Space Elevators Affirmative

2AC Cap

1. 
   Interpretation – The negative should have to defend the status quo or a competitive policy option.
   
2. 
   Violation – The negative introduces a kritik
   
3. 
   Reasons to prefer
   
   1. 
      Aff Choice – The affirmative gets the first speech; the affirmative introduces the plan; the affirmative should decide the framework to be debated under.
      
   2. 
      Predictability – There are an infinite number of advocacies that the negative could choose to defend. The aff could never hope to meet that research burden.
      
   3. 
      Moots the 1AC – Kritiks always shift the focus of a debate from the actual substance of the plan to whatever critical impact they’re trying to link us into. Plan education is critical to TOPIC education, and education is the only objective way to value debate.
      
4. 
   Voters
   
   1. 
      Fairness – Our model of predictability is the best way to allow for fair debate. By limiting out kritikal arguments, we allow debates to be more focused and specific.
      
   2. 
      Education – Fairness allows us to have more focused and specific debates, meaning better education overall. The kritik ruins our ability to have topic-specific education.
      

3. Capitalism key to sustainable growth for all—provides incentive

Butters 7 (Roger B., Ph.D., President – Nebraska Council on Economic Education, Assistant Professor of Economics – University of Nebraska at Lincoln, “Teaching the Benefits of Capitalism”, http://www.hillsdale.edu/images/userImages/afolsom/Page_6281/Butters.pdf)

The miracle of market competition is that not only does it reduce material scarcity it creates wealth for every participant. Both the buyer and seller are wealthier for having participated: The seller for having sold something for more than the opportunity cost of production, the buyer for having acquired something for less than the value it imparts. Entrepreneurial activity, the second consequence of capitalism, is inextricably connected to competition. In competitive markets the only way to accrue wealth to oneself is by creating and providing a product that others value. Furthermore, you must create and provide that product at a cost that is less than the value perceived by your customer. In order to capture a profit the entrepreneur must create something newer, better, cheaper or more appealing. He must find a way to induce someone to voluntarily surrender value to him and to do that he must create value himself. The creative process is risky and as a result people will only assume risk if the expected reward exceeds the expected costs. Property rights, via a patent or copyright, guarantee that if the entrepreneur creates something of value he will be able to capture, and retain, the profits from its sale. Without that guarantee, entrepreneurial activity slows and innovation and invention cease. The former Soviet Union created some of the greatest minds in the world and yet little or no invention and innovation occurred. The reason why is simple; there was no incentive to do so. Since the scientists had no right to their creation, since businessmen stood to earn no profits, and since entrepreneurs would never be allowed to compete in the marketplace no innovation occurred. The institutions of capitalism, on the other hand, conspire to find new and better ways to do everything in an effort to impart a fractional advantage when competing in the market place

4. Growth key to prevent extinction

Zey 98 (Michael, Executive Director – Expansionary Institute, Professor of Management – Montclair State University, Seizing the Future, p. 34, 39-40)

However, no outside force guarantees the continued progress of the human species, nor does anything mandate that the human species must even continue to exist. In fact, history is littered with races and civilizations that have disappeared without a trace. So, too, could the human species. There is no guarantee that the human species will survive even if we posit, as many have, a special purpose to the species’ existence. Therefore, the species innately comprehends that it must engage in purposive actions in order to maintain its level of growth and progress. Humanity’s future is conditioned by what I call the Imperative of Growth, a principle I will herewith describe along with its several corollaries. The Imperative of Growth states that in order to survive, any nation, indeed, the human race, must grow, both materially and intellectually. The Macroindustrial Era represents growth in the areas of both technology and human development, a natural stage in the evolution of the species’ continued extension of its control over itself and its environment. Although 5 billion strong, our continued existence depends on our ability to continue the progress we have been making at higher and higher levels. Systems, whether organizations, societies, or cells, have three basic directions in which to move. They can grow, decline, or temporarily reside in a state of equilibrium. These are the choices. Choosing any alternative to growth, for instance, stabilization of production/consumption through zero-growth policies, could have alarmingly pernicious side effects, including extinction. The fifth corollary of the Imperative of Growth claims that a society can remain in a state of equilibrium only temporarily. In reality, a society seemingly in a phase where it neither improves nor regresses is actually in a transition to either growth or decline. Such periods easily seduce their contemporaries into a false sense of security, that their institutions will last forever, they have all the science they need, and there are no more challenges. In fact, during such periods some imagine that they have reached their “golden age,” perhaps even the “end of history.” During such periods of supposed equilibrium, the population ceases to prepare itself for new challenges and becomes risk averse. Importantly, they reject the idea that growth and progress are necessary for their survival. The sixth corollary evolves from the fifth. If the system chooses not to grow, it will decline and eventually disappear, either because other organisms or systems overtake it or because it is impossible to maintain itself even at static levels without in some way deteriorating. This is the Law of Spiraling Regression. It is indeed a curiosity of the late-twentieth-century culture that this truism has been ignored. In the morass of claims about the risks of technological growth and its impact on the ecosystem, the mainstream media and orthodox academics have decided not to consider what harm the full pursuance of zero growth or non growth might inflict on the sociotechnical system, which includes our technological infrastructure, culture, and standard of living
5. Capitalism key to the environment

