Giroux, 14 Henry A. Giroux, Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University

Neolib Good

Sweeping economic collapse would be worse – war and environmental exploitation become inevitable

Monbiot, 9

(George – honorary doctorates from both U of St. Andrews and U of Essex, British investigative journalist and political activist, “Is there any point in fighting to stave off industrial apocalypse?” http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/aug/17/environment-climate-change)

The interesting question, and the one that probably divides us, is this: to what extent should we welcome the likely collapse of industrial civilisation? Or more precisely: to what extent do we believe that some good may come of it?¶ I detect in your writings, and in the conversations we have had, an attraction towards – almost a yearning for – this apocalypse, a sense that you see it as a cleansing fire that will rid the world of a diseased society. If this is your view, I do not share it. I'm sure we can agree that the immediate consequences of collapse would be hideous: the breakdown of the systems that keep most of us alive; mass starvation; war. These alone surely give us sufficient reason to fight on, however faint our chances appear. But even if we were somehow able to put this out of our minds, I believe that what is likely to come out on the other side will be worse than our current settlement.¶ Here are three observations: 1 Our species (unlike most of its members) is tough and resilient; 2 When civilisations collapse, psychopaths take over; 3 We seldom learn from others' mistakes.¶ From the first observation, this follows: even if you are hardened to the fate of humans, you can surely see that our species will not become extinct without causing the extinction of almost all others. However hard we fall, we will recover sufficiently to land another hammer blow on the biosphere. We will continue to do so until there is so little left that even Homo sapiens can no longer survive. This is the ecological destiny of a species possessed of outstanding intelligence, opposable thumbs and an ability to interpret and exploit almost every possible resource – in the absence of political restraint.¶ From the second and third observations, this follows: instead of gathering as free collectives of happy householders, survivors of this collapse will be subject to the will of people seeking to monopolise remaining resources. This will is likely to be imposed through violence. Political accountability will be a distant memory. The chances of conserving any resource in these circumstances are approximately zero. The human and ecological consequences of the first global collapse are likely to persist for many generations, perhaps for our species' remaining time on earth. To imagine that good could come of the involuntary failure of industrial civilisation is also to succumb to denial. The answer to your question – what will we learn from this collapse? – is nothing.¶ This is why, despite everything, I fight on. I am not fighting to sustain economic growth. I am fighting to prevent both initial collapse and the repeated catastrophe that follows. However faint the hopes of engineering a soft landing – an ordered and structured downsizing of the global economy – might be, we must keep this possibility alive. Perhaps we are both in denial: I, because I think the fight is still worth having; you, because you think it isn't.

Neolib decreases poverty and fosters peace

Bandow, 1

(Doug - Senior Fellow at Cato, “Globalization Serves the World's Poor,” 25 April 2001, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4310)

Despite the worst efforts of violent protestors in Quebec, leaders of countries throughout the Western hemisphere concluded their Summit of the Americas by proposing a broad free-trade agreement. Bringing more of the world's poor into the global economy is the best hope for raising them out of poverty. Curiously, globalization has become the latest cause celebre of left-wing activists. These First-World demonstrators self-righteously pose as defenders of Third-World peoples, even as they advocate leaving the latter destitute. The process of development, of moving traditional, agricultural societies into the Industrial and Information age, is extraordinarily painful. It was difficult enough for Western societies, which took hundreds of years to develop. It is even harder for today's developing states, which are attempting to telescope the process into a few decades. But that pain must be endured to achieve a better life. Economist Joseph Schumpeter termed capitalism "creative destruction." Every innovation creates losers: automobiles ruined the buggy industry, computers destroyed the typewriter industry. It is fair to encourage the development of social institutions to ease the transition. It is not fair to shut off development. Some trendy Western activists wax eloquent on the wonders of rural living. Presumably they have never visited a poor country, let alone a poor countryside. For instance, when I traveled the hills of eastern Burma with the relief group Christian Freedom International, I found ethnic Karen villagers living in wooden huts open to rain and insects. There was neither electricity nor running water. People lacked latrines and let their livestock run loose; filth was everywhere. In such circumstances, life is hard, disease is rampant, and hope is nonexistent. No wonder people flee to the city. Not one Quebec protestor would likely choose such a "dignified" way of life. Indeed, the problems of globalization must always be "compared to what?" Yes, factories pay low wages in Third World countries. But workers in them have neither the education nor the skills to be paid at First World levels. Their alternative is not a Western university education or Silicon Valley computer job, but an even lower-paying job with a local firm or unemployment. The choice is clear: according to Edward Graham of the Institute of International Economics, in poor countries, American multinationals pay foreign citizens an average of 8.5 times the per capita GDP. Overall, the process of globalization has been good for the poor. During the 1980s, advanced industrialized countries grew faster than developing states. In the 1990s, as globalization accelerated, poor nations grew at 3.6 percent annually, twice that of their richer neighbors. Despite the illusion of left-wing activists that money falls from the sky, poverty has been the normal condition of humankind throughout most of history. As even Marx acknowledged, capitalism is what eliminated the overwhelming poverty of the pre-industrial world. That remains the case today. Resource endowment, population level and density, foreign aid transfers, past colonial status none of these correlate with economic wealth. Only economic openness does. The latest volume of the Economic Freedom in the World Report, published by the Cato Institute and think tanks in 50 other countries, finds that economic liberty strongly correlates with economic achievement. Policies that open economies strongly correlate with economic growth. By pulling countries into the international marketplace, globalization encourages market reforms. With them comes increased wealth. Concern over the distribution of income understandably remains, but if nothing is produced, there is nothing to distribute. And, in fact, globalization has shared its benefits widely. In a recent World Bank report, economists David Dollar and Aart Kraay conclude that the "income of the poor rises one-for-one with overall growth." Globalization also has important political ramifications. Freedom is indivisible; economic liberty tends to undercut political controls. Countries such as South Korea and Taiwan threw off authoritarian dictatorships once their burgeoning middle classes demanded political rights to match economic opportunities. International investment and trade also help dampen nationalism and militarism. Globalization is not enough: rising levels of foreign commerce did not prevent World War I, for instance. Yet investment and trade create important economic incentives for peace. They also put a human face on people who might otherwise seem to be the enemy. The result is a better environment in which to promote international harmony. Like most human phenomena, globalization has ill, as well as good, effects. But the latter predominate. In most ways for most people, globalization is a positive.

