whole—even the worst of these catastrophes are mere ripples on the surface of the great sea of
life” (ER, 2).

Here we pause already on the first pages of Bostrom’s essay to examine this controversial position. Perhaps the most startling as- pect of Bostrom’s initial essay on
existential risk is not its wide-eyed openness to any species-wide crisis, real or speculative, but his insis- tence on categorizing the large-scale violent
events of the past and present as not at all existential threats. By demarcating only extreme calamity to be truly existential in
scale, Bostrom’s claims for a strict existential threshold not only evinces obvious callousness , it sets the bar too
high to be a useful measure. This model regretfully but purposefully ignores the violence and suffering inflicted
on groups of people in which their existential condition is at stake. Bostrom assumes this violence has been and will
continue to be contained as “ endurable global risks since humanity could eventually recover” (2). This is dangerously close to rationalizing
epochal histories of the suffering of minoritized and oppressed peoples for the sake of purported definitional consistency since
something of “humanity” would survive. Furthermore, the threat of genocide and planetsweeping violence still hangs over everyone and
thus does bear directly on the existential condition of our species. While it may be the case that humanity as a
whole is not imperiled immediately in the event of a particular genocide, that humans can intentionally commit
such acts with explicit declarations that some lives are worth less than others indicates that there is nothing in the human
condition that prevents humans from utterly destroying each other’s humanity . Does it really need to be said that
the “logic” of genocide qualifies as extinctionary , even if the results are often “incomplete”? Why has Bostrom then not built this
recognition into his philosophy?

Genocides do precipitate species-wide existential threats because those who perpetrate them seek a permanent remaking of the
human condition , removing some ways of being human from the earth and installing a new way of being human according to new rules. Even that
description fits Bostrom’s definition of an existential risk that would lead to a permanent constraint on
humanity’s potential . As Hannah Arendt detailed, some humans can have their entire political being, their very access to the political, permanently
removed from them. To lose one’s political being is to lose one’s existential condition. “What totalitarian ideologies therefore aim at is not the transformation of the
outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society, but the transfor- mation of human nature itself. The concentration camps are the laboratories where
changes in human nature are tested.”2 There are no permanent, fail-safe solutions—political or technological— to prevent this kind of extreme violence used in

transforming hu- man nature by genocidal means. There is no political system to get everyone to agree and eschew violence,
and there is also no exis- tence without politics. Attempts to “ solve ” existential risks once and for all and institute a
predictable and control lable definition of the human (in effect abolishing the political) are precisely the origin of genocidal
logics . Since humans are inevitably risky to- ward each other, Arendt adamantly insisted that building durable public institutions ,
constructing worlds in common , and aspiring to shared long-term public goods are the only way to
mitigate the inherent vulnerabilities of the human condition .
Advantage
 Adv---Turn---1NC
1. Degrowth relies on global population control---it’s the only way to make a stagnant
economy avoid continually shrinking living standards
Leigh Phillips 19, science writer and political journalist published in Nature, the New Scientist, Science,
the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the New Republic, and Jacobin; Brussels-based beat reporter covering
European affairs, climate diplomacy, and economics and finance, 8/30/19, “The degrowth delusion,”
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/degrowth-delusion/ /jpb

Advocates for degrowth immediately bristle at being described as neo-malthusians . Most come to a
degrowth perspective out of a deep horror at the social injustice that results from environmental
problems (although it is also true that not a few actively hate humans, describing us as a 'virus on the
planet'). The Reverend Malthus for his part argued against relief for the poor because he believed that
the only check on the numbers of the poor in order to prevent overpopulation is either moral restraint
(not so much of the sexy time) or poverty. In general, degrowth advocates complain against their critics
that they never speak about overpopulation . They say that it is restraint on economic growth that
they want, not restraint on the number of humans.

But Mathus's ag ricultural production was simply a stand-in for resource use , and concern s about
overpopulation is merely a species of the wider concept of limits to growth . We can see this via a
thought experiment about what would happen if the degrowth vision came to pass , of limits to
growth but no limits to population growth .

Let us assume we have identified a maximum production of 'stuff' beyond which there is ecological
calamity . The global economy now only produces that amount of stuff and no more. Let us also assume
a perfectly egalitarian distribution of that stuff amongst the world population. But there is no restraint
on population growth .

What happens the next day? Some babies are born and all the 'stuff' again equally distributed , but this
time each person must have less 'stuff' that the previous day because the amount of stuff does not
grow but the number of people does.

As the population steadily increases, the amount of stuff each person has will decline, eventually to
zero , unless at some point before then, a limit on the number of people is imposed . So whether we
talk about too many people or too much stuff, we are actually talking about the same thing .

To recapitulate, as I put it in my book, Austerity Ecology (2015):

The caplitalist says: There may or may not be resource limits, but don't worry about them! Innovation
will come along in time! Full steam ahead!

The degrowther says : Innovation can't save us! There's an upper limit to what humans can have and/or
an upper limit on the number of humans. Slam on the breaks!
The socialist says : Through rational, democratic planning, let's make sure that the innovation arrives
so that we can move forward without inadvertently overproducing. And move forward we must, in
order to continue to expand human flourishing . So long as we do that, there in principle no limits .
Let's take over the machine, not turn it off!

That authorizes racist eugenics---seemingly neutral invocations of ‘population’ as an

environment impact launder white nationalist premises into climate responses,
enabling coercive reproductive interventions---reject it on face
Lisa Tilley 23, Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at SOAS University London; and Max Ajl,
associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment and a
postdoctoral fellow with the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University, May 2023, “Eco-socialism
will be anti-eugenic or it will be nothing: Towards equal exchange and the end of population,” Politics,
43(2), pp. 201-218 /jpb

As Bikrum Gill (2021: 1, this volume) argues, ‘race underwrites the distinctively exhaustive
society/nature relation fuelling . . . the productive excess and ecological exhaustion of the capitalist
world-system’. To accept and extend Gill’s claim, we argue that race underwrites many of the dominant
solutions and novel innovations of governance developed within the frame of environmentalism and in
response to the urgency of climate change , particularly in relation to the enduring construction of
‘overpopulation ’ as an environmental problem. To substantiate this, we revisit how ‘ population ’ –
already a term for racialised groups developed through colonial management – became re-articulated
with ‘environment’ in key formative publications in environmental studies due to the efforts of white
nationalists in the mid- to late-20th century. Absent any serious reckoning with this lineage , liberal
environmentalism continues to launder effectively white nationalist priorities into their policy-oriented
analyses. Here we trace this relationship from the white nationalist populationism of Garrett Hardin
through to the liberal environmentalist populationism of Partha Dasgupta.

We situate this population fix as the necessary ideological thimblerig that justifies a capitalist world-
system structured to extract value and resources from peoples of colour in the periphery – extraction
which super-exploits and degrades peripheral labour, social orders, and ecologies, and drives migration
to the core.1 Such flows are then remoulded and represented as natural facts and threatening forces to
northern audiences through populationist discourses to justify border violence and political exclusion
(see Turner and Bailey, 2021).

The first section of this article revisits ‘population’ as a racialised ‘managerial noun’ (Murphy, 2017: 135),
which prepares the ground for coercive reproductive interventions in the name of ecology . Here we
consider the synergy and reciprocity which connect ecofascism with liberalism through the foundational
white nationalist populationism of figures like Garrett Hardin. The second section uses the lens of
ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) to bring into focus the system of extraction and exploitation, which
connects environmental harm and reproductive injustice. The third focusses on some elements of an
anti-eugenic and anti-imperialist eco-socialism , using historical Third World documents that raised and
dismissed the population-development nexus, and contemporary struggles which are the mooring for a
committed programme towards global developmental convergence . We conclude by reasserting that
an anti-imperialist eco-socialism needs to be attuned to the teachings of reproductive justice
movements and resistant to creeping liberal eugenicism as much as to the overt eco-fascism which
has proved so deadly in recent years.
 Adv---1NC
2. Degrowth either reduces GDP too much which collapses scientific development and
social progress, or not enough which makes extinction inevitable through ecological
collapse and impoverishment in the meantime---it’s impossible to get right because
the entire notion of ‘material throughput’ is too vague to form the basis for good
policy
Kenta Tsuda 21, Post Graduate Teaching Assistant, Faculty of Laws, University College London,
March/April 2021, “Naïve Questions on Degrowth,” New Left Review, Vol. 128,
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii128/articles/kenta-tsuda-naive-questions-0n-degrowth /jpb

In addition to these methodological problems of legibility, degrowthers have to confront questions of

magnitude . They advocate shrinking gdp to slow material throughput. But addressing heterogeneous
forms of damage—say, pollock overfishing in the Gulf of Alaska, deforestation in the Amazon—is
unlikely to require the same reduction in throughput. The degrowth regime would need to be cautious,
reduc ing throughput to the threshold necessary to safeguard the most sensitive natural systems. What
is that threshold , and what gdp reduction do we need in order to achieve it? Does the answer to
these questions change, depending on when we start degrowing? What is the slope at our current point
on the growth-throughput curve?

The answers to these questions are vitally important , because any calibration error will have grave
consequences . Undershoot , and humanity experiences the strife of contraction but still ends up with
an uninhabitable, wasteland Earth . Overshoot and the Earth remains habitable , but with a
‘ deadweight loss ’ paid in unnecessary human suffering , mostly by the poor, and a foregone
alternative future of social investment and scientific developments. In other words, accepting for the
sake of argument degrowthers’ axiom that it is necessary to reduce throughput to save civilization, the
degree of reduction matters—a lot .

Degrowthers hope that a n empowered democratic state will shoulder the social costs of feeding,
sheltering, educating, investing and innovating, boosting its capacities through redistribution ,
expropriation of private wealth or by monetary policy. But even these efforts would require resources
that a state cannot substitute away from, like the coercive apparatus itself and the personnel to wield
it . In a contracting economy, the state would inevitably command a shrunken tax base , an emptier
treasury and tighter constraints on public financing. All else being equal, its capacity to act would be
weaker with each year of deepening contraction . There is no political means of escape from the
importance of magnitudes.

Ultimately, while ‘material throughput’ may be a fruitful category for thought experiments, it is deeply
flawed as a basis for effective environmental policymaking . Throughput is not directly accessible, and
available proxies appear so inadequate as to render meaningful empirical treatment impossible.
Degrowth theory is thin on questions of magnitude, both for throughput thresholds and degrowth
targets. In these circumstances, while degrowthers are free to elaborate upon the concept, others may
justly respond with the Latin adage, quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur: what is freely asserted —
without substantiating grounds— may be freely denied.
Transition
 Transition---Won’t Work---1NC
1. Every other country would backlash as hard as possible or cheat on any degrowth
agreement---causes escalating spirals of backlash and domestic revolutions
Kenta Tsuda 21, Post Graduate Teaching Assistant, Faculty of Laws, University College London,
March/April 2021, “Naïve Questions on Degrowth,” New Left Review, Vol. 128,
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii128/articles/kenta-tsuda-naive-questions-0n-degrowth /jpb

Domestic policy is only the start. Degrowthers do not directly address the issue of international
coordination, but presumably all large economies would need to contract in order to achieve the
required material-throughput reductions. Degrowth in one country is a non-starter . International
coordination of degrowth, however, threatens to reproduce the domestic coordination problem within
the anarchic dynamics of inter-state politics , where economic magnitude comes armed with military
power. It seems likely that every state will aim to maximize its relative position in a degrowth world—
that is, to degrow the least relative to other nations. Recognizing this problem, powerful states will
then aim to establish an international agreement—a Global Degrowth Pact, say—to constrain each
other. The Pact would include mechanisms to monitor and punish defection. Pact members would settle
on metrics against which national contraction could be measured. Where national stat istic s failed to
conform to the degrowth schedule, punishment would kick in —escalating economic sanctions , for
example.

So much for the Pact on paper. What about in practice? The Pact would need to define criteria for
degrowth to be applied to widely varying economies, with each government wanting the discretion to
define these for itself . Most would no doubt argue that their proportion of degrowth should be
reduced, invoking the degrowth principle of ‘ localized growth in the public interest ’, or other specific
national circumstances. In the absence of determinate public-interest criteria, each government’s claims
would be hard to contest. How much contraction is demanded of each nation is likely to take on an
arbitrary character , accommodating the will of the powerful rather than optimizing for achievement of
ecological targets .

