From the comment:
Okay, first of all, I'm only a sophomore debater, so I'm really looking for advice rather than to prove you wrong. But I disagree with you saying that "a just government ought to guarantee adequate housing for all its citizens" will be an automatic neg win. Obviously, every judge will be predisposed towards neg, but there are still some good neg arguments.
First off, i would make the point that the slums are breeding grounds for crime, prostitution, and diseases. I'm sure i can find a million studies proving that people w/o homes have more diseases, and when they're all crowded together they spread quicker.
Also, having a house will give citizens a better mental attitude, encouraging them to find a job rather than result to a life of crime, etc. I'll find some sort of social theory to help this out. something saying people are generally good, and will always try, etc.
Then i would pull the "all men *and women* are created equal." Its not fair for children to grow up homeless, having less advantages than kids w homes, because their parents made faulty economic choices.
I would also make an observation at the beginning stating that it says "citizens" not "residents." Meaning we don't have to provide it for EVERYONE, esp not illegal immigrants.
FEED BACK?!?
I wouldn’t argue (in real life) that it not would be a good thing for governments to guarantee adequate housing for all its citizens, although it wouldn’t be my first choice. I’m a bleeding-heart liberal. I’d like the government to guarantee a lot of things. But that doesn’t mean the government is obliged to do it. In the regular give-and-take of LD resolutions, it is very difficult to prove supererogatory government obligations, hence my comment about neg taking it more often than not. My thoughts originally went no further than that.
On to specifics. It’s really the issue of poverty (and its attendant issue of poor education) that brings us to the bad conditions you suggest. Lack of good housing arises from lack of money, which usually arises from lack of education; that’s the real causal link (although there’s some circularity between the money and the education). The lack of housing per se is of secondary relation to your harms, that is, it is a result of something else. In the past, there have been big-government attempts to eliminate slums and build adequate housing, premised a bit on what you’re saying. Robert Moses led this charge in NYC, and the result was the tearing down of slums and the building of projects that quickly became slums of a different nature. “Better” housing didn’t solve the problems, it just put them in a different building. So I think that not only is your premise wrong, but your solution has already been proven empirically to fail.
Back to the LD side of things, the claim that equality means that everyone is, in fact, equal, is a misreading of the concept. If we were all equal, I would play the cello like Yo-Yo Ma. Societal equality is normally interpreted as my being given the opportunity to play the cello like Yo-Yo Ma; whether I do so or not is up to me. Government’s only obligation to be fair is to provide all of us with equal opportunity to become cellists; government doesn’t have to give us all a cello. Your logic, as I read it, isn’t wrong, but a slippery reading of this material could get you into trouble.
Anyhow, as I said in the original post, it was just a quick take, but as a rule, obligating rights beyond the most basic is a very difficult thing to do in a debate round. The burden on aff here would be a very hard one to pull off. I just don’t think it’s an evenly matched contest.
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