Wilson 97 (James Q., Professor of Government – Harvard University, “The Morality of Capitalism”, 10-15, http://www.cis.org.au/Events/ JBL/JBL97.htm#Wilson)

Capitalism brings three advantages to the environmental task: (i) It creates and maintains a private sphere of action. A private sphere of action makes capitalism possible because you can operate free of government control. But by maintaining a private sphere you also provide a protected place for people to stand who wish to make controversial proposals. You create a world in which the critics of capitalism – those who wish to see capitalism restrained in order to protect the environment – have an opportunity to move. No such world existed for them in the Soviet Union, and no such world exists for them today in the People’s Republic of China. The absence of a private sphere means the absence of an environmental ethic. (ii) Secondly, capitalism produces prosperity, and prosperity changes the minds of people, especially young people. It endows them what we in the social science business call in our professional journals, post-materialist or post-industrial goals. That is a fancy way of saying that when society becomes rich enough for everybody to be fed and where no-one has to struggle day and night to put food on their table, we begin to think of other things we can use resources for. Those other things include taking care of animals, protecting the environment, preserving land and the like. The prosperity induced by capitalism produces of necessity an environmental movement. How that environ-mental movement is managed of course is a very real question; sometimes it is managed very badly, other times it is managed reasonably well. Environmental policies in capitalist systems will vary greatly – from the inconsequential through the prudent to the loony – but they will scarcely exist at all in non-capitalist ones. (iii) The final thing capitalism brings to this task is that it creates firms that can be regulated. You may think that this is a trivial statement. You all know that business firms are regulated – sometimes to the advantage of the firm, sometimes to its disadvantage. But I don’t think you realise the importance of this fact. Consider the alternative. Suppose the government ran everything. What would be regulated? The main reason why Eastern Europe was a vast toxic waste dump, and why many parts of China are becoming a vast toxic waste dump, is because the government owns the enterprises and one government agency does not – cannot – regulate another government agency. This is because neither the regulator nor the regulatee has any personal motives to accept regulation. But they can regulate firms, and so when firms are producing wealth and people decide that the distribution of wealth ought to be made to accord to an environmental ethic, capitalism makes that possible.

6. Capitalism is ethical—provides means to better lives

Saunders 7 – fellow, Center for Independent Studies (Peter, Why Capitalism is Good for the Soul, http://www.cis.org.au/POLICY/summer%2007-08/saunders_summer07.html)
What Clive Hamilton airily dismisses as a ‘growth fetish’ has resulted in one hour of work today delivering twenty-five times more value than it did in 1850. This has freed huge chunks of our time for leisure, art, sport, learning, and other ‘soul-enriching’ pursuits. Despite all the exaggerated talk of an ‘imbalance’ between work and family life, the average Australian today spends a much greater proportion of his or her lifetime free of work than they would had they belonged to any previous generation in history.  There is another sense, too, in which capitalism has freed individuals so they can pursue worthwhile lives, and that lies in its record of undermining tyrannies and dictatorships. As examples like Pinochet’s Chile and Putin’s Russia vividly demonstrate, a free economy does not guarantee a democratic polity or a society governed by the rule of law. But as Milton Friedman once pointed out, these latter conditions are never found in the absence of a free economy.(12) Historically, it was capitalism that delivered humanity from the ‘soul-destroying’ weight of feudalism. Later, it freed millions from the dead hand of totalitarian socialism. While capitalism may not be a sufficient condition of human freedom, it is almost certainly a necessary one.  [continues] Wherever populations have a chance to move, the flow is always towards capitalism, not away from it. The authorities never had a problem keeping West Germans out of East Germany, South Koreans out of North Korea, or Taiwanese out of Communist China. The attraction of living in a capitalist society is not just that the economy works. It is also that if your version of the good life leads you to turn your back on capitalism, you don’t have to pick up sticks and move away. If you don’t like capitalism, there is no need to bribe people-smugglers to get you out of the country. You simply buy a plot of land, build your mud-brick house, and drop out (or, like Clive, you set up your own think tank and sell books urging others to drop out).