Enforcement would remain a work in progress: states routinely distort national macroeconomic
indicators, but under the Pact, the incentives to do so would be magnified . Ministries might send
promising junior officials to prestigious universities to sharpen their facility in cooking the books .
Governments will deploy this expertise both to dissemble their own numbers and to scrutinize those of
other nations. The Pact could also face a further problem endemic to group coordination: defection .
Though degrowthers hope to see substantial international redistribution , this might fall short, leaving
poorer countries with a still-smaller tax base to alleviate unemployment, homelessness, disease and
famine. Their suffering populations might turn to revolution . Responding to popular demands, the new
gov ernment would modify the ancien régime’s degrowth commitments , or even repudiate the Pact
altogether. The larger Pact members might ignore the withdrawal of a microstate, but would be
unlikely to countenance the defection of a major power. The response of the ‘international degrowth
community’ would be swift and furious : a punitive, exogenously imposed degrowth .
2. Selfishness guarantees nobody buys it.
Dr. Rainer Zitelmann 23, Former Lecturing Professor at Freie Universität Berlin and former chief
editor of Ullstein-Propyläen, “In Defense of Capitalism,” https://www.ipgbook.com/in-defense-of-
capitalism-products-9781645720744.php,

critics of consumerism are well aware that barely anyone could or would want to live in a
Of course, such

way that would consistently align with the logic of their arguments. Tillessen openly admits: “But if we were to
follow all of these precepts, our lives would be nothing but root vegetables , sauerkraut and shriveled
apples , and unwashed , crumpled, second-hand clothes . e multiplicity and rigor of the requirements makes
a radically sustainable life seem like something we can neither achieve nor want to achieve . Living
exclusively in harmony with the principles of sustainability and only ever buying fair trade goods would set us back decades in
the progress of humanity, as would claiming not to use Google products, either directly or indirectly. And in the end, the
perceived magnitude of the personal sacrifices every one of us would have to make would be absurdly
disproportionate to the tiny contribution we could make to improving the world. So, most people
simply abandon the attempt to live more sustainably and carry on as they always have . Unfortunately.” 445

So Tillessen knows that there is no chance of people consistently changing in their lives as he so vehemently complains
about. But they can at least change small things, he says, such as riding a bicycle to work from April to September or only using the train rather than airplanes for
domestic travel. In addition, he suggests, we should all constantly measure our carbon footprint, “even though this is only one of many aspects toward achieving net
zero carbon emissions and completely ignores the issue of the social compatibility of our consumption.” 446

3. Degrowth is gulags. Nobody is buying it.

Corbin Barthold 20, Senior Litigation Counsel, the Washington Legal Foundation, 4/29/2020, “(Still)
Against Degrowth,” https://www.forbes.com/sites/wlf/2020/04/29/still-against-degrowth/?
sh=11cc0b105228, pacc

Conditions have improved not just in America, but almost everywhere. Global poverty has plummeted, at the
fastest rate ever, since 1978. The number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen by more than half, even as the
total number of people on earth has doubled.

And the dastardly neoliberal system doesn’t just save lives ; it makes life better . McKibben is free to opine that “a man with a
phone more or less permanently affixed to his palm is partway a robot already.” Much modern progressive thought stands on supposedly sophisticated people’s
fear of change. Normal people are not obliged to share such fears, and generally they don’t. Actually, change can be rather agreeable. Remember when laptops and
cell phones were “toys for the rich”?

Nor will normal people find much to like about life in a degrowth world. Aaron Timms recently reported in The New Republic on his
three-week stay at a French degrowth “summer school.” The “students” there lived in a commune without refrigeration , air conditioning ,
or Wi-Fi . They subsisted on leaves, legumes, grains, and bread. They entertained themselves by talking “long into the night about capitalism and interspecies
extinction.” At a seminar a Dutch man presented a vision of the degrowth lifestyle. He lavished praise on the Amish and said that “it would be great to have more

darkness.” Listeners from the Global South were not impressed. A woman from Chile upbraided the speaker for idealizing
the primitiveness of the past. “People in the developing world are living in that past,” she said; “it’s called poverty .” “I’ve heard all my
life about the need for personal limits and personal sacrifice,” an Indian Ph.D. student added; “ it
feels like a regression to go back to that world.”
The school’s only Chinese attendee told Timms that no one in China would accept the school’s living conditions. “Everyone in the country

wants to move to the city,” he said, “and everyone in the city wants to copy the West.”
The Chinese would know; they have tried degrowth on for size. Although capitalism has yet to produce the kind of ruin Paul Ehrlich is always
picturing, the Great Leap Forward , China’s sharp departure from capitalism, did so to the last degree. Communal farming and rural industrialization—
deindustrialization , really—created the worst famine there has been . Equally tragic was the Khmer Rouge’s
attempt to turn Cambodia into an autarkic socialist agrarian utopia . This is not to say that every rigid environmentalist is an
eco-fascist. (McKibben, for his part, is laudably clear-eyed about the failures of Soviet autocracy and central planning.) It is simply to note that, on the few

occasions it has been implemented, abrupt, widespread, top-down degrowth has been a disaster .

4. It immediately starves 80% of the world population.

David Harvey 19, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology & Geography at the Graduate Center of the
City University of New York, 12/19/2019, “Anti-Capitalist Chronicles: Global Unrest,”
https://www.democracyatwork.info/acc_global_unrest?fbclid=IwAR1oGRcltaL_oI2N1ixYuAS-cT-
HhjF7cErSXBswcWPAvkNmPVaDndYU1xQ, Stras

So that is, if you like, one half of the problem. But the other part of the problem is this: that in Marx's time if there was a sudden
collapse of capitalism, most people in the world would be able to feed themselves and reproduce. Because most
people were self-sufficient in their local area with the kinds of, you know, things they needed to live on – in other words, people
could put breakfast on their table irrespective of what was going on in the global economy. Right now
that's no longer the case .
Most people in the United States, but increasingly, of course, in Europe, and in Japan, and now increasingly in China, and
India, and Indonesia, and everywhere are dependent entirely upon the delivery of food to them, so that they get the food from
the circulation of capital. Now, in Marx's time, like I say, that would have not been true but now this is a situation where probably around 70 or
maybe 80 percent of the world's people are dependent upon the circulation of capital in order to assure their
food supply , in order to deliver them the kinds of fuels which are going to allow them mobility, going to actually deliver
them all the necessities to be able to reproduce their daily life.

So this is a, I think, a situation which I can really summarize in the following kind of way: that capital right now is too big to fail . We
cannot imagine a situation where we would shut down the flow of capital, because if we shut down
the flow of capital , 80 percent of the world's population would immediately starve , would be rendered
immobile , would not be able to reproduce themselves in very effective ways. So we cannot afford any kind of sustained attack upon capital
accumulation. So the kind of fantasy that you might have had – socialists, or communists, and so on, might have had back in 1850, which is that
well, okay, we can destroy this capitalist system and we can build something entirely different – that is an impossibility right now. We have to
keep the circulation of capital in motion, we have to keep things moving, because if we don't do that, we are actually stuck with a situation in
which, as I've said, almost all of us would starve.
2NC
Socialist Growth
 Perm Do Both---2NC
1) CENTRALIZATION: degrowth would decentralize and localize production, whereas
socialism would centralize it---that’s key to solve environmental collapse
Güney Işıkara 23, Clinical Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies at NYU; and Özgür Narin, Assistant
Professor of Economics at Ordu University in Ordu, Türkiye, 7/1/23, “Degrowth and Socialism: Notes on
Some Critical Junctures,” https://monthlyreview.org/2023/07/01/degrowth-and-socialism-notes-on-
some-critical-junctures/ /jpb

(Re)localization of production is one of the fundamental principles of degrowth, defined as a

“ trajectory where the throughput (energy, materials and waste flows) of an economy decreases while
welfare, or well-being, improves.”19 This implies meeting local needs by local production, or shorter
production-trade-consumption circuits.20 What is at stake here is, arguably, more than the mere reduction of energy and
waste associated with trade resulting from specialization and division of labor. It is connected to the
equally important emphasis degrowth puts on decentralized structures and horizontal organization ,
which are assumed to be more compatible with local, small-scale production .

The first issue here is the problematization of scale rather than the underlying social relations. Instead of asking what set of class, property, and
power relations give rise to unwarranted hierarchies attributed to large-scale organization, the latter is taken to be self-constituted. It is,
however, worth remembering Murray Bookchin’s call for caution when it comes to presuming a direct relationship between scale and
hierarchy: “Decentralism, small-scale communities, local autonomy, even mutual aid and communalism are not intrinsically ecological or
emancipatory. Few societies were more decentralized than European feudalism, which in fact was structured around small-scale communities,
mutual aid, and the communal use of land. Local autonomy was highly prized and autarchy formed the economic key to feudal communities.
Yet few societies were more hierarchical.”21 Any given set of simple or complex technologies, small- or large-scale organizations, or local,
regional, national, and even global structures, unspecified for social context and content, is necessarily either oppressive and exploitative on
the one hand, or emancipatory on the other.

The second question that arises from a potentially extensive localization of production is that of the productivity
loss associated with diminishing scale. Although this might be welcomed by degrowth thinkers at large since
productivity and large-scale production are grasped as intrinsically related to the mindset of capital
accumulation , we insist on distinguishing labor productivity from various notions of efficiency defined by
criteria peculiar to capital accumulation. Socialism embraces an intended increase of labor
productivity , and the development of productive forces in general .22 A reduction in labor productivity conflicts with
another central objective of both the degrowth and socialist imaginary, namely, the shortening of the workday necessary for the reproduction
of life.

The latter was discussed by Marx as the realm of necessity upon which the true realm of freedom can arise, and as the sphere of heteronomy,
which cannot be abolished in any social formation, but can be organized “with the maximum efficiency and the least expenditure of effort and
resources” in order to assure “the programmed and planned production of everything necessary to individual and social life.”23 According to
Gorz and another pioneer of degrowth, Ivan Illich, the utmost expansion of the sphere of autonomy is conditioned by the use of complex tools
and advanced technologies in the sphere of heteronomy.24 It is striking that this clear emphasis of two of the most influential degrowth
pioneers escapes the attention of contemporary degrowth advocates.

Once the matter is grasped in terms of this dual conception of labor, and the intrinsic relationship between necessity and freedom, it becomes
clear that what matters is the social relations of production that condition the character, quality, and relative importance of the two spheres.
The main issue with the emphasis laid on localization is not the economic, geographical, or administrative
scale. It is rather the one-sidedness of the argument in most of its forms.

Localness can only become an emancipatory virtue if it is nested in a broader, interwoven structure that is
regulated and coordinated by collective bodies of workers . Interdependence of localities under
socialism would not imply a power asymmetry or hierarchy between them, which is characteristic of capitalism, but
rather represent the source of their collective power. For instance, anticipated disruptions in food production
and projected shifts in agricultural practices due to the planetary crisis would not be met by local self-
sufficiency under socialism, but rather, by a condensation of coordination at higher levels of planning ,
where a more global picture is available. The same can be said for the expansion and scaling up of
agroecological food systems , ecological restoration , and earthcare labor .

2) PLANNING: degrowth actively rejects central planning because markets are still the
coordinating actors in the economy
Güney Işıkara 23, Clinical Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies at NYU; and Özgür Narin, Assistant
Professor of Economics at Ordu University in Ordu, Türkiye, 7/1/23, “Degrowth and Socialism: Notes on
Some Critical Junctures,” https://monthlyreview.org/2023/07/01/degrowth-and-socialism-notes-on-
some-critical-junctures/ /jpb

The dialogue, or controversy, depending on how one looks at it, between advocates of degrowth and
socialism over the past years has brought about a partial convergence expressed in recent synthesis-
seeking contributions.1 At the same time, salient differences between the two currents, highly
heterogeneous within themselves, still persist . These pertain to their imaginaries on how to overcome
capitalism and what to replace it with, which can easily be seen even in the respective nomenclatures
they employ, namely a postcapitalist future of degrowth versus socialism .

From a certain viewpoint, capitalism can be seen as generalized commodity production where individual
production units make independent decisions regarding what and how much to produce, which
combination of inputs and technologies to employ, how to organize the production process, and so
forth. As individual productive units have no choice but to relate to the rest of the picture through their
products, value serves as the common ground where commodities are equated in terms of the quantity
of abstract labor they contain, and where emerging profit differentials give cues on the rate and
direction of new investment. The pursuit of profit constitutes the regulating principle , and production
at the aggregate level is regulated as each excessive expansion or contraction sets in motion forces that
counteract the deviation.

Exploitation, reification of social relations, commodity fetishism, as well as an intensifying disruption of

the metabolic relationship with nonhuman natures are integral parts of the (re)production process
outlined above in a nutshell. They all exist in embryonic form in the individual production unit in the
form of surplus value extraction, or exploitation of labor . Thus, a systemic alternative to capitalism
must arise upon different social relations , and offer a set of mechanisms and processes to regulate
and coordinate the complex and interdependent set of activities to reproduce life in its various
dimensions.

Planning is one such alternative with a long history of theoretical discussions as well as practical
applications at different scales. Until recently, however, the degrowth literature had been keeping a
clear distance from the idea of planning. Instead, the transformation ahead used to be outlined in terms
of what one of the sources of inspiration for degrowth, André Gorz, called “ non-reformist reforms ,”
today manifested in proposals such as the provision of u niversal b asic i ncome, reduced working
hours , public finance, reclaiming and expanding the realm of the commons and sharing, localizing
production, and so on.2 The question of their compatibility with accumulation-driven commodity
production aside, these reforms do not even remotely offer an alternative to the coordinating role of
markets in production .

Planning as a radically different way of organizing and coordinating production and social reproduction
has rarely been engaged with in past degrowth literature. This has been changing with more radical
degrowth thinkers increasingly taking up the question of planning explicitly. In what follows, we focus on
matters pertaining to planning which constitute, in our opinion, critical nodes of the discussion.
 Solves the Case---2NC
The counterplan solves so much better than the plan. Several reasons:
1) NUANCE: Degrowth is a blunt inflexible cap on economic activity that can’t
distinguish harmful from beneficial growth. It’s so much easier to just rationally plan
the economy to wind down harmful activities like fossil fuel extraction while allowing
beneficial growth
Güney Işıkara 23, Clinical Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies at NYU; and Özgür Narin, Assistant
Professor of Economics at Ordu University in Ordu, Türkiye, 7/1/23, “Degrowth and Socialism: Notes on
Some Critical Junctures,” https://monthlyreview.org/2023/07/01/degrowth-and-socialism-notes-on-
some-critical-junctures/ /jpb

What is at stake in planning is not abstract, alienated labor measured by monetary categories peculiar to
capitalism, but labor producing use values in conscious , voluntary, and planned rotation. This is one of
the distinctive features of socialism vis-à-vis diverse social imaginaries, which do not clearly aim to
abolish capitalist commodity production. It is substantially different from demanding tax cuts (or tax
raises for the rich ), universal basic income , or constraints to commodification from an alienated,
sublime authority. There is no ambiguity resulting from mystified categories of production and
distribution (value and price; wage, interest, rent, and profit; productive and unproductive sectors ; and
so on).

