On balance, the U.S. should choose a Free Market Economy over a Government Regulated one

It seems Pro is confused what the debate is.

If Pro is still confused in Round 2 and thinks this is Capitalism vs Socialism instead of unregulated vs regulated Capitalism, I will then ignore Pro and talk solely to voters.

“The regulations I support include making sure products lack toxic ingredients, have safety standards etc. They also include making sure executives pay fair tax and do not launder or pocket any money via regular audits. It also includes worker unions and ensuring fair employment policies to all ethnicities, LGBTQ etc (while banning child labour).”

Government Regulation- A law that controls the way that a business can operate, or all of these laws considered together.

fair pay

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) establishes minimum wage, overtime pay, recordkeeping, and child labor standards affecting most full-time and part-time workers in the private sector and in federal, state, and local governments.

unpaid leave

Under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) eligible employees of covered employers have the right to take unpaid, job-protected leave for specified family and medical reasons.

Young Workers' rights

Federal child labor laws ensure that when young people work, the work is safe and does not jeopardize their health, well-being or educational opportunities.

Farm Workers' rights

The Wage and Hour Division helps all workers in the United States. We enforce the law without regard to a worker’s immigration status.

H-2B

The H-2B provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) provide for the admission of nonimmigrants to the U.S. to perform temporary non-agricultural labor or services.

Restaurant Workers' rights

The restaurant/fast food industry includes establishments which are primarily engaged in selling and serving to purchasers prepared food and beverages for consumption on or off the premises.

There is no single definition or definitive list of workers' rights. The International Labor Organization (ILO) identifies what it calls "fundamental principles and rights at work" that all ILO Members have an obligation to respect and promote, which are:

• freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining;
  
• elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labor;
  
• effective abolition of child labor;
  
• elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation; and
  
• a safe and healthy working environment.
  
  
  
  The ILO has adopted – and supervises the application of – international labor conventions in each of these areas. Other important ILO standards deal with conditions of work, including wages and hours of work, but these standards are not considered "fundamental" or "core" conventions.
  
  United States trade law adds “acceptable conditions of work” with respect to minimum wages, hours of work, and occupational safety and health to that list, calling them "internationally recognized labor rights."
  
  Before the Bipartisan Trade Deal of May 10, 2007, U.S. trade agreements did not include non-discrimination on the list of "internationally recognized labor rights" covered by agreements' labor chapters. U.S. trade preference programs still omit that fundamental right from their list.
  

Unfair competition

Primary tabs

Overview

The law of unfair competition is primarily comprised of torts that cause economic injury to a business through a deceptive or wrongful business practice. Unfair competition can be broken down into two broad categories:

1. unfair competition
   
   1. sometimes used to refer only to those torts that are meant to confuse consumers as to the source of the product (also known as deceptive trade practices)
      
2. unfair trade practices
   
   1. comprises all other forms of unfair competition.
      

Unfair competition does not refer to the economic harms involving monopolies and antitrust legislation. What constitutes an "unfair" act varies with the context of the business, the action being examined, and the facts of the individual case.

Two common examples of unfair competition are trademark infringement and misappropriation. The Right of Publicity is often invoked in misappropriation issues. Other practices that fall into the area of unfair competition include:

1. false advertising
   
2. "bait and switch" selling tactics
   
3. unauthorized substitution of one brand of goods for another
   
4. use of confidential information by former employee to solicit customers
   
5. theft of trade secrets
   
6. breach of a restrictive covenant
   
7. trade libel
   
8. false representation of products or services.
   

The law of unfair competition is mainly governed by state common law. Federal law may apply in the areas of trademarks, copyrights, and false advertising. See Trademark, Copyright, and § 1125 of the Lanham Act.

Congress established The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in part to protect consumers from deceptive trade practices. The FTC indirectly protects competitors because some deceptive trade practices (e.g. "bait and switch tactics") that injure consumers also injure competing businesses. The FTC regulations concerning unfair competition are found in various parts of Title 16 of the Code of Federal Regulations. If there is a conflict between federal and state law, the federal law will often triumph because of the doctrine of preemption. 