7. They can’t solve -- dominant hierarchies are inevitable. Only in a free capitalist society can effective limits be placed on these organizations.

Wilkinson, policy analyst at the Cato institute, 2005 (Will, “Capitalism and Human Nature,” Cato Policy Report Vol. XXVII No. 1 January/February 2005, DS)

Emory professor of economics and law Paul Rubin usefully distinguishes between "productive" and "allocative" hierarchies. Productive hierarchies are those that organize cooperative efforts to achieve otherwise unattainable mutually advantageous gains. Business organizations are a prime example. Allocative hierarchies, on the other hand, exist mainly to transfer resources to the top. Aristocracies and dictatorships are extreme examples. Although the nation-state can perform productive functions, there is the constant risk that it becomes dominated by allocative hierarchies. Rubin warns that our natural wariness of zero-sum allocative hierarchies, which helps us to guard against the concentration of power in too few hands, is often directed at modern positive-sum productive hierarchies, like corporations, thereby threatening the viability of enterprises that tend to make everyone better off. There is no way to stop dominance-seeking behavior. We may hope only to channel it to non-harmful uses. A free society therefore requires that positions of dominance and status be widely available in a multitude of productive hierarchies, and that opportunities for greater status and dominance through predation are limited by the constant vigilance of "the people"—the ultimate reverse dominance hierarchy. A flourishing civil society permits almost everyone to be the leader of something, whether the local Star Trek fan club or the city council, thereby somewhat satisfying the human taste for hierarchical status, but to no one's serious detriment.

8. Alternative:

1. Perm : Do the plan as a commitment to the communist hypothesis

2. Perm: Do the plan with the mindset of the kritik

Perm solves best:

The negative depictions of capitalism are totalizing. This discourse erases the complexity of the economy eliminating the multiple identities that are present in todays economy. Vote affirmative to endorse a new kind of local ethical subject.

Gibson-Graham, feminist economic geographers, 2001 (Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson, “An Ethics of the Local” in Rethinking Marxism, May 2001)