The process of planning could be steered by a structure of nested councils, which connect various
collective bodies from lower to higher levels of overview, where workers actively shape and validate
diverse spatial and sectoral aspects of the overall plan. The aggregate use of energy and matter at any
given time can be managed by constraints determined in a recursive fashion comprising bottom-up and
top-down feedback mechanisms. These constraints would result from political processes of deliberation
in the light of the scientific knowledge of the fullest possible range of consequences of our decisions, the
pursuit of the precautionary principle (since such knowledge is characterized by uncertainties), the
complexity of ecosystems , and the multiplicity of the evaluation criteria employed.7

In socialist planning, the fact that social labor will no longer be wasted in branches such as marketing
and advertising, consulting, and financial services; accumulation strategies such as planned
obsolescence and food waste will cease to exist ; ecologically destructive industries (production of
fossil fuels, arms, private jets, sport utility vehicles, and so forth) will be massively scaled down or
curtailed entirely , combined with the complete abolition of unemployment and participation of all
working citizens in producing and providing essentials discussed above, implies that the labor time
associated with the realm of necessity will be significantly less than eight hours a day.

Depending on how narrowly or broadly the category of “essentials” is defined, its share in the sphere of
production is roughly in the interval of 45 to 70 percent, with significant variation across countries.8
Thus, a direct implication of conscious steering of production is a significant reduction in the
throughput of matter and energy associated with the cessation or phasing out of the activities
mentioned above. This is a desired and expected outcome common to imaginaries of degrowth and
socialism . A line of demarcation , however, persists when it comes to the question of institutionalizing
degrowth : “Growth in the material standard of living means , well, growth in the use of materials (and
energy). Whether the economy that produces such growth is capitalist, precapitalist, or socialist makes
no difference.”9

We believe that a substantially higher amount of free time and the social and communal organization of
reproductive labor, combined with the universal access to essential products in the broad sense (high-
quality health, education, public transport, cultural and informational services, and parks and recreation
facilities, in addition to other material aspects of life), do constitute a growth in the material standard
of living for the vast majority of the global population. This is the instance where degrowth advocates ,
by adopting a notion of growth indifferent to the social form of organization , blur the relationship
between quantity and quality, or perhaps, suppress the question of quality and reduce the discussion
to the quantitative dimension .

The arg ument here is not that a socialist society would produce more of everything , and yet still not
be ecologically destructive due to its qualitative distinction. The degrowth literature itself clearly
argues that the question is not “more or less?” but rather “ more of what and less of what?”
Furthermore, it is beyond doubt that in some parts of the world most production activities need to be
massively expanded to ensure a decent living standard, while in some other places, it is a question of
modifying the scale, direction, and composition of production. In any event, however, it entails
abolishing the capitalist mode of production in favor of a social formation where social (re)production
is planned and steered consciously by empowered workers and citizens themselves. As admitted by its
advocates, degrowth is a project tailored for the Global North where an imperial mode of living prevails.
It is not a desirable and viable path for the Global South .10

2) FORGOING PROGRESS: socialist planning is the best way to resolve the global
environmental crisis by channeling investment and progress towards beneficial
technologies---degrowth locks in warming and every other environment impact---and
it’s mutually exclusive because the CP requires growth, we just make sure it’s the good
kind!
Leigh Phillips 19, science writer and political journalist published in Nature, the New Scientist, Science,
the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the New Republic, and Jacobin; Brussels-based beat reporter covering
European affairs, climate diplomacy, and economics and finance, 8/30/19, “The degrowth delusion,”
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/degrowth-delusion/ /jpb
We are standing still. That was the conclusion of BP's chief economist upon the release of its latest statistical review of energy—the annual
report that all global warming specialists hold as the gold standard of climate and energy data. He was referring to a chart that stopped him
cold. It showed how in 2018 , the non-fossil share of the global energy mix was the same as it was in 1998 , the
year the UN Kyoto Protocol was agreed.

More than two decades of climate diplomacy, carbon pricing, and, in recent years, a record build-out of
variable renewable energy such as wind and solar, with very little so far to show for it all . We have barely moved.
The democratic socialist explanation for this state of affairs should be fairly straightforward. If the market is left to
its own devices, there will continue to be an incentive to produce any commodity so long as it is
profitable, regardless of what we know of the harm that good or service may inflict . Fossil fuels are
perhaps the contemporary example ne plus ultra of such irrational production .

Meanwhile, if we know something to be beneficial, so long as that good or service is not profitable, or even
insufficiently profitable, there is no incentive for it to be produced , again outside of some non-market
intervention. Here, the most acute example of this form of irrational production lies in the realm of public health, where the retreat by
large pharmaceutical firms some three decades ago from research, development and production of new classes of antibiotic due to their poor
return on investment has threatened humanity with the rise of multi-drug resistant bacteria. Researchers and public health officials warn that
we may be entering a 'post-antibiotic era' of medicine, in which even minor surgery becomes impossible, and infection-related mortality rates
return to those of Victorian times.

With respect to climate change, we see, for example, market actors cherry pick the most profitable locations
for charging stations instead of the nationwide network needed to overcome the range anxiety of
motorists. The Norwegian government, unwilling to wait an eternity for Elon Musk to do the job, simply built such a
network themselves . Together with a raft of smart incentives and perks for electric vehicle drivers like free parking, such
regulatory and public infrastructural intervention in the country have achieved as of this year a market
penetration rate for clean cars of 60 percent of all new vehicles sold. They expect to have completely
decarbonized passenger vehicles by the middle of the next decade, years ahead of schedule .

Similarly, nuclearpower has an emissions intensity as low as that of onshore wind (global mean of 12g CO2eq/kWh
vs 11g CO2eq/kWh, according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) but unlike wind can power hospitals 24/7. It should
be the backbone of any clean transition , and indeed three of the four possible Illustrative Pathways that the IPCC's latest report
uses to illustrate possible strategies to avoid more than 1.5°C of warming assume between a 150% and a 500% increase in the share of primary
energy from nuclear by mid-century (one keeps nuclear at about the same). However,
the up-front capital costs of
conventional nuclear make it unattractive to risk-averse market actors without eye-watering public
subsidies , underwriting and price guarantees, as with the private finance boondoggle of Hinkley C. Advanced nuclear, with its ability to use
nuclear waste as fuel and meltdown-proof passive safety designs, suffers from a related market challenge. To take next- gen eration
reactors from concept through to commercialization need s an industrial policy to support research,
development and demonstration and to shape and create markets for them .
The fastest historical declines in the carbon intensity of energy of any economy was France's nuclearization of its electric grid—a 4.5% annual
reduction rate. This is not far from the Stockholm Resilience Centre's 'carbon law' of a 5% annual mitigation rate up to 2050 needed to avoid
dangerous global warming. But the French effort was a centralized, public-sector 'grand projet d'état' performed in the dying days of the post-
war Keynesian consensus in the late 70s and early 80s prior to the imposition of European energy-sector liberalization.

Thus if the source of all environmental challenges is the result of the market's irrational production
incentives or lack of incentives, then to exit from the current impasse with respect to climate change and
other environmental challenges—from nitrogen pollution to biodiversity loss —we must also exit from
a laissez-faire approach.

Market-based solutions, such as carbon taxes , emissions trading, feed-in tariffs and carbon offsets have had minimal
impact compared to fiat regulation , work too slowly, do not work, or have counterproductive and
frequently socially unjust outcomes. These may be a species of regulatory intervention in the market, but of the most attenuated
sort, originally crafted by market advocates precisely to avoid public spending and the state 'picking winners' as much as possible.
It is often assumed that opposition to carbon pricing comes from the 'anti-tax' right. But working class opposition is no case of 'false
consciousness' whipped up by climate-sceptic conservatives. Carbon
pricing immediately alienates working families who
have suffered from four decades of stagnating incomes and the ambient terror of deindustrialisation. It
is true that fee-and-dividend versions of carbon taxation (in which rebates are sent to low-income households)
ameliorates the problem, but they do not eliminate it. Any social justice perspective should start from a
foundational understanding that households need clean energy options to be cheaper than fossil fuels
currently are, not for fossil fuels to be more expensive than clean energy options currently are. Carbon
pricing is also indifferent to and has no strategy for how deal with the potential job losses in the fossil-fuel sector and those many sectors that
would be negatively impacted by higher prices for fossil energy, from fertilizer, steel and cement production to aviation and shipping.

No, rather than expecting the market to solve a problem the market created, the solution is a return to
economic planning.

A Green New Deal is, in principle, precisely that. It is an industrial policy on a grand scale in service of full employment and raising living
standards. It just happens to achieve this via the technology-switching and infrastructure buildout needed to decarbonize the economy.

Yet at the very moment that the socialist case for planning should be at its most obvious , sections of
the environmental community have embraced a revival of 'limits to growth' philosophy , or
Malthusianism —an ideology the left battled against dating back to Friedrich Engels' arguments against its eponymous founder, Thomas
Malthus—this time going by the name of 'degrowth '.

Rallying under the slogan that you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet, the philosophy has been articulated in slightly
varying forms by academics such as Jason Hickel , Giorgos Kallis , Kate Raworth and Tim Jackson, and builds on the work of earlier thinkers
such as Serge Latouche, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Herman Daly, E.F. Schumacher and the Club of Rome's 1972 Limits to Growth report. But
it has also been embraced by green NGOs such as Greenpeace, and America's leading climate campaign group 350.org.

Rather than viewing the market's irrational production as the source of environmental challenges, the
degrowth position views the source to be economic growth .

Even some Green New Deal advocates get a little confused when they call for an end to growth as well . (This
is an odd position, as it is quite difficult to imagine how trillions in infrastructure spending that created

sufficient additional jobs to soak up all unemployment and significantly push up wages would not result
in economic growth ).

The degrowth argument says that growth drives energy demand up, thus making it harder and perhaps
even impossible to decarbonize the economy. But a reduction in material throughput would reduce
energy demand , thus making the clean transition more achievable. And to reduce material throughput,
we have to reduce aggregate economic activity .

However, what is foreclosed by the notion of degrowth is the possibility of socialist growth : a boundless
—if carefully planned—increase in the creation of new value that does not undermine the ecosystem
services upon which human flourishing depends.

And because degrowth rejects the notion of socialist economic growth , it commits three grave errors.

First, degrowth lets off the hook the real source of the problem , thus condemning civilisation to
dangerous climate change and parallel ecological threats .
Second, degrowth unwittingly endorses what would be an imposition of austerity on the Western
working class far beyond anything a Thatcher, Cameron or May could imagine, this time in the name of the
planet.

And, worst of all, degrowth would bring an end to progress itself —the steady expansion of freedom for
all humanity .

It also solves every specific impact to the 1AC:

1) WARMING: degrowth locks in catastrophic climate change even in the best case
Robert Pollin 19, Distinguished University Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Political
Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, June 2019, “Advancing a Viable
Global Climate Stabilization Project: Degrowth versus the Green New Deal,” Review of Radical Political
Economics, 51(2), pp. 311-319 /jpb

In the name of fairness, one could, with good reason, insist that the U nited States and other rich
countries be required to bring down per capita CO2 emissions to the same level as low-income
countries. We could also insist that high-income people—regardless of their countries of residence—be
permitted to produce no more CO2 emissions than anyone else.

There is a solid ethical case for such measures. But there is also absolutely no chance that they will be
implemented . Given the climate stabilization imperative facing the global economy, there is simply
no cushion of time for investing huge global efforts fighting for unattainable goals . Consider the US
case: on grounds both of ethics and realism, it will be much more constructive to require that, in
addition to bringing its own emissions down to about 6 tons per capita within 20 years, the U nited
States must also assist other countries to finance and bring to scale their own transformative clean-
energy projects.

The Problems with Degrowth

As I emphasize at the outset, degrowth proponents are making valuable contributions by addressing,
broadly, many of the problems with economic growth. But on the specific issue of climate change ,
degrowth does not provide anything close to a viable stabilization framework . Consider some very
simple arithmetic. Following the IPCC, we know that global CO2 emissions need to fall from the current
level of 32 billion tons to 20 billion tons with in 20 years. Now assume that global GDP contracts by 10
percent over the next two decades, following a degrowth scenario. That would entail a reduction of
global GDP four times larger than what we experienced over the 20 07 –2009 financial crisis and Great
Recession. In terms of CO2 emissions, the net effect of this 10 percent GDP contraction, considered on
its own, would be to push emissions down by precisely 10 percent —that is, from 32 billion tons to 29
billion. So, the global economy would still not come close to bringing emissions down to 20 billion
tons by 2040.

Clearly then, even under a degrowth scenario, the overwhelming factor pushing emissions down will not
be a contraction of overall GDP but massive growth in energy efficiency and clean renewable energy
investments (which, for accounting purposes, will contribute toward increas ing GDP) along with
similarly dramatic cuts in fossil-fuel production and consumption (which will register as reducing GDP).
Moreover, any global GDP contraction would result in huge job losses and declines in living standards
for working people and the poor. Global unemployment rose by over 30 million during the Great
Recession. I have not seen any degrowth proponent present a convincing argument as to how we could
avoid a severe rise in mass unemployment if GDP were to fall twice as much as during 2007–2009.