A few states have enacted legislation dealing with specific types of unfair competition. See, e.g., Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act.

What is the The Federal Trade Commission (FTC)? 
The FTC has broad authority to regulate consumer products that are not otherwise regulated by a separate agency. Most notably, the FTC places consumer goods into product categories and prescribes specific labeling requirements pursuant applicable statutes, regulations, or industry standards.
What is the Food and Drug Administration? 
The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act is the primary federal law administered by the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA classifies goods falling under its regulatory authority into product groups, such as cosmetic and food labeling. The FDA requires extensive testing and labeling to disclose and avoid potential hazards to consumers. In general, the FDA prescribes the content for labels that must be affixed on the inside and outside of product containers, wrappers, or packaging.
What is the Consumer Product Safety Commission? 
As discussed above, The CPSC is primarily charged with ensuring consumer product safety. As part of this mission, the agency enforces packaging, labeling and other consumer disclosure provisions. Notably, the CPSA enforces labeling provisions under the Consumer Product Safety Act, Federal Hazardous Substance Act, and Poison Prevention Packaging Act.
What is the US Customs and Border Protection Service (CBP)? 
The CBP regulates and polices the flow of goods into and out of the United States. It is tasked with enforcing US labeling laws for imported goods. Goods incorrectly labeled may be refused entry into the United States, subject to fines, and destroyed.

Government Regulation- A law that controls the way that a business can operate, or all of these laws considered together.

This is the argeed definition in the description.

I will elaborate as my opponent is confused.

A free market economy means that people (and companies) buy and sell with a minimum of government regulation.

“https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/our-work/workers-rights

That same page lets us know that child labour would also freely occur if not for government regulation.”

“The reason you can open a can of tuna and know it isn't poisoned is government regulation on businesses trickling down from government regulation on unfair competition. The code on which capitalism is based; that you sell what you say you are selling and that you price it according to its reasonable current market value and not in a way to drive your competition to the ground by mixing extreme low prices to run them out of business and then high again. That same ethos includes the laws you can see in there such as 'deceptive trade practises act'.extension of government legislation and its enforcement are why you can put on makeup, shampoo and drink water out of a purchased bottle and feel safe and secure you bought it at a fair enough price and that it isn't going to chemically harm you long-term to the knowledge of scientists of this era.”

On balance, the U.S. should choose a Free Market Economy over a Government Regulated one

Free Market- An economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses.

Government Regulation- A law that controls the way that a business can operate, or all of these laws considered together.

• All workers' rights
  
• All regulations that ensure what's written on a label and commercial is what's really inside the product being used or service being provided.
  
• All regulations banning children being exploited by corporations in a professional and/or direct labour sense.
  
• All regulations preventing monopolies and cartels forming (not meaning illicit drug cartels).
  

1. A "sweatshop" is defined by the US Department of Labor as a factory that violates 2 or more labor laws.[1]
   
2. Sweatshops often have poor working conditions, unfair wages, unreasonable hours, child labor, and a lack of benefits for workers. Take a stand and protest: Ask your school to make its apparel under fair conditions. Sign up for Tighty Whitey Rally.[2]
   
3. In developing countries, an estimated 168 million children ages 5 to 14 are forced to work.[3]
   
4. America has stronger labor laws than most undeveloped countries, but it is not free of sweatshop conditions. Many labor violations slip under the radar of the US Department of Labor.[4]
   
5. Products that commonly come from sweatshops are garments, cotton, bricks, cocoa, and coffee.[5]
   
6. A study showed that doubling the salary of sweatshop workers would only increase the consumer cost of an item by 1.8%, while consumers would be willing to pay 15% more to know a product did not come from a sweatshop.[6]
   
7. Sweatshops do not alleviate poverty. The people who are forced to work must spend the majority of their paycheck on food for their families to survive.[7]
   
8. Child labor is especially common in agriculture (98 million, or 59% of child laborers work in agriculture), followed by services (54 million) and industry (12 million).[8]
   
9. The majority of child laborers are found in Asia and the Pacific. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest prevalence, with one in five children in child labor.[9]
   
10. According to one survey, more than 2/3 of US workers experienced at least one pay-related violation in the previous work week. Assuming a full-time, full-year work schedule, workers lose an average of $2,634 annually due to violations.[10]
    
11. Because women make up 85 to 90% of sweatshop workers, some employers force them to take birth control and routine pregnancy tests to avoid supporting maternity leave or providing appropriate health benefits.[11]
    

The Middle East and North Africa are worst

Once again, the Middle East and North Africa was the worst region for treatment of workers, with the Kafala system in the Gulf still enslaving millions of people:

• The absolute denial of basic workers’ rights remained in place in Saudi Arabia. 
  
