AT Coercion DA - Michigan 7 2023 CFMP

aff answers
uniqueness
2ac—uq—taxes inevitable
this disad has negative uniqueness...
Wikipedia ‘ND (Wikipedia, the FREE ENCYCLOPEDIA!), “Taxation in the United States,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_United_States //ike
The United States of America has separate federal, state, and local governments with taxes imposed at each of these levels. Taxes are levied on income, payroll, property, sales, capital gains, dividends, imports, estates and gifts, as well as various fees. In 2020, taxes collected by federal, state, and local governments amounted to 25.5% of GDP, below the OECD average of 33.5% of GDP. The United States had the seventh-lowest tax revenue-to-GDP ratio among OECD countries in 2020, with a higher ratio than Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Ireland, Costa Rica, and Turkey.[1]
link
2ac—L—turn
link turn – eliminating economic inequality is a pre-requisite to realizing value of AMERICAN FREEDOM!
Spicker ’85 (Paul Spicker, Emeritus Professor of Public Policy at the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen.), “Why Freedom Implies Equality,” 1985, Journal of Applied Philosophy, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24353449 //ike
Equality implies the elimination of disadvantage. Freedom is a redistributive idea, implying that the freedom of some must be restricted to increase the freedom of others. Although the individual concept of freedom is restrictive, equal treatment and equality of opportunity are largely compatible with it, and even equality of outcome with it to some degree. The social concept of freedom is broader, extending the scope of redistribution to all forms of social disadvantage. This demands a high degree of equality; it also defines the boundaries of the pursuit of equality, which is justifiable in so far as it increases freedom. Freedom is not, therefore, in conflict with equality. Certain egalitarian assumptions are part of its normative base, and it actively requires a degree of redistribution.
impact
2ac—!—not theft – top level
it’s not theft – mad warrants.
Wells ’23 (Thomas R. Wells, philosopher.), “Why taxation is not theft,” 8-22-22, 3 Quarks Daily, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/08/why-taxation-is-not-theft.html //ike
The idea that ‘taxation is theft’ is one of those thrilling, paradigm shifting recognitions that are continually being rediscovered and shared. It is a classic case of pseudo-intellectuality, in which the excitement around an idea determines its popularity, rather than its quality (previously). First, unlike theft, taxation is legal – and this turns out to be a more significant difference than it first seems since we rely on laws to determine who owns what. Second, taxation is a device for solving collective action problems and thus allowing us (by coercing us) to meet our moral obligations to ourselves and each other – including our obligations to respect each others’ property rights. One can’t coherently be in favour of enforcing property rights, e.g. by having a police force and judges to catch and punish thieves, without also being in favour of a sustainable system for funding that enforcement. 1. Taxation is Legal The straightforward rebuttal of the claim that taxation is theft goes like this: Theft is when someone takes something from you in a way that violates your legal property rights When the government taxes money from you they do not violate your legal property rights Therefore Taxation is not theft To many people this semantic analysis is rather unsatisfactory. Whether things are legal or not is after all determined by the government. But whether something is right or wrong is determined by morality, which is not something determined by governments. The point of the claim that taxation is theft is that taxation is immoral in just the same way that theft is, i.e. that taking people’s property from them against their will and under threat of violence is wrong whether it is done by an ordinary person or by an agent of the government. I agree that people do have an intuitive idea of moral concepts like property, consent, and theft independent from how governments choose to define them. Yet these ‘pre-political’ intuitions are impractically vague. As natural rights theorists like John Locke acknowledge, we need to know much more precisely what property means if we are to successfully respect each other’s moral rights in a complicated modern society. For example, if I own a piece of land do I also own the part of the river that runs through it? Do I also own (some of) the fish in it? Do I also own the copper underneath it? If I mine the copper and kill the fish, do I owe people downstream compensation for killing ‘their’ fish? If I rent the land to someone else and they invest in agricultural improvements, who should get what share of the increased yield? If I go bankrupt who should decide which creditors get what share of my land and other assets? And so on. It is clear that we need clear and reliable answers to such peculiar questions if we are to know where we stand – who owns what – in a modern economy with its sophisticated and complex economic transactions and interdependencies. But it is also clear that these questions don’t have straightforward common sense answers that are already obvious to everyone in the way that our moral intuitions are supposed to be. We need another source for those answers, and that source is the laws made up by governments. Therefore it turns out that law is of greater moral significance than it at first seemed. The strong normative intuition that people shouldn’t take your things without your consent requires a clear shared understanding of exactly whose things they are in the first place. You can only say that such and such is your property and that someone else who takes it is a thief because of the legal definitions provided by the government (and also interpreted and enforced by them, as we will come to below). To put it another way, the very idea of private property can be understood as one person’s right to exclude all others from using certain objects without their consent, i.e. property rights are a restriction of the freedom of all other people except the rightful owner. Suppose one of those people disagrees with another about who owns an object. The moral determination of which person is the rights holder and which is the wrong doer will turn on the application of legal definitions. If the idea of theft itself depends on government defined and interpreted laws, then law is clearly not so irrelevant to our moral intuitions after all. Thus the fact that taxation is legal is a central, not incidental, difference with theft. Governments make the laws on which the definition of property depends. To deny the relevance of laws to determine what counts as whose rightful property is to undermine the concept of property on which the concept of theft itself depends.
pretax income has no independent significance.