For nearly 40 years now, the gains from economic growth in virtually all countries have persistently
favored the rich. Nevertheless, the prospects for reversing inequality in all countries will be far greater
when the overall economy is growing , than when the rich are fighting everyone else for shares of a
shrinking pie. Even thinking in strategic terms alone, attempting to implement a degrowth agenda
would have the effect of render ing the global clean-energy project utterly unrealistic politically .

If we are serious about mounting a viable global climate stabilization project, we clearly have no time
to lose in seeking to build a broadly conceived degrowth movement that, for the reasons outlined,
cannot succeed in actually stabilizing the climate . This is even more emphatically the case when a fair
and workable approach to climate stabilization lies right before us via the G reen New Deal.

2) DISEASE: 1AC internal link ev says it’s caused by deforestation, solved by socialist
planned growth, and intensive farming to satisfy meat demand---the CP solves all
meat demand by transitioning to cultured meat that has minimal environmental
footprint and no need for antibiotics---DROPPED by the 2AC!
3) AI: their ev says AI extinction risk is driven by alignment with capitalist market
values. HELLO. Socialist growth bans that. The CP subordinates AI to the mission of
maximizing true social utility, which is independently a reason that planning works
perfectly!
Nick Dyer-Witheford 13, associate professor at the University of Western Ontario in the Faculty of
Information and Media Studies, 2013, “Red Plenty Platforms,” Culture Machine, Vol. 14,
https://culturemachine.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/511-1153-1-PB.pdf /jpb
Yet perhaps the idea of everyone watching mobile screens lest they miss, not a Facebook poke, but voting the seventh iteration of the
participatory plan, duplicates unattractive features of everyday life in high-tech capitalism. So we might speculate further, and suggest that
what decentralized collective planning really needs is not just council media but communist agents:
communist software agents . Software agents are complex programmed entities capable of acting ‘with a
certain degree of autonomy… on behalf of a user (or another program)’ (Wikipedia, 2013b: np). Such agents manifest ‘goal-
direction, selection, prioritization and initiation of tasks’; they can activate themselves, assess and react to context,
exhibit aspects of artificial intelligence, such as learning, and can communicate and cooperate with other agents (Wikipedia,
2013b: np).

Commercially, software ‘bidding agents’ are able to consistently outperform human agents so that ‘Humans are
on the verge of losing their status as the sole economic species on the planet’ (Kephart, 2002: 7207). The ability of such entities to create
‘perfect competition’ in electronic markets makes them a favorite of Austrian School-influenced economists (Mirowski, 2002). As
preprogrammed buyers and sellers capable of processing vast amounts of market data, software agents
have transformed electronic commerce because of their ability to quickly search the Internet, identify
best offers, aggregate this information for users, or, indeed, make purchases autonomously. However, the
arena in which such agents truly excel is in the financial sector , where high frequency trading is entirely
dependent on software ‘bots’ capable of responding to arbitrage possibilities in milliseconds .

One can’t help but ask, however,what if software agents could manifest a different politics? Noting that Multi-Agent
System models can be thought of as a means to answer problems of resource allocation, Don Greenwood (2007: 8) has suggested they
could be geared toward solving the ‘socialist calculation problem’ . As planning tools, Multi-Agent
Systems, he notes, have the advantage over real markets that ‘the goals and constraints faced by agents
can be pre-specified by the designer of the model ’ (Greenwood, 2007: 9). It is possible to design agents with
macro-level objectives that involve more than just the maximization of individual self-interest; two
‘welfare’ principles that economists have experimented with incorporating are equality and environmental protection
sustainability .

Perhaps, then, we should envisage the repeated decision-cycles of democratic planning as being, not just debated and
deliberated in social media, but partially delegated to a series of communist software agents , who absorb the
attentional demands of the process, running at the pace of high-speed trading algorithms, scuttling
through data rich networks, making recommendations to human participants (‘if you liked the geo-engineering
plus nanotechnology but no-nukes five year plan, you might like…’), communicating and cooperating with each other at a
variety of levels, preprogrammed to specific thresholds and configurations of decision (‘ keep CO2 emissions

below 300 parts a million , increase incomes of the lower quintile… and no rise in labour hours necessary
for a cup of coffee’). In the age of autonomous machines, this may be what a workers’ council would look like.
Automata, Copies and Replicators

Yet, is planning necessary at all? Centralized, neo-socialist planning schemes and decentralized, networked councilist versions both see computers as calculative instruments, a means to measure, particularly to measure work: their aim is to abolish capitalist exploitation by returning to workers the full worth of their labour time. There is, however, another line of communist futurism which understands computers not so much as instruments of planning as machines of abundance. There are, we might say, two ways to beat Hayek’s capitalist catallaxy. One is to out-calculate
it. The other is to explode it: scarcity is replaced with plenitude, ending the need for either prices or planning. For Marxists, ‘plenty’ yields the transition from the ‘lower’ phase of communism, which still must grapple with problems of scarcity, to the higher phase of ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’. A popular metaphor for the technological conditions necessary for this latter moment is the Star Trek ‘replicator’, which automatically, and with a limitless energy, provides for human needs (Fraise, 2011). This essay is not going to adjudicate
what level of needs satisfaction should be considered ‘enough’, or what combination of growth and redistribution is adequate to attain it: this surely would be the issue facing the collective planners of the future. It will, however, identify three cybernetic tendencies that point towards the ‘higher’ phase of communism: automation, copying and peer-to-peer production.

Automation has been the most central to the communist imagination. Its classic statement is the now-famous ‘Fragment on Machines’ in Grundrisse, where, looking at the industrial factory of his age, Marx (1973: 690-711) predicts capital’s tendency to mechanize production will, by destroying the need for waged labour, blow up the entire system. The founder of cybernetics, Norbert Weiner (1950), saw its main consequence to be the computerized elimination of jobs. This digital ‘end of work’ thesis has been developed very bluntly by thinkers such as Andre Gorz (1985)
and Jeremy Rifkin (1995). Over the late twentieth century, however, capital has notably avoided this scenario. Far from totally automating work, it has both sought out global reservoirs of cheap labour, and followed a ‘march through the sectors’ that pushes a moving front of labour commodification through agriculture, industry and services.

Since 2000, however, the automation debate has been renewed. Continuing reductions in computing costs, improvements in vision and touch technologies, the military investments of the 9/11 wars in drones and autonomous vehicles, and wage demands by workers in China, India and other sources of formerly cheap labour has spurred a ‘new wave of robots… far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other heavy manufacturers’, more flexible and easier to train, that are now replacing workers not just in manufacturing but in distribution,
circulation and service processes such as warehousing, call centres and even elder care (Markoff, 2012: np). Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (2011: 9), economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have sounded an alarm that the ‘pace and scale of this encroachment into human skills’ is now reaching a new level with ‘profound economic implications.’ These concerns are being echoed by mainstream economists (Krugman, 2012).

Within capital, automation threatens workers with unemployment or production speed-up. If, however, there were no dominant structural tendency for increases in productivity to lead to unemployment or greater output without reduction in labour time, automation could systematically yield to less time spent in formal workplaces. In a communist framework that protected access to the use value of goods and services, robotization creates the prospect of a passage from the realm of necessity to freedom. It reintroduces the goal – closed down both within the
Stakhanovite Soviet experiment and in the wage-raising trades unionism of the West – of liberating time from work, with all this allows both in terms of human self-development and communal engagement.

Juliet Schor’s (1991) estimate, that if American workers had taken gains won from productivity increases since the 1950s, not in wages but in time off, they would by 2000 have been working a twenty hour week. It indicates the scale of possible change. Proposals for a ‘basic income’ have recently figured in left politics. There are certainly criticisms to be made of these insofar as they are advanced as a reformist strategy, with the risk of becoming merely a rationalized welfare provision supporting neoliberal precarity. But it would be hard to envision a meaningful communist
future that did not institute such measures to acknowledge the reductions in socially necessary labour time made possible by advances in science and technology, destroying Hayek’s calculation problem by progressively subtracting from it the capitalist ur-commodity, labour power.

If robots undermine the centrality of the wage relation, the Internet presents a parallel possibility, priceless goods. Mainstream economists have long recognized the anomalous features of nonrivalrous informational goods, which can be endlessly copied at almost zero cost, all but instantaneously circulated, and shared without detracting from their use value. As intellectual and cultural production have become increasingly digitized, these tendencies to make the Internet ‘a place of plenty’ (Siefkes, 2012: np) have become increasingly problematic for the price system.
Capital has struggled to maintain the commodity form in cyberspace, either by attempts to enforce intellectual property, or by treating informational flows as advertising accelerators for other commodities. Nonetheless, the drift to software decommodification has proven ineradicable, and been intensified by the capacities to conduct this circulation outside of centrally controlled servers, through peer-to-peer networks. Piracy, which now accounts for the majority of digital music, games, film and other software distributed in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe
(Karaganis et al., 2011) is the clandestine and criminalized manifestation of this tendency; and the free and open source software movement its organized expression.

The latter has been the focus of interest on the libertarian left since the inauguration of the Free Software Foundation (by Richard Stallman in 1984), which released code under a General Public License (GPL), guaranteeing users the freedom to repurpose, study, customize, redistribute, and change it. As Jacob Rigi (2012) observes, the so-called ‘copyleft’ clause in the GPL, which requires that any program using GPL code is itself issued under GPL, is a ‘dialectical negation’ of copyright, because it simultaneously preserves and abolishes property in software, formulating ‘an
allinclusive global property right’. This development was elaborated by Linus Torvalds’ organization in the early 1990s of the online voluntary collective cooperative method for open-source software production. As Rigi (2012) says, the combination of GPL license and Linux-style open source collective programming ‘represents the gist of the P2P [peer-to-peer] mode of production’; he sees in this an instantiation of Marx’s ‘higher communism’, acknowledging the collective nature of scientific knowledge, and rejecting any scarcitybased demand for ‘equivalence between
contribution to social production and share of social product’.

Open source software has attained considerable practical success (Weber, 2004), while P2P production has developed in various directions, with its political inflection ranging from libertarian capitalism, to liberal views of the new ‘wealth of networks’ (Benkler, 2006) as supplementary to and compatible with markets, to specifically communist versions, such as the Oekonux project (Meretz, 2012), with the ecumenical Foundation for P2P Alternatives (Bauwens, 2012) working across the entire spectrum. However, even if one regards open source and P2P as a germinal of a
new mode of production, difficulties in cultivating this seed have become apparent. One such difficulty is the relative ease with which capital has incorporated this seed as a contribution to downstream commodification processes: indeed, the whole tendency of Web 2.0 could be said to be the containment of ‘new’ P2P production and circulation methods firmly within the shell of capitalist ‘old’ commodity forms. The other issue has been what Graham Seaman (2002) terms the ‘washing machine problem’ – the gulf between virtual and material production, cornucopian
software and industrial production, which seems to restrict P2P practices, however progressive, to a small subset of total economic activity.

Over the last decade, however, this gap has been narrowed by the rapid development of forms of computer controlled microfabrication devices: additive 3D printing is the most famous, but there are a variety of others, including subtractive micro-mills and other miniaturized and digitized engineering devices that put industrial capacities within the grasp of ‘hack labs’, households and small communities. These have provided the basis for an emerging ‘maker’ movement, which links these digital manufacturing units to the networked circulation of design, suggesting to
some that the ‘P2P mode of production can be extended to most branches of material production’ (Rigi, 2012). These technologies are also associated with the proliferation of robots and small-scale automata; indeed, the holy grail of the ‘maker’ movement is the self-replicating replicator, the perfect von Neumann machine. Extrapolation from these tendencies places the ‘fabbers’ and ‘replicators’ of sci-fi imagination much closer to realization than seemed possible even quite recently.

Even the most market-oriented of ‘makers’ don’t hesitate to point out that such developments appear to return the means of production back to popular hands (Doctorow, 2009; Anderson, 2012). But as the example of open source suggests, there is no intrinsic communizing logic in the maker movement, which could as easily result in a proliferation of micro-entrepreneurship as in a micro-industrial commons. In his critique of liberal P2P enthusiasts, Tony Smith observes that full development of commons-based peer production is ‘incompatible with the property and
production relations of capital’ (2012: 178); as long as these relations persist those involved in volunteer peer production will continue to be explicated in the wage work on which they depend, their creations will be appropriated by capital as ‘free gifts’, and the wider development of such projects starved of resources.

However, in a world where investments were determined without systemically favouring the commodification of knowledge, and without the possibility of combining common goods with proprietary knowledge, the ‘immense emancipatory promise’ of peer-to-peer production could be fulfilled (Smith, 2012: 179). As Smith remarks, capital contains within itself a tendency to develop technologies ‘that allow certain types of use-values to be distributed in unlimited numbers to individuals at marginal costs approaching zero’ (2006, 341): ‘In any form of socialism worthy of the
name, the costs of the infrastructure and social labour required to produce products such as these would be socialized and the products would be directly distributed as free public goods to any and all who wanted them’. Although Smith is sceptical that this tendency could, ‘in the foreseeable future’ become prevalent throughout the economy, he concedes that if it did, the Soviet experience, ‘plagued by scarcity issues’, would be ‘completely irrelevant to the socialist project’ (2006: 241-2).