• In countries such as Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, conflict and breakdown of the rule of law means workers have no guarantee of labour rights. 
  
• In conflict-torn Yemen, 650,000 public sector workers have not been paid for more than 8 months, while some 4 million private sector jobs have been destroyed, including in the operations of multinationals Total, G4S and DNO, leaving their families destitute.  
  
• The continued occupation of Palestine also means that workers there are denied their rights and the chance to find decent jobs.  
  

Conditions in Africa have deteriorated, with Benin, Nigeria and Zimbabwe being the worst performing countries - including many cases of workers suspended or dismissed for taking legitimate strike action.

The report ranks the ten worst countries for workers’ rights in 2017 as Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt, Guatemala, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Qatar, South Korea, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.

The Philippines, South Korea and Kazakhstan have joined the ten-worst ranking for the first time this year. 

Sombre reading

The 2016 annual ranking makes for sombre reading. Violence and repression of workers are on the increase. In just one year, the number of countries experiencing physical violence has risen by 10 percent. Attacks on trade union members have been documented in fifty-nine countries, fuelling growing anxiety about jobs and wages.

Corporate interests are being put ahead of the interests of working people in the global economy, with 60% of countries excluding whole categories of workers from labour law, undermining fundamental democratic rights.

Denying workers protection under labour laws creates a hidden workforce, where governments and companies refuse to take responsibility, especially for migrant workers, domestic workers and those on short-term contracts.  

Key findings

This year’s key findings include:

• 84 countries exclude groups of workers from labour law.
  
• Over three-quarters of countries deny some or all workers their right to strike.
  
• Over three-quarters of countries deny some or all workers collective bargaining.
  
• Out of 139 countries surveyed, 50 deny or constrain free speech and freedom of assembly.
  

The number of countries in which workers are exposed to physical violence and threats increased by 10 per cent (from 52 to 59) and include Colombia, Egypt, Guatemala, Indonesia and Ukraine.

Unionists were murdered in 11 countries, including Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Mauritania, Mexico, Peru, The Philippines and Venezuela.

In South Korea, Han Sang-gyun, President of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, has been imprisoned since 2015 for organising public demonstrations during the candlelight revolution, to prevent the now deposed Park government from passing anti-worker labour laws.

Trade union leaders in Kazakhstan were arrested merely because they called for strike action. In the Philippines, the climate of violence and impunity, which has proliferated under President Duterte, had a profound impact on workers’ rights.

Working conditions also worsened in other countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and Myanmar. 

Argentina has seen a spike in violence and repression by the state and private security forces – in one case, 80 workers were injured during a stoppage for better pay and conditions.The build-up of the 2016 Olympic games in Brazil saw a significant increase in labour exploitation, and the dismantling of labour legislation by the new Brazilian government last year caused a sharp decline of labour standards.

In Ecuador, union leaders were forbidden from speaking out and their offices were ransacked and occupied by the government. 

Problems in the garment sector in Myanmar persist, with long working hours, low pay and poor working conditions being exacerbated by serious flaws in the labour legislation that make it extremely difficult for unions to register.