Statistics prove neolib is good for human rights and peace

Soysa et al. 11

(Norwegian University of Science and Technology professor [Indra de, “Does Being Bound Together Suffocate, or Liberate? The Effects of Economic, Social, and Political Globalization on Human Rights, 1981–2005”, KYKLOS, Vol. 64 – February 2011 – No. 1, 20–53, ebsco])

There is a large volume of research on human rights and their determinants, but theoretical models and empirical evidence on the effects of globalization on the extent of human rights are sparse. The empirical evidence on this subject that does exist assess very simple dimensions of globalization, typically measures such as the level of trade openness or the penetration of FDI (Hafner-Burton 2005). Instead of these commonly-used proxies of globalization, we use an index that aggregates several factors that in combination capture how globalized a country is along three main dimensions—economic, political, and social globalization (Dreher et al. 2008). As far as we are aware, no study has estimated how differentially these three dimensions of globalization affect government respect for human rights and the degree of political terror, an important normative policy concern as well as a crucial aspect of future socio-political development. We employ panel data for 118 countries for which there is complete data (94 developing and 24 developed countries) over the period 1981–2005 (25 years). Our results are easily summarized: globalization and the disaggregated components along economic, social, and political dimensions predict higher human rights, controlling for a host of other factors. These results are robust to instrumental variables techniques that allow us to assess the endogenous nature of the relationship between human rights and globalization. The results support those who argue that increased globalization could build peace and social progress, net of all the other factors such as democracy and higher levels of income.

Capitalism key to environmental protection

Taylor 2003, director of natural resource studies at CATO, Aprill 22, 2003

[Jerry, Happy Earth Day? Thank Capitalism, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3073]

Indeed, we wouldn't even have environmentalists in our midst were it not for capitalism. Environmental amenities, after all, are luxury goods. America -- like much of the Third World today -- had no environmental movement to speak of until living standards rose sufficiently so that we could turn our attention from simply providing for food, shelter, and a reasonable education to higher "quality of life" issues. The richer you are, the more likely you are to be an environmentalist. And people wouldn't be rich without capitalism. Wealth not only breeds environmentalists, it begets environmental quality. There are dozens of studies showing that, as per capita income initially rises from subsistence levels, air and water pollution increases correspondingly. But once per capita income hits between $3,500 and $15,000 (dependent upon the pollutant), the ambient concentration of pollutants begins to decline just as rapidly as it had previously increased. This relationship is found for virtually every significant pollutant in every single region of the planet. It is an iron law. Given that wealthier societies use more resources than poorer societies, such findings are indeed counterintuitive. But the data don't lie. How do we explain this? The obvious answer -- that wealthier societies are willing to trade-off the economic costs of government regulation for environmental improvements and that poorer societies are not -- is only partially correct. In the United States, pollution declines generally predated the passage of laws mandating pollution controls. In fact, for most pollutants, declines were greater before the federal government passed its panoply of environmental regulations than after the EPA came upon the scene. Much of this had to do with individual demands for environmental quality. People who could afford cleaner-burning furnaces, for instance, bought them. People who wanted recreational services spent their money accordingly, creating profit opportunities for the provision of untrammeled nature. Property values rose in cleaner areas and declined in more polluted areas, shifting capital from Brown to Green investments. Market agents will supply whatever it is that people are willing to spend money on. And when people are willing to spend money on environmental quality, the market will provide it. Meanwhile, capitalism rewards efficiency and punishes waste. Profit-hungry companies found ingenious ways to reduce the natural resource inputs necessary to produce all kinds of goods, which in turn reduced environmental demands on the land and the amount of waste that flowed through smokestacks and water pipes. As we learned to do more and more with a given unit of resources, the waste involved (which manifests itself in the form of pollution) shrank. This trend was magnified by the shift away from manufacturing to service industries, which characterizes wealthy, growing economies. The latter are far less pollution-intensive than the former. But the former are necessary prerequisites for the latter. Property rights -- a necessary prerequisite for free market economies -- also provide strong incentives to invest in resource health. Without them, no one cares about future returns because no one can be sure they'll be around to reap the gains. Property rights are also important means by which private desires for resource conservation and preservation can be realized. When the government, on the other hand, holds a monopoly on such decisions, minority preferences in developing societies are overruled (see the old Soviet block for details). Furthermore, only wealthy societies can afford the investments necessary to secure basic environmental improvements, such as sewage treatment and electrification. Unsanitary water and the indoor air pollution (caused primarily by burning organic fuels in the home for heating and cooking needs) are directly responsible for about 10 million deaths a year in the Third World, making poverty the number one environmental killer on the planet today. Capitalism can save more lives threatened by environmental pollution than all the environmental organizations combined.