Anthropocene Knowledge Infrastructures

An abundant communist society of high automation, free software, and in-home replicators might, however, as Fraise (2011) suggests, need planning more than ever – not to overcome scarcity but to address the problems of plenty, which perversely today threaten shortages of the very conditions for life itself. Global climate change and a host of interlinked ecological problems challenge all the positions we have discussed to this point. Bio-crisis brings planning back on stage, or indeed calculation – but calculation according to metrics measuring limits, thresholds and
gradients of the survival of species, human and otherwise. Discussing the imperatives for such ecosocialist planning, Michael Lowy (2009) points out how this would require a far more comprehensive social steering than mere ‘workers control’, or even the negotiated reconciliation of worker and consumer interests suggested by schemes such as Parecon. Rather, it implies a far-reaching remaking of the economic systems, including the discontinuation of certain industries, such as industrial fishing and destructive logging, the reshaping of transportation methods, ‘a
revolution in the energy-system’ and the drive for a ‘solar communism’ (Lowy, 2009: np).

Such transformations would involve cybernetics along two major axes, as both contributors to the current bio-crisis and as potential means for its resolution. On the first of these axes, the ecological costs of nominally ‘clean’ digital technologies have become increasing apparent: the electrical energy requirements of cloud computing data-centres; the demands of chip manufacture for fresh water and minerals, the latter from large scale extractive enterprises; and the resulting prodigious quantities of toxic e-waste. Making every home a fab-lab mini-factory will only speed-
up planetary heat death. Contrary to all idealistic notions of virtual worlds, cybernetics are themselves inextricably part of the very industrial system whose operations have to be placed under scrutiny in a new system of metabolic regulation that aims for both red and green plenty.

However, cybernetic systems are also a potential part of any resolution of the bio-crisis – or, indeed, of even fully recognizing it. Paul Edward’s (2010) A Vast Machine analyzes the global system of climatological measurement and projection – the apparatus of weather stations, satellites, sensors, digitally archived records and massive computer simulations, which, like the Internet itself, originated in US Cold War planning – on which comprehension of global warming rests. This infrastructure generates information so vast in quantity and from data platforms so diverse in
quality and form that it can be understood only on the basis of computer analysis. Knowledge about climate change is dependent on computer models: simulations of weather and climate; reanalysis models, which recreate climate history from historical data; and data models, combining and adjusting measurements from multiple sources.

By revealing the contingency of conditions for species survival, and the possibility for their anthropogenic change, such ‘knowledge infrastructures’ of people, artifacts, and institutions (Edwards, 2010: 17) – not just for climate measurement, but also for the monitoring of ocean acidification, deforestation, species loss, fresh water availability – reveal the blind spot of Hayek’s catallaxy in which the very grounds for human existence figure as an arbitrary ‘externality’. So-called ‘green capital’ attempts to subordinate such bio-data to price signals. It is easy to point to the
fallacy of pricing non-linear and catastrophic events: what is the proper tag for the last tiger, or the carbon emission that triggers uncontrollable methane release? But bio-data and bio-simulations also now have to be included in any concept of communist collective planning. Insofar as that project aims at a realm of freedom that escapes the necessity of toil, the common goods it creates will have to be generated with cleaner energy, and the free knowledge it circulates have metabolic regulation as a priority. Issues of the proper remuneration of labor time require
integration into ecological calculations. No bio-deal that does not recognize the aspirations of millions of planetary proletarians to escape inequality and immiseration will succeed, yet labour metrics themselves need to be rethought as part of a broader calculation of the energy expenditures compatible with collective survival.

Conclusion: For K-ommunism?

Marx (1964), in his famous, or notorious, comparison of the ‘worst of architects’ and the ‘best of bees’, saw the former distinguished by an ability to ‘erect in imagination’ the structure he will create. Today, with our improved knowledge of bee communities, this distinction reeks of anthropocentricism. Yet even alongside bees, beavers and other primates, humans manifest a hypertrophic planning capacity. The Soviet experience, of which the cyberneticians featured in Red Plenty were part, was only a narrow, historically specific and tragic instantiation of this capability,
whose authoritarianism occludes the most crucial point in the Marxist concept of planning, namely that it is intended as a means of communal election of which, of a variety of trajectories, collective human ‘species-becoming’ might follow (Dyer-Witheford, 2004).

A new cybernetic communism, itself one of these options, would, we have seen, involve some of the following elements: use of the most advanced super-computing to algorithmically calculate labour time and resource requirements, at global, regional and local levels, of multiple possible paths of human development; selection from these paths by layered democratic discussion conducted across assemblies that include socialized digital networks and swarms of software agents; light-speed updating and constant revision of the selected plans by streams of big data from
production and consumption sources; the passage of increasing numbers of goods and services into the realm of the free or of direct production as use values once automation, copy-left, peer-to-peer commons and other forms of micro-replication take hold; the informing of the entire process by parameters set from the simulations, sensors and satellite systems measuring and monitoring the species metabolic interchange with the planetary environment.

This would indeed be a communism heir to Lenin’s ‘soviets plus electricity’, with its roots in red futurism, constructivism, tektology and
cybernetics, together with the left-science fiction imaginaries of authors such as Iain M. Banks, Ken McLeod and Chris Moriarty. It
would be
a social matrix encouraging increasingly sophisticated forms of artificial intelligence as allies of human
emancipation . For those who fear the march of the machine it holds only this comfort: whatever singularities might spring
from its networks would not be those of entities initially programmed for unconstrained profit
expansion and the military defense of property , but rather for human welfare and ecological
protection . Such a communism is consonant with a left accelerationist politic that, in place of anarchoprimitivisms, defensive
localism and Fordist nostalgia, ‘pushes towards a future that is more modern, an alternative modernity that
neoliberalism is inherently unable to generate’ (Williams & Srnicek, 2013). If it needs a name, one can take the K-prefix with
which some designate ‘Kybernetic’ endeavors, and call it ‘K-ommunism’. The possibile space for such a communism now
exists only between the converging lines of civilizational collapse and capitalist consolidation . In this
narrowing corridor, it would arise not out of any given, teleological logic, but piece by piece from countless

societal breakdowns and conflicts ; a post-capitalist mode of production emerging in a context of

massive mid-twenty-first century crisis, assembling itself from a hundred years of non-linear
computerized communist history to create the platforms of a future red plenty .
 AT: Fails
All our args everywhere else are obviously defenses of socialist growth that beat their
generic ‘unsustainability’ args---the reason growth is unsustainable is anarchic
production and the lack of central planning, which the CP fixes.
Reject their assertion that ‘all growth is unsustainable’---planning can easily determine
the optimal methods to meet human needs in accordance with sustainability
Güney Işıkara 23, Clinical Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies at NYU; and Özgür Narin, Assistant
Professor of Economics at Ordu University in Ordu, Türkiye, 7/1/23, “Degrowth and Socialism: Notes on
Some Critical Junctures,” https://monthlyreview.org/2023/07/01/degrowth-and-socialism-notes-on-
some-critical-junctures/ /jpb

Most degrowth thinkers agree that growth, as both a fact and a concept, is brought about by capitalism.3 It is even
acknowledged that growth is not the driver, but an outcome , the “surface appearance or ‘fetish’ of an underlying
process: capital accumulation.”4 One would then expect that the challenge to it and the imaginary of an
alternative society would be based on the negation of capitalism as a mode of production . Yet instead,
growth remains the focal point of the discussion .

The emphasis on growth as an aggregate phenomenon that emerged only with industrial capitalism and turned into an
unquestionable economic paradigm following the Second World War is not trivial. It implies that growth as we know it is

capitalist growth , or actually accumulation of capital, constituted in processes of exploitation and

expropriation peculiar to capitalism, measured by indicators designed by and for capitalist societies. Why should we then
be so concerned with growth as such from the viewpoint of a socialist (or postcapitalist) society? The
degrowth position is that it mesmerizes and captivates individual and social imaginaries , political movements,
parties, and projects, including that of socialism: “Growth is the child of capitalism, but the child outdid the parent, with the pursuit of
growth surviving the abolition of capitalist relations in socialist countries.”5

The transplantation of growth from its capitalist historical context into a socialist future , and thereby the
problematization of growth as such —which supposedly transcends social relations upon which
societies are founded—can be justified only under one condition: if all growth , regardless of the
underlying relations of humans to both humans and nonhuman natures, can be seen as homogeneous ,
or at least alike to a significant degree. This is precisely what Giorgos Kallis puts forward : “ socialist growth cannot
be sustainable , because no economic growth can be ecologically sustainable . Growth in the material standard
of living requires growth in the extraction of materials. This is unavoidably damaging to the environment and ultimately undermines the
conditions of production and reproduction.”6

The logical conclusion of this argument is that all human activity involving extraction, transformation,
and use of materials —that is, all human reproduction —is in direct conflict with the environment as the
former unavoidably damages the latter. This is a reversion to crude materialism founded on the
oppositional binary of nature and society. According to Kallis, this conflict becomes unsustainable if
material living standards keep growing. Growth, however, is still understood in its meaning in the capitalist
context, representing a process of accumulation.
The qualitative difference between socialism and capitalism as two distinct modes of production is
highly relevant here . The primary function of production under socialism is to provide all citizens with
use values to satisfy a universal standard of basic needs (essentials), which determines the length of the necessary working
day. This comprises not only shelter, basic food items, clean water supply, health care, education, and
accessible public transport, but also child and elder care, parks and recreation, basic cultural and
informational services, (possibly) ecological restoration activities, and the like.

Once any such set of essential needs is determined socially and mediated politically, the number of total
(direct and indirect) labor hours socially necessary to produce these essentials can be easily calculated with
the help of input-output data for a given set of technologies and labor processes . This total amount could
then be distributed across the working-age population, taking social and political preferences,
disabilities, and the principle of work rotation into account. This constitutes the realm of necessity or sphere of
heteronomy, which constitutes the baseline labor required from each citizen in order to reproduce a universally granted, decent standard of
living for all. It is, at the same time, the basis for the conviviality of an egalitarian society without struggle for
essentials.

Note that each

worker directly gets their share of labor-time after the deduction of the common funds for
other social necessities (contingency planning, disaster preparedness, planned investment in scientific research
and technological advance, and so forth). They can use their remaining labor-time funds to acquire
products beyond immediate essentials, which implies working an additional number of hours, informed in
turn by the labor time socially necessary to produce their additional demand. By implication, exchange (though not commodity exchange) could
occur via digital labor certificates. The demand
for essentials would be relatively stable over time, while the
relationship between the supply of and demand for more personal, customized items could be easily
tracked by an online network connecting all stores, alerting planning agencies in case of a change or
imbalances.
 AT: Thermo---2NC
Even if they get credit for the full Jevon’s paradox arg, they’re wrong:
1) YES ABSOLUTE DECOUPLING---it’s driven by the exact innovations that degrowth
would ban, but that socialist planning would facilitate
Leigh Phillips 19, science writer and political journalist published in Nature, the New Scientist, Science,
the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the New Republic, and Jacobin; Brussels-based beat reporter covering
European affairs, climate diplomacy, and economics and finance, 8/30/19, “The degrowth delusion,”
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/degrowth-delusion/ /jpb

We can see the first major error of the degrowth concept if we turn our attention to past environmental
challenges that we have actually overcome. The evidence is clear that it is planning —typically regulation, but
also via public-sector infrastructure spending and industrial policy— not reduction in economic growth ,
that was responsible for these victories.

It is worth remembering that we have solved a fair few ecological problems, from acid rain over the Great Lakes to
air and water quality in many Western nations. Until the 1980s, sulphur dioxide pollution was tied tightly to economic growth in the
OECD club of wealthier nations, but it is no longer. Not enough ecological problems have been solved to be sure, but we need to
investigate where there has been success—largely thanks to the struggles of trade unions, impacted
communities, and environmental groups—in order to learn the lessons of what works.

Where there has been subsequent deterioration after achieving such successes—such as the scandalously still-
unresolved lead contamination of water in Flint, Michigan—this has been the result of neoliberal retreat from non-

market intervention : privatisation, deregulation, regulatory capture, and underfunding or outsourcing

of inspection. In the case of Flint, we can add to this list the neoliberal era's neglect of water infrastructure, particularly with respect to
that servicing less-profitable minority and poor communities. Likewise, neoliberal racism that resulted in infrastructural breakdown and
underconsumption of water resources by poor and racialised neighbourhoods was responsible for the water crisis in Cape Town, not
overconsumption.

But perhaps the greatestenvironmental victory yet has been the healing of the ozone layer. In the 1980s, depletion
of atmospheric ozone, particularly around the poles, was that era's version of existential ecological crisis . It was also
no less threatening to humanity over the near term than climate change via an increase in skin cancer and immune
deficiency disorders as well as negative impacts on terrestrial and near-surface aquatic food webs and biochemical cycles, and reduction in
agricultural yields. And the cause was also anthropgenic emissions: this time primarily chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that were popularly
understood, roughly correctly, as being used in refrigerators and aerosol sprays.

Since the 1987 Montreal Protocol ban on ozone-depleting substances, including CFCs, such emissions have declined by 98
percent (there has however been an uptick in unreported emissions since early this decade from east Asia, suggesting someone in the
region is cheating). Ozone depletion reversed by the 2000s and full recovery is expected by 2075.

Having grown up in the 80s, I remember at the time bugging my mum to stop buying cans of hair spray. She did not follow my advice.

Thankfully my advice was not taken by policymakers either. Instead, the Montreal Protocol regulatorily intervened in the market against and
over the wails and lobbying efforts of the industries affected.

