Libertarianism
A2 Liberty First --- Aff Ans
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- ---No impact to state coercion --- The State does not exclude individual freedom and can often help protect it.
A2 Liberty First --- Aff Ans---Case outweighs --- Extinction ends all liberty for all time.Rothbard 1973 Murray, Dean of Austrian School, Head of Mises Institute, FOR A NEW LIBERTY: THE LIBERTARIAN MANIFESTO, p. http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p263 Many libertarians are uncomfortable with foreign policy matters and prefer to spend their energies either on fundamental questions of libertarian theory or on such "domestic" concerns as the free market or privatizing postal service or garbage disposal. Yet an attack on war or a warlike foreign policy is of crucial importance to libertarians. There are two important reasons. One has become a cliche, but is all too true nevertheless: the overriding importance of preventing a nuclear holocaust. To all the long-standing reasons, moral and economic, against an interventionist foreign policy has now been added the imminent, ever-present threat of world destruction. If the world should be destroyed, all the other problems and all the other isms—socialism, capitalism, liberalism, or libertarianism—would be of no importance whatsoever. ---Government intervention is key to liberty --- It’s the only actor capable and motivated to enforce the protection of individual rights.Amy 7 (Douglas J. Amy is a Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College. 2007. Governmentisgood.com. “A Guide to Rebutting Right-Wing Criticisms of Government” http://www.governmentisgood.com/articles.php?aid=19) Sherman But consider this: Who comes to the rescue when our government violates our rights in these ways? To whom do Americans turn to revoke or remedy those actions and to make sure that they don’t happen again? The government. Sometimes the government acts independently in this protective role, as when federal authorities intervened in the 1960s when some states were violating the civil rights and voting rights of African Americans. But often it is citizens themselves who use one part of the government – usually the courts – to stop another part of the government from infringing on their freedoms and rights. Citizen organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union have been particularly active in using the courts to protect our freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to vote, etc. In the end, then, we depend heavily on the tools of democratic government to protect people’s rights. When we want to limit the abusive activities of government – such as unreasonable searches or unfair appropriations of our property – we need to rely on the positive actions of another part of the government to do so. This is a point that anti-government conservatives consistently ignore. Yes, government can violate our rights, but democratic government also functions as the main protector of our rights and freedoms as well – and it has often done so very effectively. Certainly totalitarian and dictatorial governments are the enemies of freedom, but democratic governments have constitutions and institutions that enable us to effectively protect our rights and freedoms. We often make the mistake of seeing our rights and civil liberties as merely the absence of some kind of governmental action. We believe that we have free speech or freedom of religion when the government does nothing to impede those freedoms. But in reality, our rights depend heavily on active government – on positive government actions. In fact, the very existence of rights depends on government. In a very real way, rights and civil liberties are actually political constructs – creations of government. Formal rights do not exist until they are created by law or established in a constitution. We only have the right of free speech because it is guaranteed in our constitution. If we didn’t have our constitution, or if we didn’t have government, our civil liberties would literally not exist. In the preamble of the Constitution, the founding fathers did not say that in order to “secure liberty for ourselves and our posterity” they were going to abolish government; they said that they were going to “ordain and establish” a democratic constitutional government to do so.1 They knew, as Benjamin Barber has explained, that “in democracies, representative institutions do not steal our liberties from us, they are the precious medium through which we secure our liberties."2 ---Right tradeoffs are inevitable --- We should prioritize the ones that minimize death and suffering to maximize future liberty.Sunstein 1999 Stephen, Professor of political science @ Princeton, The cost of rights: why liberty depends on taxes, pg 130 Rights remain rights even though they will not always be enforced to the hilt, or even as thoroughly as would be possible were resources more plentiful or taxpayers more open-handed. Trade-offs in rights enforcement must and will be made. Scarce resources will be allocated between monitoring the police and (for example) paying and training the police, between monitoring the police and monitoring electoral officers, between monitoring the police and providing legal aid to the poor, providing food stamps to the poor, educating the young, nursing the elderly, financing national defense, or protecting the environment. Morally speaking, incomplete protection of property rights is far easier to swallow than half-hearted protection of the helpless from beatings and killings. We accord property rights special, but not the greatest possible, protection. But are the interests of some Americans not being brutalized or murdered given the same level of regard as the interests of other Americans in protection of their property rights? Was the palpable benefit to Joshua DeShaney of retaining his normal brain functions given the highest imaginable level of administrative protections? Was it accorded a level of protection greater or less than that received by the homeowners of Westhampton? There seems to be something obscene about the very comparison, not to mention the distressing answers such questions may elicit. But they do suggest that, in reality, no right can be uncompromisable, for rights enforcement, like everything costly, is inevitably incomplete. ---No impact to state coercion --- The State does not exclude individual freedom and can often help protect it.Glaeser 07 ( Ed, Professor of Economics at Harvard University “Acceptable Government Coercion?” Economist’s View 5/14/07 http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/05/acceptable_gove.html) SWOAP But, as Klein notes, just because something is coercive, doesn’t mean that it is wrong. The coercive power of the state is useful when it protects our lives and property from outside harm. If we think that state-sponsored redistribution is desirable, then we are willing to accept more coercion to help the less fortunate. We also rely on state-sponsored coercion regularly when writing private contracts. The ability of creditors to collect depends on the power of the state to coerce borrowers. The great difficulty is that coercion is both necessary and terrifying. For millenia, governments have abused their control over the tools of violence. The historical track record insists that we treat any governmental intervention warily. What principles help us decide on the appropriate limits to government-sponsored coercion? Are minimum wage laws acceptable coercion or do they fall outside of the pale? I start with the view that individual freedom is the ultimate goal for any government. The ultimate job of the state is to increase the range of options available to its citizens. To me, this is ... justified by both philosophy and history. ... A belief in the value of liberty flows strongly through mainstream neoclassical economics. Economists frequently speak about an aim of maximizing utility levels, and this is often mistranslated as maximizing happiness. Maximizing freedom would be a better translation. The only way that economists know that utility has increased is if a person has more options to choose from, and that sounds like freedom to me. It is this attachment to liberty that makes neoclassical economists fond of political liberty and making people richer, because more wealth means more choices... But putting freedom first doesn’t mean abandoning the state. At the very least, we rely on the government to protect our private property against incursions by others. Even most libertarians think that it is reasonable for the state to enforce contracts. ... 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