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Impact—Turns the Aff (Rollback)



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Impact—Turns the Aff (Rollback)

With each new attack, more invasive security measures are created. Disad turns the case.


Balko 14 – Radley Balko, senior writer and investigative reporter at the Huffington Post, graduate of Indiana University, and policy analyst at the Cato Institute, 2014 ( “Was the police response to the Boston bombing really appropriate?,” Washington Post, April 22nd , Available Online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/04/22/the-police-response-to-the-boston-marathon-bombing/ , Accessed June 17th 2015, J.L.)

The economist and historian Robert Higgs has written prolifically over the years about what he calls the “ratchet effect.” In times of crisis, governments tend to expand, usually at the expense of civil liberties. When the crisis abates, government power does, too, but never completely back to where it was before. With each subsequent crisis, government encroaches a bit more. Higgs has documented the effect through major wars, depressions and other national emergencies. But the effect may be particularly pronounced and dangerous with respect to the war on terror, because as crises go, terrorism can never completely be defeated. We’re now more than a year out from the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013. The studies, reviews, and after-action reports have been written. Politicians and other public officials have held hearings, cast blame and pontificated on the lessons they have learned. There have been calls for more monitoring of foreign travelers; better information-sharing among federal, state and local government police agencies; and the inevitable demands for more security, more surveillance and generally more government power to prevent similar attacks in the future. We instinctively put our faith in government to protect us in times of crisis, even when those crises are the result of the government’s failure to protect us. We regret it later. Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Gallup polling found that 47 percent of the public was willing to sacrifice its civil liberties for security. Within two years, that figure was down to 33 percent, and by 2012, it was at 25 percent. Those figures show why it’s dangerous to pass new policies when the public is fearful and emotional, and why politicians are particularly eager to do exactly that. (See the Patriot Act.) The danger here is that the Boston response tightens the ratchet and becomes the default response to similar crises in the future. For example, we’ve already seen other examples of wanton, indiscriminate gunfire from cops during manhunts for fugitives suspected of killing cops,

Plan rollback – interest groups favored by changes preserve the status quo.


Bainbridge 13 – Stephen Bainbridge, Joseph Flom Visiting Professor of Law and Business at Harvard law School and author of The New Corporate Governance in Theory and Practice, 2013 (“The Global Ware on Terror & the Ratchet Effect,” Stephen Bainbridge's Journal of Law, Politics, and Culture, May 27th, Available online at http://www.professorbainbridge.c om/professorbainbridgecom/2013/05/the-global-ware-on-terror-and-the-ratchet-effect.html, accessed 6/19/15, J.L.)

Robert Higgs demonstrated that wars and other major crises typically trigger a dramatic growth in the size of government, accompanied by higher taxes, greater regulation, and loss of civil liberties. Once the crisis ends, government may shrink somewhat in size and power, but rarely back to pre-crisis levels. Just as a ratchet wrench works only in one direction, the size and scope of government tends to move in only one direction—upwards—because the interest groups that favored the changes now have an incentive to preserve the new status quo, as do the bureaucrats who gained new powers and prestige. Hence, each crisis has the effect of ratcheting up the long-term size and scope of government. There's a slew of domestic restrictions on our liberties that came into place after 9/11. The TSA's security theater apparatus at airports is just the most noticeable. As Jonathan Turley has noted: For civil libertarians, the legacy of bin Laden is most troubling because it shows how the greatest injuries from terror are often self-inflicted. Bin Laden's twisted notion of success was not the bringing down of two buildings in New York or the partial destruction of the Pentagon. It was how the response to those attacks by the United States resulted in our abandonment of core principles and values in the "war on terror." Many of the most lasting impacts of this ill-defined war were felt domestically, not internationally. Starting with George W. Bush, the 9/11 attacks were used to justify the creation of a massive counterterrorism system with growing personnel and budgets designed to find terrorists in the heartland. Laws were rewritten to prevent citizens from challenging searches and expanding surveillance of citizens. Leaders from both parties acquiesced as the Bush administration launched programs of warrantless surveillance, sweeping arrests of Muslim citizens and the creation of a torture program. What has been most chilling is that the elimination of Saddam and now bin Laden has little impact on this system, which seems to continue like a perpetual motion machine of surveillance and searches.




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