Had we embraced degrowth with respect to ozone depletion by attempting to arrest growth in, say, the number
of fridges in the world—or even reduce the total number—instead of regulation to enforce technology-
switching, disaster would have befallen us . Saying "this many fridges and no more" would only have
arrested the growth in emissions , not emissions tout court. (For the same reason today, it is not
enough to keep g reen h ouse g as emissions steady, but eliminate them )

It simply would not have worked in any case, as by what right can developed nations tell the global south
that they cannot keep their food fresh while they continue to do so? (Indeed, one might say that the socialist
argument is instead: There still are not enough fridges in the world.)

Today there are more cans of hair spray and more fridges than ever before. The latter not least in the developing world, where refrigeration
enhances quality of life through expansion of the range of food available, reducing food contamination, and improving nutrition. It also reduces
food waste and therefore greenhouse gas emissions.

There has been an absolute decoupling of growth in the tech nologies that historically used ozone-
depleting substances from growth in ozone depletion. The degrowth position maintains that absolute
decoupling of growth from negative environmental impact is impossible , and that only relative
decoupling—or reduced resource use per unit of production but increased production overall—is possible, but the story of
ozone depletion shows this belief to be false . Economic growth has been absolutely, not relatively, decoupled from ozone
depletion.

There are many, many other examples. Europe’s forests have grown by a third over the last century. Timber was used in almost
every economic sector around 1900—for fuel, for furniture, house construction, even metal production—meaning that there was little forested
tech nological innovation in ag riculture such as motorization, better drainage and irrigation
areas left on the continent. But
reduced cropland as less area was needed to produce the same volume of food. In addition, there was a mass
migration away from rural areas to the cities and, crucially, states after World War Two invested heavily in reforestation. Indeed, once a
nation reaches a certain per capital income threshold, net deforestation ceases. Globally, tree cover has increased
over the last 35 years.

Across the Atlantic, there

were more dairy cows in the United States in 1870 than today , when the country has
roughly ten times the population, according to the US Department of Agriculture. US crop production has increased
even as agricultural inputs such as fertilizer, water and crop acreage have declined or plateaued , with
the decline in fertilizer use being particularly sharp. Corn acreage has been absolutely decoupled from corn production.
American potato yields continue to increase but the potato market is saturated, so potato production has plateaued, meaning that land is
removed from production. Across the agricultural sector, this has meant an area of farmland the size of Washington State
has been returned to nature , according to a forthcoming analysis by MIT business scholar Andrew McAfee.

McAfee also notes how US consumption of metals marched in lock-step with GDP until about the 1980s. Since then, consumption
of
important metals such as aluminium, nickel, copper, steel and gold have plateaued or declined. This takes
into account imports and exports, so globalization is not the reason for this.

One important paper from degrowth advocates argues that this

is simply because traded goods have a greater
material impact than merely what is incorporated into them (think of the difference between an ingot of steel versus raw
iron ore). Once this is taken into account, suggests another paper by a leading degrowth advocate, OECD
absolute decoupling reveals itself to be a mirage, and globally economic growth remains as coupled to use of materials as
ever—although, interestingly, that same paper notes this is primarily a result of offshoring of just construction materials.

But this is a global consideration of material inputs , so a range of sectoral absolute decouplings goes
unnoticed, and global ones that are immaterial are likewise ignored . CFC absolute decoupling is global
but unrecognized because measurement of material inputs doesn’t capture this . The sharp reduction in
emissions of carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, lead and particulate in Europe and America
has come from regulation; they have not shifted overseas . US ag ricultural absolute decoupling has
likewise not been a product of offshoring, as inputs here are primarily domestically sourced. A global decoupling of
g reen h ouse g as emissions from growth (in principle feasible, but very far from being implemented) likewise would be
missed by such an analysis .

And even more importantly, the very fact that there has already been a great many demonstrable examples of
regional and global absolute decoupling in different sectors disproves the claim of the impossibility of
absolute decoupling. The only question that remains is whether absolute decoupling can be extended
across all sectors , or sufficient sectors as to eliminate undermining of ecosystem services .

2) DOESN’T GENERALIZE---Jevon’s paradox is not a universal rule, it’s disproved by

substitute goods, and it’s irrelevant for short-term decisionmaking
Kenta Tsuda 21, Post Graduate Teaching Assistant, Faculty of Laws, University College London,
March/April 2021, “Naïve Questions on Degrowth,” New Left Review, Vol. 128,
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii128/articles/kenta-tsuda-naive-questions-0n-degrowth /jpb

The notion that there is a limit to growth has a basic plausibility. Degrowth arg ument s often start from a
kind of cosmic perspective, invoking ecological economists’ emphasis on terrestrial finitude . ‘The economy is a sub-system of a larger
system, the ecosphere, which is finite, non-expanding, materially closed’, as Daly puts it.footnote12 No amount of ingenuity,
entrepreneurial tinkering or government investment can overcome the constraints of physical reality —
the stock of accessible materials, the flow of solar radiation. At some point, growth must end . The time horizon is

relevant , however. Independent of any anthropogenic action, the sun will one day transition to a red-
giant state and Earth will become uninhabitable. These eventualities are not relevant for present
practical-political purposes . The burden, therefore, is on degrowth proponents to rationalize degrowth
now .

The necessary premise of the degrowth thesis is that life on Earth is threatened by the scale of
contemporary ‘material throughput’, that is, the rate of ‘extraction of raw materials from nature and their
return to nature as waste’. In this view, ‘economic growth unavoidably increases throughput’ .
Degrowthers see no escape through cleaner energy or more efficient resource use, due to the dynamic known as the ‘Jevons
rebound’.footnote13 In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons showed that improved efficiency in the combustion of coal
counterintuitively resulted in accelerated depletion of coal supplies: the efficiency improvement initially reduced demand for coal—less coal
needed per unit of mechanical work. But due to the resulting change in price, consumers responded by demanding more mechanical work (new
steam engines became cost-effective for a wider range of applications) and thus more coal. Degrowthers generalize the Jevons-
rebound effect from the 19th-century coal market to the civilizational use of physical materials
considered in aggregate .footnote14 Technological progress may render resource use more efficient—the same work or consumption
can be generated from fewer resources—but, degrowthers posit, all efficiency gains are offset by expansions in scale.
The macro-level rebound effect, they claim, quashes hopes of technological advances that would reduce material throughput to a sustainable
level without a policy of downsizing.

The macro-economic rebound effect is an axiom of degrowth theory, not a finding , and there is reason
to doubt it. Whether the rebound effect applies to a given efficiency gain is an empirical question :
apparently it applied to 19th-century improvements in coal combustion, at least for a time. There is no reason
to believe that it necessarily transfers to all situations , however. Efficiency gains will not yield a rebound
effect, for example, where they generate an entirely distinct substitute good. Increased use of petroleum-
fuelled engines that were more efficient than coal-fired engines brought no rebound effect in coal
consumption , at least not by the mechanism Jevons described; rather it expanded the use of a distinct resource, petroleum.footnote15
Degrowthers side-step this by emphasizing the commensurability of all terrestrial resources —with the
above example, of coal and petroleum. ‘Material throughput’, encompassing all resources and sinks, is capacious
enough to make substitution impossible: one cannot substitute away from physical reality. But is it a helpful category
or merely a placeholder term?

In the abstract, one can posit a civilizational metabolism or production function with physical inputs
(natural resources) and outputs (goods, services, wastes) that has existed since at least the beginning of
human history. Relative to today, inputs in 1900 included proportionately more horses, coal and
firewood, and less silicon and fewer carbon-fibre precursors; by 2100 there may be fewer horses, less
coal and more silicon and carbon fibre, in addition to other materials barely used today. In other words,
the composition of this metabolism or production function is highly variable and unstable. On the basis
of what unit do degrowthers render disparate inputs and outputs commensurable across human-
technological history?
Advantage
 Eugenics
Population growth’s up.
UN 22 – the United Nations, sometime after 2022, “Global Issues: Population,”
https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/population#:~:text=Our%20growing%20population&text=The
%20world's%20population%20is%20expected,billion%20in%20the%20mid%2D2080s, RMax!
Our growing population

The world’s population is more than three times larger than it was in the mid-twentieth century. The global
human population reached 8.0 billion in mid-November 2022 from an estimated 2.5 billion people in 1950, adding 1
billion people since 2010 and 2 billion since 1998. The world’s population is expected to increase by nearly 2 billion
persons in the next 30 years, from the current 8 billion to 9.7 billion in 2050 and could peak at nearly 10.4 billion
in the mid-2080s.

This dramatic growth has been driven largely by increasing numbers of people surviving to reproductive age,
the gradual increase in human lifespan, increasing urbanization , and accelerating migration. Major changes in
fertility rate have accompanied this growth. These trends will have far-reaching implications for generations to come.

Diesendforf concedes degrowth necessitates population control.

Mark 1AC Diesendorf, 2023, Honorary Associate Professor in the Environment & Society Group,
School of Humanities & Languages at UNSW Sydney. Originally trained as a physicist, he broadened out
into interdisciplinary energy and sustainability research. From 1996 to 2001 he was Professor of
Environmental Science and Founding Director of the Institute for Sustainable Futures at University of
Technology Sydney, Rod Taylor, “Transforming the Economic System,” Chapter 7, The Path to a
Sustainable Civilization: Technological, Socioeconomic, and Political Change,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0663-5

Planned degrowth is not the same as economic collapse , which can result from an ecological disaster,45 the failure of
neoclassical economics in a financial crisis, war, internal conflict, and poor governance, including economic and political exploitation.46 Planned
degrowth, as conceived by many ecological economics practitioners, is a planned program to reduce the use of energy,
materials and land, and to stabilise population , initially in the rich countries. The goal of planned degrowth is a
sustainable, steady-state economy. To be truly sustainable , planned degrowth must increase human
wellbeing while protecting and restoring the environment, in other words, to foster sustainable prosperity. Social justice demands that
low-income countries must grow their economies and hence consumption. Therefore, high-income countries
must undergo plan ned degrowth. In the saying attributed to Mahatma Gandhi: “The rich must live more simply so that the poor
can simply live”. The following definition of planned degrowth by economic anthropologist Jason Hickel makes these considerations explicit:
“Degrowth is a planned reduction in less-necessary production in rich countries that is socially just and achieved in a democratic manner”.47

We have defined planned degrowth in biophysical terms, because that’s the environmental imperative. Of primary importance is to develop a
strategy to protect our life-support system and facilitate the wellbeing for all people (see Sect. 7.5). The fate of GDP is of secondary importance.
Within a sustainable degrowth program, some industries will expand —for example, renewable energy ,
energy efficiency, electric vehicles , public transport , bicycles, aged care, child care , public health
facilities, housing , medical care , public education and training, the arts, nature conservation , and
plantation forestry in appropriate locations—while others will contract —for example, fossil fuels , road-building,
logging of native forests, high-GHG-emission agriculture , tobacco, armaments for attack rather than
defence , advertising and financial services . The net effect must be to reduce biophysical impacts and this may in turn reduce
GDP. In contrast, green growth would allow GDP and hence net biophysical impacts to increase, albeit not as rapidly as business-as-usual
growth.

To what extent does physical degrowth imply monetary degrowth, that is, a reduction in GDP? In the jargon of economics, to what extent is
there decoupling between monetary economic activity and physical economic activity and hence environmental impact? Several studies have
established that on average GDP and biophysical impact are coupled, although there are exceptions observed over short periods of time in
specific locations for particular environmental impacts.48 Clearly, all economic activity depends on at least some physical activity and hence has
some environmental impact. For example, education in a school requires a building and equipment for teaching and learning. Writing a book
nowadays requires a computer, internet connection and a server. However, the total, life-cycle environmental impacts of school-teaching and
book-writing are generally much less than those of owning and operating a private jet aircraft. Therefore, while shifting to ‘greener’ economic
activities will result in less environmental impact (i.e. relative decoupling), there is no absolute decoupling. Therefore, green growth must be
rejected as insufficient. The Sustainable Civilisation needs both greener economic activities and planned degrowth.

Environmental economist Peter Victor investigated scenarios for no-growth and monetary degrowth of the Canadian economy, defined in
terms of a reduction in GDP. Creating a macroeconomic model, Victor found that, as expected, simply
reducing GDP resulted in
increasing unemployment . However, in scenarios where reducing GDP was combined with other policies—for
example, working time reduction, increased government expenditure on poverty reduction and health care ,

government investment in green infrastructure , ending population growth —an economy

with reduced GHG emissions , reduced unemployment and reduced poverty can be achieved.49
An alternative approach was taken by Graham Turner, using a biophysical method, the Australian Stocks and Flows Framework, to model
physical degrowth in the Australian socio-economy.50 Stocks are quantities of physical items, such as land, livestock, people and buildings at a
point in time. Flows are the rates of change over a period, for example, net addition of agricultural land, new computers, births, deaths and
immigration. Although he used an entirely different method, Turner obtained similar results to Victor’s.

Simone D’Alessandro and colleagues constructed a simulation model for planned degrowth in France that combined environmental and
radical social justice policies, together with a reduction in consumption and exports. The environmental policies included greater
energy efficiency , renewable energy and a carbon tax . The social justice policies comprised a job guarantee ,
working time reduction and a wealth tax . They obtained a viable sustainable economy at the ‘cost’ of substantial levels of
public expenditure.51 While cost may be a political problem for governments that follow the prescriptions of neoclassical economics and
neoliberalism, it is not necessarily an economic problem within the macroeconomics framework of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), as
discussed in the next section.
 Poverty/Austerity Turn---2NC
The plan imposes radical, devastating austerity---it pegs everyone’s income at $5,500
a year and grinds the economy to a halt---all their args about switching to care work
are total lies because those things all rely on material throughput that the plan
restricts---at best the plan’s version of ‘care work’ looks like sitting in candlelight with
your dying grandparent, explaining to them that their dialysis had to get cut so that
we could meet our annual degrowth targets
Leigh Phillips 19, science writer and political journalist published in Nature, the New Scientist, Science,
the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the New Republic, and Jacobin; Brussels-based beat reporter covering
European affairs, climate diplomacy, and economics and finance, 8/30/19, “The degrowth delusion,”
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/degrowth-delusion/ /jpb

When I am on a picket line, I want my fellow workers to win not just improved conditions, but higher
wages . If we win those higher wages, we will perforce be able to consume more than we currently do .