I want to turn now to thinking about how we as local subjects might cultivate ourselves in accordance with the principles of a local ethics, and to describe as a vehicle for that cultivation process a multi-continental program of research that is attempting to create social and discursive spaces in which ethical practices of self-formation can occur. In introducing that research program, I invoke the term “politics”—because I see these practices of resubjectivation or making ourselves anew as ultimately (if not simply) political (Connolly 1999).7 The research projects I will describe are focused on transforming ourselves as local economic subjects, who are acted upon and subsumed by the global economy, into subjects with economic capacities, who enact and create a diverse economy through daily practices both habitual (and thus unconscious) and consciously intentional. But these practices of self transformation rely on an initial and somewhat difficult move. If we are to cultivate a new range of capacities in the domain of economy, we need first to be able to see noncapitalist activities and subjects (including ones we admire) as visible and viable in the economic terrain. This involves supplanting representations of economic sameness and replication with images of economic difference and diversification. Feminist economic theorists have bolstered our confidence that such a representation is both possible and productive. Based on a variety of empirical undertakings, they argue that the noncommodity sector (in which unpaid labor produces goods and services for nonmarket circulation) accounts for 30-50 percent of total output in both rich and poor 7 This research program has strong affinities with the work of Arturo Escobar (2001) and Arif Dirlik (2000b) on the politics of place. 11 countries (Ironmonger 1996). According to the familiar definition of capitalism as a type of commodity production, this means that a large portion of social wealth is noncapitalist in origin. And even the commodity sector is not necessarily capitalist—commodities are just goods and services produced for a market. Slaves in the antebellum U.S. south produced cotton and other commodities, and in the contemporary U.S. worker-owned collectives, self employed people, and slaves in the prison industry all produce goods and services for the market, but not under capitalist relations of production.8 Arguably, then, less than half of the total product of the U.S. economy is produced under capitalism. From this perspective, referring to the U.S. or any economy as capitalist is a violent act of naming that erases from view the heterogeneous complexity of the economy. Working against this process of erasure, our research is trying to produce a discourse of economic difference as a contribution to the ethical and political practice of cultivating a diverse economy. In projects underway in Australia, Asia, the Pacific, and the United States, we are attempting to generate and circulate an alternative language of economy, one in which capitalism is not the master signifier, the dominant or only identity in economic space. This eclectic language, emerging from conversations both academic and popular, provides the conceptual infrastructure for re-presenting economic subjects and multiplying economic identities (Gibson-Graham 2001). Two of our projects have moved beyond the planning and early implementation phase and are beginning to reveal their specificity as ethical practices and political experiments.9 One is based in the Latrobe Valley in southeastern Australia (Cameron and Gibson 2001). 8 There is a tendency to conflate all market-oriented (i.e., commodity) production with capitalism. We need to resist that tendency if we are to theorize economic difference in the market sphere, and to acknowledge the many types of economic organization that are compatible with commodity production. 12 The other is underway in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, the region that stretches north-south along the Connecticut River in the northeastern U.S. (Community Economies Collective 2001). While the Latrobe Valley is a single industry region (based on mining and power generation) with a recent history of downsizing and privatization, the Pioneer Valley mixes agriculture, higher education, and recognized economic alternatives, supplementing this unusual mixture with a small manufacturing sector that is suffering the lingering effects of deindustrialization. In both of these regions globalization sets the economic agenda—we are all being asked to become better subjects of capitalist development (though the path to such a becoming does not readily present itself) and to subsume ourselves more thoroughly to the global economy. The two research projects provide a social context for Foucault’s second moment of morality—cultivating the ethical subject—which involves working on our local/regional selves to become something other than what the global economy wants us to be. But what actual processes or techniques of self (and other) invention do we have at our disposal? Foucault is not forthcoming here, at the microlevel of actual practices. And when we embarked on these projects we did not imagine how difficult the process of resubjectivation would be. In both the U.S. and Australia, for example, we have come up against the patent lack of desire for economic difference in the regions where we are working. We have encountered instead the fixation of desires upon capitalism—individuals want employment as wage workers, policymakers want conventional economic development. It was only after months of resistance, setbacks, and surprising successes that we could see the deeply etched contours of existing subjectivities and the complexity of the task of “re-subjecting” we were 9 Here it has become necessary to shift to the first person plural since the projects we are discussing are collective efforts involving large numbers of people (see acknowledgments below). Invaluable in helping us to conceptualize and negotiate this complexity was the work of William Connolly. Whereas we had stumbled through the process of cultivating alternative economic subjects, Connolly’s work on self-artistry and micropolitics allowed us retrospectively to see steps and stages, techniques and strategies. Connolly is concerned with the subject as a being that is already shaped and as one that is always (and sometimes deliberately) becoming. In his view active selftransformation— working on oneself in the way that Foucault has described—functions as a micropolitical process that makes macropolitical settlements possible. If we are to succeed in promoting a diverse economy and producing new subjects and practices of economic development, there must be selves who are receptive to such an economy and to transforming themselves within it. How do we nurture the micropolitical receptivity of subjects to new becomings, both of themselves and of their economies? Micropolitics can be understood as an “assemblage of techniques and disciplines that impinge on the lower registers of sensibility and judgment without necessarily or immediately engaging the conscious intellect” (Connolly 2001, 33). One object of such a politics is what Connolly calls the “visceral” domain where “thought-imbued intensities below the reach of feeling” (1999, 148) dispose the individual in particular ways, with a seldom acknowledged impact on macropolitical interactions. In a discussion of the public sphere, where he argues that the visceral register cannot be excluded from public discourse and the process of coming to public consensus, Connolly (1999, 35-36) puts forward a set of norms for discourse across differences. Instead of attempting to tame or exclude the body, reducing public discourse to rational argument, he advocates developing an appreciation of “positive possibilities in the visceral register of thinking and discourse” as a way of 14 beginning to creatively produce and respond to the emergence of new identities. This appreciation of positive possibilities in the body, he suggests, might be supplemented by an “ethic of cultivation” that works against the bodily feelings of panic experienced when naturalized identities are called into question. And rather than expecting people to transcend their differences in order to be or behave like a community, he suggests the possibility of a “generous ethos of engagement” between constituencies in which differences are honored and bonds are forged around and upon them. All these attitudes and practices could make possible ethically sensitive, negotiated settlements between potentially antagonistic groups and individuals in the construction of communities. We are drawn to Connolly’s italicized arsenal of stances and strategies because they take into account the stubborn, unspoken bodily resistances that stand in the way of individual becoming and social possibility; and at the same time they acknowledge the visceral register of discourse as a positive resource for social creativity. For us, retrospectively, they offer a “cultivator’s manual” for the ethical practice of cultivating different local economic subjects—subjects of capacity rather than debility, subjects whose range of economic identifications exceeds the capitalist order. Though Connolly did not intend them this way, for us they have become a way of organizing our narrative of local resubjectivation in the Latrobe and Pioneer Valleys