The history of labor disputes in America substantially precedes the Revolutionary period. In 1636, for instance, there was a fishermen's strike on an island off the coast of Maine and in 1677 twelve carmen were fined for going on strike in New York City.[1] However, most instances of labor unrest during the colonial period were temporary and isolated, and rarely resulted in the formation of permanent groups of laborers for negotiation purposes.[1] Little legal recourse was available to those injured by the unrest, because strikes were not typically considered illegal.[1] The only known case of criminal prosecution of workers in the colonial era occurred as a result of a carpenters' strike in Savannah, Georgia in 1746.[1]

By the beginning of 19th-century, after the revolution, little had changed. The career path for most artisans still involved apprenticeship under a master, followed by moving into independent production.[2] However, over the course of the Industrial Revolution, this model rapidly changed, particularly in the major metropolitan areas. For instance, in Boston in 1790, the vast majority of the 1,300 artisans in the city described themselves as "master workman". By 1815, journeymen workers without independent means of production had displaced these "masters" as the majority.[3] By that time journeymen also outnumbered masters in New York City and Philadelphia.[3] This shift occurred as a result of large-scale transatlantic and rural-urban migration. Migration into the coastal cities created a larger population of potential laborers, which in turn allowed controllers of capital to invest in labor-intensive enterprises on a larger scale.[2] Craft workers found that these changes launched them into competition with each other to a degree that they had not experienced previously, which limited their opportunities and created substantial risks of downward mobility that had not existed prior to that time.[2]

“If you look outside the US for a moment, it's blatant that less developed nations with very mistreated workers (sometimes on behalf of corporations operating inside of the US) have less government regulation within them.”

“While none of this means that the US necessarilly with 100% certainty would end up the same way, in the past before workers' rights, the US regularly abused firstly an entire race of people as slaves and then all the poor.”

“Restrictive licensing requirements make it timely and costly for workers to switch to higher paying jobs. Accelerated rise since the 1960s in government imposed rules, regs, and restrictions that make it increasingly expensive to build housing in high-wage areas like New York and San Francisco. The resulting scarcity of supply has driven up the costs of housing in these areas making it increasingly costly for low-wage workers to move to these areas and take advantage of the higher wages. The regulatory tax on housing wipes out any wage premium as a result.” - Gene Epstein

Typically, it revolves around government-funded social services and social service programs.

At least half of the world’s population cannot obtain essential health services, according to a new report from the World Bank and WHO. And each year, large numbers of households are being pushed into poverty because they must pay for health care out of their own pockets.

Currently, 800 million people spend at least 10 percent of their household budgets on health expenses for themselves, a sick child or other family member. For almost 100 million people these expenses are high enough to push them into extreme poverty, forcing them to survive on just $1.90 or less a day. The findings, released today in Tracking Universal Health Coverage: 2017 Global Monitoring Report, have been simultaneously published in Lancet Global Health.

“If you look outside US, the countries that most lack government regulations on their economies have the worst poverty and divides where the poor could be dying of extremely treatable things or have broken bones even and can't afford treatment. If you look inside the US, there's a slight disparity only because nowhere in the US has public healthcare and often by default the poorer areas vote Democrat but that means very little because the society in US is all right-wing on balance due to lacking public-anything. Even their subway is barely public transport as the prices are far from cheap and affordable for someone on low income.”

“As for 'mobility', you will find that due to all the problems I mentioned that Pro has essentially zero rebuttal to, someone cannot easily climb the ladder, only fall down it faster. Every single item sold will either be super cheap in a short while to drown out lesser businesses for the monopoly to stay supreme (they will literally sell below profit, at a loss, to drown out competition) and then be ramped up the moment the monopoly or cartel are in total control. This means an individual has to pay more in the end for every good and service they want in a society based on ripping people off. However, since 'more' is relative to income and so many more will be in poverty it can look like reasonable prices.”

“I see zero comeback to my point of products lying about what they offer or have inside them. In a truly private society, even to sue a corporation for destroying someone's life or killing them by a faulty product is very costly and sometimes not deemed worth it.”

“I am not sure how exactly Pro wants me to 'prove' things when Pro himself has just stated things as somehow self-evidently true. What I think is self-evidently true is that public healthcare and high government regulations on providing healthcare to the poor are irrefutably the most ironclad way to ensure the poor are not financially strained when they need healthcare, assuming the tax towards such things is progressively done meaning higher incomes pay proportionally more.”

“I guarantee you that the countries where the impoverished can't get healthcare are all countries with a lack of government regulation on healthcare provision to the poor and who don't ensure insurance is affordable if they do lack public healthcare on top.”