Yet the degrowth position wants to see a reduction in consumption by these same workers, decrying
how "we all" in the West consume too much. So there is an immediate and insurmountable
contradiction between degrowth and trade unionism. Compounding this contradiction is the real wage
stagnation workers across the West have suffered for some 40 years.

Let us remember that Thatcher and Reagan's immediate solution to the profit squeeze that had
emerged by the 70s that was the consequence of postwar full employment was wage restraint.
Likewise, the European Central Bank's solution to the eurozone crisis was primarily an effort to make
wages in Greece and other peripheral EU member states 'competitive'. They were successful. Greek
wages fell 20 percent from 2010-2014, which, together with a slashing of the social wage and a raft of
privatisations, prompted mass demonstrations, strikes, riots and rapid growth of the far right .

Some degrowth advocates such as Troy Vettese concede that yes, such 'eco-austerity' for even the
working class of developed nations will be necessary. In a curious echo of the Mao-inspired Third-
Worldist ideology of the 1960s that wrote off the entirety of the Western working class as
"overdeveloped", Vettese writes: "A solution to global environmental crises requires the humbling of
the global bourgeoisie , the richest several hundred million." He does not specify where these several
hundred million workers live who suddenly have been transformed into the owners of the means of
production, but given that Western Europe, the U nited S tates and the Antipodes collectively are home
to perhaps 850 million people, we know who he means needs to be "humbled ".

However, some degrowth advocates, notably anthropologist Jason Hickel , counters that degrowth is
not a politics of austerity or scarcity but one of abundance. A planned reduction of the throughput of
high-income nations can occur while standards of living are maintained or even improved. This can be
achieved, he says , by a redistribution of existing income , a shortening of the working week, the
introduction of a job guarantee and living wage and, crucially, an expansion of access to public goods.
Most of these are excellent ideas, but in the absence of economic growth , still result in an equality of
scarcity, not of abundance .

Hickel and his co-thinkers argue that a radical redistribution of income would raise the standard of living
of the poorest and reducing that of the rich until everyone was equal while fixing global GDP at its
current amount.

This seems on its face to be a salutary goal. The image in one's heads is likely to be one of everybody in
the world living a decent, but not luxurious life, and there being no poor or rich. But let's consider what
it would mean with numbers attached . Thankfully, former World Bank economist Branko Milanovic,
also one of the world's leading experts on inequality, has already done the work for us.

Concretely, this would be a reduction down to the global mean income for everyone above that mean,
and a boost up to that mean for everyone below it. The global annual mean income in 2018 when
Milanovic performed his back-of-the-envelope calculation was $5,500.

Almost everyone in the West lives above this level , and substantially above it. So let me repeat this
for the cheap seats: an egalitarian world without any further economic growth would mean an income
for everyone of $5,500 . What would your life be like on $5,500?

The reduction in the standard of living, the scale of the cut in wages, for Western workers would far, far
more drastic than anything experienced during the neoliberal revolution of the 80s or in the wake of
the Eurozone crisis. To be clear, this estimate is, as Milanovic himself says, just to give us a rough,
ballpark understanding of what global equality today without any additional economic growth would
mean. But we need to have such ballpark understandings so that we know the magnitude of what we
are actually talking about.

But it gets worse.

The 27 percent of the global population that exists above the mean would see their aggregate income
reduced by two thirds , according to Milanovic. Most degrowth advocates do not suggest that this
reduction would happen via fiscal transfers from the global north to the global south . Instead,
equalization would occur via allowing the global south to expand production while the global north
would steadily contract its own production . So this means a reduction in production of two thirds in
developed countries.

"Factories, trains, airports, schools would work one-third of their normal time; electricity, heating and
hot water would be available for 8 hours a day ; cars may be driven one day out of three ; we would
work only 13 hours per week," Milanovic concludes, "all in order to produce only a third as many goods
and services that the West is producing now."

The degrowthers respond that the reduction in productive activity in the West would not be across the
board as in Milanovic's thought experiment. Instead, socially useful production would continue as
normal while socially unnecessary production would cease. Hickel lists as examples of those sectors that
are " ecologically destructive and offer little if any social benefit " as: marketing , McMansions , SUVs ,
beef , single-use plastics and fossil fuels .

We might well contest whether all of these truly offer no social benefit . Single-use plastics such as
condoms, syringes and catheters have delivered public health revolutions . Marketing is not only the
preserve of breakfast cereals and running shoes; a great many enterprises that are not profit-driven,
from epidemiologists to community theatre troupes, still need to communicate information in a
compelling way. I may find McMansions and SUVs to be unnecessary but the problem they pose is their
combustion of fossil fuels , a problem shared by the very socially necessary heating of much smaller
houses and transportation of people and goods in buses, trains, ships and yes also cars and planes.
Beef is indeed pretty much inarguably carbon-intensive, but it certainly isn't socially unnecessary.
Humans in general find meat and dairy particularly tasty because the density, quality and absorbability
of essential nutrients is greater in animal products. There are far more nutrients in a kilo of chicken than
in a kilo of celery. Without the nutrient concentration of meat, we might never have become the
creatures we are.

The problem with fossil fuels is not that they do not provide social benefit . Their energy density and
portability freed humanity from the whims of mother nature , providing the foundation of the modern
world. They are utter marvels . The primary ecological challenge posed by fossil fuels is that the
immediate social benefit , however profound, is outweighed over the long term by how they are
pushing the planet out of the Goldilocks planetary conditions that have existed for the last dozen
millennia or so but which on a geological scale are rare, and that technology-switching to clean
alternatives is being undermined by market imperatives .

But such woolly thinking over what counts as socially necessary is not our main concern here. Instead,
the salient point is that even if we agreed that these sectors were socially unnecessary, combined they
clearly do not amount to two thirds of Western production .

"But these are just examples of socially unnecessary production! There are many others," Hickel and
others might respond.

Perhaps. But could we really say, even if we conceded that production of a great many items is
irrational, that a full two thirds of production in the West is superfluous , manufacturing trifles that we
don't really need?

What about the other mechanisms Hickel says could maintain or even improve standards of living while
global GDP does not expand, such as shortening the working week and thus expanding leisure time,
and a generous expansion of social services?

While any socialist worth her salt should be supporting such ideas for their own sake, it isn't clear that
they would make up for the decline in income to $5,500, or for that matter that these would reduce
material throughput .
First, lots of free time does not make up for being extremely poor . Indeed, you can already make that
swap right now if you want . But nobody does , as explained by the old Marxist joke: In capitalist
society, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited.

Second, the idea that leisure time and social services are less emissions-intensive comes from the belief
that they don't involve 'stuff' and therefore there is no 'extraction' for raw materials or energy. The
grain of truth in this argument is that services in general, not just social ones, are indeed less materially
intensive than goods production. This is the primary cause of the 'S-shaped' environmental Kuznets
Curve: the finding that while it is true that as an economy industrialises, it has ever greater negative
impact on ecosystem services, at a certain level of wealth, this impact begins to moderate as mature
economies shift to more services and light industry.

But while less materially intensive than heavy industry, services and leisure time are still very much
'stuff-embedded' . Musical instruments are made of metal, wood, and plastic . Hospitals are full of
equipment made of pretty much every mineral you can dig out of the Earth , including, again, the
petroleum used to make plastics. Climbing equipment, kayaks and bicycles all ultimately come from
deep underground.

While it is vital that we restore and expand public services, particularly to tackle the housing crisis that
afflicts so much of the West, the welfare state is not the only thing that gives us rich lives. So do
sneakers , Lego sets , waffle-irons , and yes flat-screen TVs and X-boxes. Remember that the
contemporary middle-class belief that the absence of consumer goods—the 'simple life'—is more
fulfilling, is not the first time this argument has been mounted. One of the most persistent internal
critiques of the Soviet Union was how grey life was due to the lack of jeans, Elvis records, pineapples.

We want bread yes, but we want roses too.

The degrowth promise of "radical abundance" is ultimately no material abundance at all , but simply a
secular repetition of the Christian encouragement of James 2:5 that however poor in the world we may
be, we are nevertheless rich in spirit .

The socialist today counters the degrowth promise of austerity the same way the legendary union
organiser with the Industrial Workers of the World, Joe Hill, did in the 1920s in his song mocking the
officer-ministers of the Salvation Army, who promised there would be pie in the sky when we die. No,
preacherman, poor in the world is just plain poor . Or we might repeat the words of suffragette and
marxist Sylvia Pankhurst:

"Socialism means plenty for all. We do not preach a gospel of want and scarcity, but of abundance. Our
desire is not to make poor those who to-day are rich, in order to put the poor in the place where the rich
now are. Our desire is not to pull down the present rulers to put other rulers in their places. We wish to
abolish poverty and to provide abundance for all. We do not call for limitation of births, for penurious
thrift, and self-denial. We call for a great production that will supply all, and more than all the people
can consume."
Diesendforf concedes degrowth necessitates population control.
Mark 1AC Diesendorf, 2023, Honorary Associate Professor in the Environment & Society Group,
School of Humanities & Languages at UNSW Sydney. Originally trained as a physicist, he broadened out
into interdisciplinary energy and sustainability research. From 1996 to 2001 he was Professor of
Environmental Science and Founding Director of the Institute for Sustainable Futures at University of
Technology Sydney, Rod Taylor, “Transforming the Economic System,” Chapter 7, The Path to a
Sustainable Civilization: Technological, Socioeconomic, and Political Change,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0663-5

Planned degrowth is not the same as economic collapse , which can result from an ecological disaster,45 the failure of
neoclassical economics in a financial crisis, war, internal conflict, and poor governance, including economic and political exploitation.46 Planned
degrowth, as conceived by many ecological economics practitioners, is a planned program to reduce the use of energy,
materials and land, and to stabilise population , initially in the rich countries. The goal of planned degrowth is a
sustainable, steady-state economy. To be truly sustainable , planned degrowth must increase human
wellbeing while protecting and restoring the environment, in other words, to foster sustainable prosperity. Social justice demands that
low-income countries must grow their economies and hence consumption. Therefore, high-income countries
must undergo plan ned degrowth. In the saying attributed to Mahatma Gandhi: “The rich must live more simply so that the poor
can simply live”. The following definition of planned degrowth by economic anthropologist Jason Hickel makes these considerations explicit:
“Degrowth is a planned reduction in less-necessary production in rich countries that is socially just and achieved in a democratic manner”.47

We have defined planned degrowth in biophysical terms, because that’s the environmental imperative. Of primary importance is to develop a
strategy to protect our life-support system and facilitate the wellbeing for all people (see Sect. 7.5). The fate of GDP is of secondary importance.
Within a sustainable degrowth program, some industries will expand —for example, renewable energy ,
energy efficiency, electric vehicles , public transport , bicycles, aged care, child care , public health
facilities, housing , medical care , public education and training, the arts, nature conservation , and
plantation forestry in appropriate locations—while others will contract —for example, fossil fuels , road-building,
logging of native forests, high-GHG-emission agriculture , tobacco, armaments for attack rather than
defence , advertising and financial services . The net effect must be to reduce biophysical impacts and this may in turn reduce
GDP. In contrast, green growth would allow GDP and hence net biophysical impacts to increase, albeit not as rapidly as business-as-usual
growth.

To what extent does physical degrowth imply monetary degrowth, that is, a reduction in GDP? In the jargon of economics, to what extent is
there decoupling between monetary economic activity and physical economic activity and hence environmental impact? Several studies have
established that on average GDP and biophysical impact are coupled, although there are exceptions observed over short periods of time in
specific locations for particular environmental impacts.48 Clearly, all economic activity depends on at least some physical activity and hence has
some environmental impact. For example, education in a school requires a building and equipment for teaching and learning. Writing a book
nowadays requires a computer, internet connection and a server. However, the total, life-cycle environmental impacts of school-teaching and
book-writing are generally much less than those of owning and operating a private jet aircraft. Therefore, while shifting to ‘greener’ economic
activities will result in less environmental impact (i.e. relative decoupling), there is no absolute decoupling. Therefore, green growth must be
rejected as insufficient. The Sustainable Civilisation needs both greener economic activities and planned degrowth.

Environmental economist Peter Victor investigated scenarios for no-growth and monetary degrowth of the Canadian economy, defined in
terms of a reduction in GDP. Creating a macroeconomic model, Victor found that, as expected, simply
reducing GDP resulted in
increasing unemployment . However, in scenarios where reducing GDP was combined with other policies—for
example, working time reduction, increased government expenditure on poverty reduction and health care ,
government investment in green infrastructure , ending population growth —an economy
with reduced GHG emissions , reduced unemployment and reduced poverty can be achieved.49
An alternative approach was taken by Graham Turner, using a biophysical method, the Australian Stocks and Flows Framework, to model
physical degrowth in the Australian socio-economy.50 Stocks are quantities of physical items, such as land, livestock, people and buildings at a
point in time. Flows are the rates of change over a period, for example, net addition of agricultural land, new computers, births, deaths and
immigration. Although he used an entirely different method, Turner obtained similar results to Victor’s.