Murphy & Nagel ’02 (Liam Murphy, legal, moral, & political philosopher, Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy @ NYU.), “The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice,” 4-25-02, Oxford Academic, https://academic.oup.com/book/5300 //ike
In a capitalist economy, taxes are the most significant instrument by which the political system can put into practice a conception of economic justice. But conventional ideas about what constitutes tax fairness--found in the vigorous debates about tax policy going on in political and public policy circles, in economics and law--are misguided. In particular, the emphasis on distributing the tax burden relative to pretax income is a fundamental mistake. Taxation does not take from people what they already own. Property rights are the product of a set of laws and conventions, of which the tax system forms a central part, so the fairness of taxes can’t be evaluated by their impact on preexisting entitlements. Pretax income has no independent moral significance. Standards of justice should be applied not to the distribution of tax burdens but to the operation and results of the entire framework of economic institutions. The result is an entirely different understanding of a host of controversial issues, such as the estate tax, the tax treatment of marriage, “flat” versus progressive taxes, consumption versus income taxes, tax cuts for the wealthy, and negative income taxes for the poor.
2ac—!—taxes good
taxes are not only necessary but good – laundry list of benefits.
Rogers ’06 (Diane Lim Rogers, PhD in economics.), “Good reasons for taxes,” 4-16-06, Brookings, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/good-reasons-for-taxes //ike
Left unsaid, though, is that even with our imperfect tax system, the revenues provided by taxes strengthen, not weaken, our nation’s economy. They fund essential public goods and services, they contribute positively to national saving, and many of the things that they fund — from highways and schools to biomedical research and national parks — indirectly create private wealth as well. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it in 1927, ”Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society.” Policy makers who argue that taxes are too high are typically not just in favor of low taxes; they are also in favor of smaller government. They ignore the fact that the recent tax cuts have not shrunk government spending. The recent tax cuts instead have increased the budget deficit, reduced national saving, and made it more likely that our children and grandchildren will face a weaker economy and lower standard of living than would otherwise be possible. Since President Bush took office, the 10-year budget outlook has deteriorated from a $5.6 trillion surplus to a nearly $3 trillion deficit, according to the official ”baseline” estimates of the Congressional Budget Office. That $8 trillion turnaround actually understates the fiscal damage associated with current policies, because the CBO baseline assumes that the 2001 tax cuts expire at the end of 2010 and the 2003 dividend and capital gains tax cuts expire at the end of 2008. Those who have supported the tax cuts typically deny that the tax cuts have had anything to do with this deteriorating budget outlook. In fact, many have argued that revenues would have been lower without the tax cuts, i.e., that the tax cuts more than pay for themselves. But the facts show that the tax cuts already enacted will cost more than $3 trillion just through 2016. Thus, contrary to the view that the tax cuts were neutral or even beneficial, the tax cuts have been a huge factor in the deterioration of the 10-year outlook and our currently high and rising deficits. Making the 2001-03 tax cuts permanent, as the president is calling for, would bring the total cost through 2016 to $6 trillion, including interest. Yet the president says this is the way to ”stay on track to meet our goal of cutting the budget deficit in half by 2009.” Unfortunately, the goal of cutting in half the huge deficit created during this administration is a bit like a retailer marking up prices just before a sale. President Bush took office facing trillions of dollars in surpluses and said that his administration would reduce the federal debt by nearly $1 trillion in his first four years. Instead, the debt ceiling has been raised four times, by a total of more than $3 trillion. Finally, the argument that tax cuts grow the economy, while tax increases shrink it, is incomplete and incorrect. Economists generally agree that true tax reform, where marginal tax rates are reduced while the tax base is broadened and the revenue collected stays the same, is good for economic growth. But tax cuts that diminish revenue are harmful to economic growth if they increase deficits and reduce national saving. So as we work on our tax returns, what should we be pondering about the deeper meaning surrounding this painful and tedious task? Rather than making fiscally unsustainable tax cuts permanent, let us remember that taxes are collected for a reason: to provide vital public services such as a strong defense, homeland security, healthcare, retirement and income security, education and training, and disaster relief.
1ar—!—deontology bad
deontology sucks. prefer util.