Their alternative fails—Marxist regimes have caused more violence than any other event in human history.

Rummel, prof. emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii, 2004 (Rudolph, The Killing Machine that is Marxism, Online, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1588725/posts, DS)

Of all religions, secular and otherwise, that of Marxism has been by far the bloodiest – bloodier than the Catholic Inquisition, the various Catholic crusades, and the Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants. In practice, Marxism has meant bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal prison camps and murderous forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and fraudulent show trials, outright mass murder and genocide. In total, Marxist regimes murdered nearly 110 million people from 1917 to 1987. For perspective on this incredible toll, note that all domestic and foreign wars during the 20th century killed around 35 million. That is, when Marxists control states, Marxism is more deadly then all the wars of the 20th century, including World Wars I and II, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars. And what did Marxism, this greatest of human social experiments, achieve for its poor citizens, at this most bloody cost in lives? Nothing positive. It left in its wake an economic, environmental, social and cultural disaster. The Khmer Rouge – (Cambodian communists) who ruled Cambodia for four years – provide insight into why Marxists believed it necessary and moral to massacre so many of their fellow humans. Their Marxism was married to absolute power. They believed without a shred of doubt that they knew the truth, that they would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness, and that to realize this utopia, they had to mercilessly tear down the old feudal or capitalist order and Buddhist culture, and then totally rebuild a communist society. Nothing could be allowed to stand in the way of this achievement. Government – the Communist Party – was above any law. All other institutions, religions, cultural norms, traditions and sentiments were expendable. The Marxists saw the construction of this utopia as a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism and inequality – and, as in a real war, noncombatants would unfortunately get caught in the battle. There would be necessary enemy casualties: the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, "wreckers," intellectuals, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, the rich and landlords. As in a war, millions might die, but these deaths would be justified by the end, as in the defeat of Hitler in World War II. To the ruling Marxists, the goal of a communist utopia was enough to justify all the deaths. The irony is that in practice, even after decades of total control, Marxism did not improve the lot of the average person, but usually made living conditions worse than before the revolution. It is not by chance that the world's greatest famines have happened within the Soviet Union (about 5 million dead from 1921-23 and 7 million from 1932-3, including 2 million outside Ukraine) and communist China (about 30 million dead from 1959-61). Overall, in the last century almost 55 million people died in various Marxist famines and associated epidemics – a little over 10 million of them were intentionally starved to death, and the rest died as an unintended result of Marxist collectivization and agricultural policies. What is astonishing is that this "currency" of death by Marxism is not thousands or even hundreds of thousands, but millions of deaths. This is almost incomprehensible – it is as though the whole population of the American New England and Middle Atlantic States, or California and Texas, had been wiped out. And that around 35 million people escaped Marxist countries as refugees was an unequaled vote against Marxist utopian pretensions. Its equivalent would be everyone fleeing California, emptying it of all human beings. There is a supremely important lesson for human life and welfare to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology: No one can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power a government has to impose the beliefs of an ideological or religious elite, or decree the whims of a dictator, the more likely human lives and welfare will be sacrificed. As a government's power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all corners of culture and society, the more likely it is to kill its own citizens

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