AT: Alt

The transition to socialism is no longer feasible and that only a reform in capitalism can solve.

Callinicos, 3

(Alex -Professor of European Studies, “An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto”)

One of the merits of Hines's argument for localization is that it brings out into the open the issue of the nation-state. The state is generally seen as one of the main victims of economic globalization: does it follow that it is a potential ally of the anti-capitalist movement? Hines answers this question in the affirmative. Even greater stress is laid on the nation-state as an agent of desirable social transformation by those who advocate, as an alternative to neo-liberalism, the return to a more regulated capitalism. It is this position that I have chosen to call 'reformist anti-capitalism'. In the classical labour movement 'reformism' referred to the strategy of social democracy of achieving socialism by parliamentary means. Few contemporary social democrats believe that a socialist alternative to capitalism is any longer feasible. Instead they seek to regulate and humanize capitalism. Reformist anticapitalists differ from localists in the sense that they focus on the national and the international levels as the main fields of action. It is in fact begging an important question to describe the aim of this variant of anti-capitalism as a return to a more regulated capitalism. This accurately captures the aim of important strands of the reformist wing of the movement. Patrick Bond argues that within what he calls the 'New Social Movements' who seek 'to promote the globalization of people and halt or at a minimum radically modify the globalization of capital' there is an ongoing debate over whether energy should be invested in helping Post-Washington Consensus reforms constitute a global state regulatory capacity – expanding upon embryos like the IMF and World Bank, WTO, United Nations and BIS – or whether in contrast the immediate task should be defunding and denuding the legitimacy of the current sites of international regulation so as to reconstitute progressive politics on the national scale.'

Anti-Capitalist movements are easily quashed

Callinicos, 2003

(Alex -Professor of European Studies, “An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto”)

(1) Dialogue. The established powers can respond to major challenges from below in two ways — repression or incorporation. In other words, they can seek simply to crush a movement for change by the use of coercive and juridical power, or instead to weaken it by making limited concessions designed to divide the movement, in particular by winning over the more moderate elements and isolating the radicals. The anti-capitalist movement has so far faced both responses. The repressive reaction was most visible in the police violence at Genoa; the antiterrorism legislation passed by the United States, Britain, and other leading states after 11 September represents a very serious longer-term threat to all those engaging in direct action. But there have also been efforts by different sections of what one might broadly call the international capitalist establishment to draw the movement into dialogue.

The movement will be met with violence

Callinicos, 2003

(Alex -Professor of European Studies, “An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto”)

The police charged violently. We fought back and I stand by our response as a political fact. Nonetheless, for us to also take up militaristic tactics would be crazy and political suicide. At Genoa there were all the forces of order, the army, the secret services of the eight most powerful – both economically and militarily – nations on the planet. Our movement can't measure up with that type of military power. We would be crushed within three months . . . Two, three years ago we thought at length about how to act in a conflict without it becoming destructive. Our technique was different: we stated publicly what we wanted to do, letting it be known that if the police attacked us, we would defend ourselves only with shields and padding. It was our rule because it was essential that we create conflict and consensus about the objectives that we set up for ourselves. In Genoa we expected that more or less the same thing as usual would happen. They deceived us . . . The police forces used firearms, even though they had assured us that they would not. The right to demonstrate that [Italian Foreign Minister Renato] Ruggiero agreed was an inalienable right was run over under the wheels of the police armoured cars." The right-wing government of Silvio Berlusconi had dramatically altered the rules of the game. In doing so it drew attention to a truth long stressed by classical Marxism –that the state, as concentrated and organized violence, acts as the last line of defence of capitalist property relations. After Genoa, an intense debate developed within the anti-capitalist movement over whether or not it should abandon mass protests altogether for fear of the violence they were attracting, both from the police and from the Black Bloc (which many believed had been infiltrated by agents provocateurs).' But the deeper difficulty posed by Genoa concerned how the movement could confront the centralized power of the capitalist state without reproducing the hierarchical and authoritarian structures it was seeking to challenge. Celebrations of fragmentation and dispersal are of no help whatsoever in addressing this problem.