Alexander ’07 (Lawrence Alexander, professor of law @ UC San Diego, co-executive director @ the Institute for Law & Religion.), “Deontological Ethics,” 11-21-07, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/#AdvDeoThe //ike
4. The Weaknesses of Deontological Theories On the other hand, deontological theories have their own weak spots. The most glaring one is the seeming irrationality of our having duties or permissions to make the world morally worse. Deontologists need their own, non-consequentialist model of rationality, one that is a viable alternative to the intuitively plausible, “act-to-produce-the-best-consequences” model of rationality that motivates consequentialist theories. Until this is done, deontology will always be paradoxical. There are several distinct hurdles that the deontologist must overcome. One hurdle is to confront the apparent fact that careful reflection about the degrees of wrongdoing that are possible under any single moral norm does not make it easy to see deontological morality as consisting of general, canonically-formulated texts (conformity to which could then be said to constitute the distrinct form of practical rationality unique to deontological ethics); rather, such apparently simple texts as, “thou shalt not murder,” look more like mere epistemic aids summarizing a much more nuanced and detailed (and thus less text-like) moral reality (Hurd and Moore forthcoming). A second hurdle is to find an answer to the inevitable question of authority, assuming that there are such general texts. If it is rational to conform one’s behavior and one’s choices to certain general texts, as deontology claims, it is always in point to demand the reasons making such texts authoritative for one’s decisions. Deferring one’s own best judgment to the judgment enshrined in some text is always prima facie paradoxical (see the entry on authority) and deontologists like everybody else need to justify such deference. Hopefully they can do so other than by reference to some person-like but omniscient Deity as the supposed source of such texts, because many deontologists cannot accept such theism (Moore 1995). Moreover, even for those with theistic commitments, they may prefer to join Kant’s insistence that ethics proceed from reason alone, even in a theistic world. The third hurdle exists even if the first two are crossed adequately. This hurdle is to deal with the seeming demand of deontological ethics that on occasion one’s categorical obligations require one to preserve the purity of one’s own moral agency at the cost of having one’s actions make the world be in a morally worse state of affairs—at least, “worse” in the agent-neutral sense of the word used by consequentialists. Patient-centered versions of deontology cannot easily escape this problem, as we have shown. It is not even clear that they have the conceptual resources to make agency important enough to escape this moral paradox. Yet even agent-centered versions face this paradox; having the conceptual resources (of agency and agent-relative reasons) is not the same as making it plausible just how a secular, objective morality can allow each person’s agency to be so uniquely crucial to that person. Moreover, it is crucial for deontologists to deal with the conflicts that seem to exist between certain duties, and between certain rights. For more information, please see the entry on moral dilemmas. Kant’s bold proclamation that “a conflict of duties is inconceivable” (Kant 1780, p. 25) is the conclusion wanted, but reasons for believing it are difficult to produce. The intending/foreseeing, doing/allowing, causing/aiding, and related distinctions certainly reduce potential conflicts for the agent-centered versions of deontology; whether they can totally eliminate such conflicts is a yet unresolved question. One well known approach to deal with the possibility of conflict between deontological duties is to reduce the categorical force of such duties to that of only “prima facie” duties (Ross 1930, 1939). This idea is that conflict between merely prima facie duties is unproblematic so long as it does not infect what one is categorically obligated to do, which is what overall, concrete duties mandate. Like other softenings of the categorical force of deontological obligation we mention briefly below (threshold deontology, mixed views), the prima facie duty view is in some danger of collapsing into a kind of consequentialism. This depends on whether “prima facie” is read epistemically or not, and on (1) whether any good consequences are eligible to justify breach of prima facie duties; (2) whether only such consequences over some threshold can do so; or (3) whether only threatened breach of other deontological duties can do so. Thirdly, there is the manipulability worry mentioned before with respect to agent-centered versions of deontology. To the extent potential conflict is eliminated by resort to the Doctrine of Double Effect, the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing, and so forth (and it is not clear to what extent patient-centered versions rely on these doctrines and distinctions to mitigate potential conflict), then a potential for “avoision” is opened up. Such avoision is the manipulation of means (using omissions, foresight, risk, allowings, aidings, acceleratings, redirectings, etc.) to achieve permissibly what otherwise deontological morality would forbid (see Katz 1996). Avoision is an undesirable feature of any ethical system that allows such strategic manipulation of its doctrines. Fourth, there is what might be called the paradox of relative stringency. There is an aura of paradox in asserting that all deontological duties are categorical—to be done no matter the consequences—and yet asserting that some of such duties are more stringent than others. A common thought is that “there cannot be degrees of wrongness with intrinsically wrong acts…” (Frey 1995, p. 78, n.3; also Hurka 2019). Yet relative stringency—“degrees of wrongness”—seems forced upon the deontologist by one if not two considerations. First, duties of differential stringency can be weighed against one another if there is conflict between them, so that a conflict-resolving, overall duty becomes possible if duties can be more or less stringent. Second, when we punish for the wrongs consisting in our violation of deontological duties, we (rightly) do not punish all violations equally. The greater the wrong, the greater the punishment deserved; and relative stringency of duty violated (or importance of rights) seems the best way of making sense of greater versus lesser wrongs (Hurd and Moore forthcoming). Fifth, there are situations—unfortunately not all of them thought experiments—where compliance with deontological norms will bring about disastrous consequences. To take a stock example of much current discussion, suppose that unless A violates the deontological duty not to torture an innocent person (B), ten, or a thousand, or a million other innocent people will die because of a hidden nuclear device. If A is forbidden by deontological morality from torturing B, many would regard that as a reductio ad absurdum of deontology.