Simone D’Alessandro and colleagues constructed a simulation model for planned degrowth in France that combined environmental and
radical social justice policies, together with a reduction in consumption and exports. The environmental policies included greater
energy efficiency , renewable energy and a carbon tax . The social justice policies comprised a job guarantee ,
working time reduction and a wealth tax . They obtained a viable sustainable economy at the ‘cost’ of substantial levels of
public expenditure.51 While cost may be a political problem for governments that follow the prescriptions of neoclassical economics and
neoliberalism, it is not necessarily an economic problem within the macroeconomics framework of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), as
discussed in the next section.
 Solvency---International Coordination---2NC
The aff has to solve perfectly and globally or it’s meaningless---the bar is as high as it
could possibly be
Kenta Tsuda 21, Post Graduate Teaching Assistant, Faculty of Laws, University College London,
March/April 2021, “Naïve Questions on Degrowth,” New Left Review, Vol. 128,
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii128/articles/kenta-tsuda-naive-questions-0n-degrowth /jpb
Degrowth theory generally locates its critique of economic expansion in the environmental crisis of the 21st century. However, extra-ecological rationales are
invoked in passing.footnote10 So far, attempts to articulate a moral theory of anti-consumption have largely served to illustrate the difficulties of the project. For
example, degrowtherGiorgos Kallis advocates a ‘culture of limits’, which he derives from Aristotle and the city states of Classical Greece. Kallis
proposes a collective life organized around an ethics of ‘limitarian’ freedom, in which humans flourish to
the extent that they discipline their desires and confine their actions to fulfilling ‘ real’ needs, as
opposed to illusory ones generated by hubris.footnote11 As a personal perspective , this sounds interesting, perhaps
compelling. But degrowth is necessarily a collective undertaking ; it occurs at the societal, likely global,
level or not at all . Therefore, any case for degrowth must justify not only private preferences, but also
public choices . It is one thing to choose to live by limitarian ethics, another to legislate it . Kallis
envisages his limitarian philosophy being ‘autonomously’ imposed by the demos upon itself; if this is a
prediction, it seems like a bad one. Even if one is inclined to some version of the austere life he describes, it is a leap to proclaim
its universal applicability and to welcome its imposition by the state . Degrowthers may have a more persuasive moral
theory in the pipeline. Until they provide one, a social strategy based on the extra-ecological case for degrowth would be fundamentally arbitrary, requiring a high
degree of coercion.
1NR
T---Income Taxes
 AT: Counter-Interp---2NC
b) Their interp creates an entirely different topic about regulatory taxes---taxation
only redistributes when it targets income to transfer money from rich to poor---taxes
that internalize the costs of regulated activities are entirely distinct
Reuven S. Avi-Yonah 11, the Irwin I. Cohn Professor of Law and director of the International Tax LLM
Program at the University of Michigan, 2011, “Taxation as Regulation: Carbon Tax, Health Care Tax, Bank
Tax and Other Regulatory Taxes,” Accounting, Economics, and Law, 1(1),
https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2643&context=articles /jpb

Taxation has two well-known goals .5 Undoubtedly, as suggested by the first quotation above, the first and most widely
accepted one is to raise revenue for necessary government functions. Although there is a broad debate about which
governmental functions are truly indispensable, most commentators would agree that raising revenue is an indispensable feature of
governments and that a government that is unable to collect taxes, like the Russian government almost was in 1998, is unlikely to survive.

The second and more controversial goal of taxation is redistribution . Most developed countries see the
tax system as a way to redistribute income from the rich to the poor. The desirability of redistribution
has been controversial , but most commentators agree that if redistribution is a legitimate government goal, then taxation may
be the most effective way to achieve that goal.

But taxationhas a third goal , which has not been noticed as widely: a regulatory goal . In most developed countries
governments use the tax system to change the behavior of actors in the private sector, by incentivizing
(subsidizing) activities they wish to promote and by disincentivizing (penalizing) activities they wish to
discourage. This is the point of the second quotation above.

This regulatory function of the tax system is quite well established. Indeed, it can be argued that some
types of taxes, such as
Pigouvian taxes (designed to deter certain activities by forcing private actors to internalize their social
costs), are entirely regulatory in nature. In other cases, such as the corporate income tax, much of the complexity of the current tax
structure stems from the government’s attempting to use it to achieve regulatory aims. If the US income tax was purely a
revenue raising and redistributive tax , most of the complexity of the current tax code could be
eliminated .

Precisely for this reason, most commentators have decried the use of taxation for regulatory purposes. Regulation, they argue, should
either be done directly , or if it is desirable that it be done via subsidies or penalties, those should be delivered directly as well by other
government agencies. The IRS should be left to its proper role of collecting revenues, with a possible side role in
achieving redistribution .

c) Fiscal redistribution is exclusively measured by the redistribution of income from

higher-income to lower-income people---their interp allows anything that changes
average incomes which could be affected by anything in the economy
David Coady 19, Lead Social Spending Expert at the Fiscal Affairs Department (FAD) in the IMF, et al.,
3/8/19, “Fiscal Redistribution and Social Welfare,”
https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/2019/051/article-A001-en.xml
Figure 1 shows the welfare impact of redistributive fiscal policy, i.e. the extent of fiscal redistribution ,
across countries.10 The results are based on an aversion to inequality of unity (ε=1) so that decile
welfare weights equal the inverse of the ratio of each deciles income per capita to mean per capita
income.11 Transfers are based on the transfers and taxes in the EUROMOD data, but with taxes scaled
(both upwards and downwards) to equal benefits in each country. This ensures that the welfare impact
arises solely from the redistribution of income from higher-income to lower-income groups
(redistribution of the pie) rather than from changes in average income (the size of the pie). The extent
of fiscal redistribution varies widely, being highest (above 35 percent) in Ireland, Denmark, Belgium,
Estonia and Finland, and lowest (below 13 percent) in Greece, Hungary, Slovakia and Cyprus. Fiscal
redistribution increases social welfare by over 22 percent in more than half of all countries.

d) That blows the lid off the topic, and independently allows the aff to dodge core
econ DA links
Francois Bourguignon 18, professor emeritus at the Paris School of Economics, was the World Bank’s
chief economist from 2003 to 2007, March 2018, “SPREADING THE WEALTH,”
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2018/03/bourguignon /jpb

Income redistribution will lower poverty by reducing inequality, if done properly . But it may not accelerate
growth in any major way, except perhaps by reducing social tensions arising from inequality and allowing poor people to devote more
resources to human and physical asset accumulation. Directly investing in opportunities for poor people is essential. Transfers to the poor
should not consist merely of cash; they should also boost people’s capacity to generate income, today and in the future. Education and training
as well as access to health care, micro-credit, water, energy, and transportation are powerful instruments. Social assistance is critical to prevent
people from falling into poverty traps when adverse shocks hit. Programs such as India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment
Guarantee, in which the state acts as the employer of last resort, do precisely that.

Conditional cash transfers have been shown to motivate families to send their children to school, improve their nutrition, and monitor their
health. But facilities to meet this additional demand must be made available and must be financed. The same is true of other programs focusing
on improving opportunities for the poor. Financing these programs through progressive taxation while providing cash transfer incentives to
poor households thus reduces inequality and poverty in the short term and helps these households generate more income over the medium
and long term.

Is such a strategy of static and dynamic income equalization immune to the efficiency cost of redistribution? In other words, do these
taxes and transfers take away the incentives for people to work, save, and become entrepreneurs? Given
the limited scope of redistribution in developing economies, it is unlikely that it would have much effect on economic incentives. Substantial
income tax progressivity may indeed be achieved with marginal tax rates much below those in advanced economies, where redistribution is not
considered to be an obstacle to growth (Lindert 2004). Also, replacing distortionary indirect taxes or subsidies with income transfers should
improve efficiency. Moreover, conditional cash transfers appear to have no significant negative effect on labor supply; they may even
encourage entrepreneurship (Bianchi and Boba 2013).

Strategies that promote greater equality and stronger growth rely on raising resources in a progressive
way and spending them on programs that benefit the poorest segment of the population in this generation or
Other policies that do not rely on redistribution may achieve the same goals . Before
the next one.
contemplating redistribution, however, governments ought to consider enhancing the pro-poor nature or
inclusiveness of their growth strategies, in particular through fostering employment for unskilled workers.

Other policies besides straight redistribution are also available. Minimum wage laws —although controversial
in advanced economies because of their potentially negative effects on employment when the minimum is set too high— generate more
equality in the distribution of earnings. In developing economies, such policies may actually increase labor productivity by
improving the physical condition of workers, as predicted by the efficiency wage theory. Part of the drop in inequality observed in Brazil at the
turn of the century just as growth was accelerating has been partly attributed to the significant increase in the minimum wage (Komatsu and
Filho 2016).

Anti-discrimination laws can also promote equality and foster growth by improving work and training
incentives for minority groups. And anti-corruption strategies , by reducing rent seeking, are probably the best
candidates for both enhancing growth and income equality, even if the inequality arising from corruption is often difficult
to observe.

Governments can draw on an array of policies to foster growth by reducing inequality and ensuring that
growth reduces poverty. The policies they adopt will depend on the relative importance of these two
objectives and the time horizon over which they can be expected to deliver results. Pure income redistribution policies
generate less future growth than those policies that expand the economic opportunities of poor
people —but they reduce poverty immediately. They also alleviate social tensions and may thus free growth constraints in the case of
excessive inequality. On the other hand, policies that enhance opportunities for the poor do less to reduce inequality today, essentially through
taxation, but result in faster growth, less poverty, and greater equality tomorrow.

a) Fiscal redistribution reduces inequality of income, directly, without reliance on any

other actor
Pablo Beramendi 4, Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University; and Thomas R. Cusack,
Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, May 2004, “Diverse Disparities: The Politics and
Economics of Wage, Market and Disposable Income Inequalities,”
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=555817 /jpb
Even if independent from each other, the effects of union density, economic coordination and partisan inheritance combine very differently in
the real world. In some countries, such as the Scandinavian nations, all three factors will be very high, thus reducing disposable income
inequality to its lowest observed levels. In some other countries, the situation is reversed: coordination, union density and partisan inheritance
are very low and, as a result, disposable income inequality reaches its maximum levels. These patterns may lead the reader to wonder about
the existence of complementarities between some of these elements, for instance left-wing parties and overall economic coordination. This
being the case, an interaction effect between these two factors should be observed. If left-wing parties facilitate the existence of wage
bargaining agreements and depend upon them to create an egalitarian wage distribution, should the capacity of left-wing parties to shape the
distribution of disposable income not be contingent as well upon the overall degree of coordination in the economy? The answer is that no such
complementarity is in place, as confirmed by the re-estimation, including interaction terms, of the models presented in Table 11.26 And the
reason for this lies in how directly governments are able to shape the distribution of disposable income inequality as opposed to the
distribution of earnings. As argued above, government’s effects on wage inequality are indirect in that they are contingent on the agreement of
unions to wage moderation and high taxes on labor. Such agreement only takes place under conditions of high wage bargaining coordination,
thereby producing the observed interaction effects. Alternatively, an increase in fiscal redistribution reduces inequality of
disposable income directly , i.e., without any other actors taking part in shaping the final outcome. Thus,
for a given value of market income inequality, left-wing governments can make use of fiscal redistribution to reduce inequality regardless of the
institutional position of any other actor. As a result, no interaction effect is to be observed.

b) Indirect taxes involve an external transaction with a third party (like when someone
buys a carbon-intensive fuel or banks make a financial transaction)
Kodjovi M. Eklou 20, economist at the International Monetary Fund; and Mamour Fall, Ph.D. candidate
in economics at the University of Sherbrooke, 1/17/20, “The (Subjective) Well-Being Cost of Fiscal Policy
Shocks,” https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/2020/005/article-A001-en.xml /jpb

In this dataset, public spending can be disaggregated between government consumption and public
investments. Government consumption includes for instance, current expenditures (good and services),
public sector salaries but also the managing cost of public services such as healthcare and education.
Public investments are defined as government gross fixed capital formation expenditures and include for
instance, construction of roads and railways. They also distinguish transfers, defined as disbursements of
the government in favor of private entities and include for instance social assistance benefits. On the tax
side, the two main components are direct and indirect taxes. Direct taxes are defined as those imposed
on a property or a person and that do not involve any transaction . They include for instance property,
income and capital gains taxes. Indirect taxes are those imposed relative to some transaction involving
the purchase of goods or services such as VAT or sale taxes.15
 AT: Predictable---2NC
Our interp’s the consensus view of inequality studies---they’re all framed around
redistribution of income through taxation
Michele Battisti 16, Professor of Economics, University of Palermo; and Joseph Zeira, Professor of
Economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2016“The Effects of Fiscal Redistribution,” in
Inequality and Growth: Patterns and Policy, Volume I: Concepts and Analysis, eds. Basu & Stiglitz, p.
201 /jpb

Every discussion on income distribution and inequality distinguishes between market income, namely
income before tax and without transfers , and disposable, or net income , which is after tax and
including transfers. Hence, taxation and transfers create a redistribution of income . This redistribution
is usually progressive, as direct taxes and subsidies are progressive, and thus it is supposed to reduce
inequality, in the transition from market income to disposable income . This paper focuses on
measuring the effect of fiscal policy in income redistribution and in reducing inequality. It also examines
which type of fiscal policy is most strongly related to the redistribution of income, are they transfer
payments? Is it direct taxation? Or is it the overall measure of fiscal policy, namely public expenditures,
which are also known as the size of the public sector?