Here is my affirmative constructive this year. Fell free to give me any feedback you have to offer.
One of my favorite board games is the Parker Brothers® game: Monopoly. If you have ever taken the time to play, you would notice that the main strategy is to snuff out the competition and get a monopoly. Once you have a monopoly, the amount of money you can charge a player who lands on your deed automatically doubles. You can put houses and hotels on your properties and the prices go up and up. Why is this allowed? Because there is not other player that owns any part of your color. You can do anything you want to do in your color. In a sense the real business world acts the same way. Imagine that there was only one company in the entire world that sold toys. This would be a monopoly. They could put their prices as high as they liked, and consumers would have no choice but to pay the price because there is no alternative. They could have terrible customer service, and people wouldn’t be able to choose another company. They could have the worst business ever and still rake in profit all because there is no competition.
That is why for the sake of my value, positive progress, and my criterion—or way of achieving my value—competition, I urge that we affirm the resolution, which is what we are debating, and I stand resolved that competition is superior to cooperation as a means of achieving excellence.
So that we do not have any confusion on what some of these rather complex words mean, I shall supply some definitions of words found in the resolution—which is what we are debating—and my value—which is why we should affirm the resolution.
Cambridge Dictionary of American English defines my criterion, Competition as, “an activity done by a number of people or organizations, each of which is trying to do better than all of the others.”
Webster's Revised Unabridged, 1913 Edition defines superior as, “Higher or greater in excellence; surpassing others in the greatness, or value of any quality; greater in quality or degree; as, a man of superior merit; or of superior bravery.”
Infoplease Dictionary defines cooperation as, “an act or instance of working or acting together for a common purpose or benefit; joint action.”
Encarta® World English Dictionary, North American Edition defines Achieving as, “to succeed in doing or gaining something, usually with effort.”
Webster's Revised Unabridged, 1913 Edition defines Excellence as, “The quality of being excellent; state of possessing good qualities in an eminent degree; exalted merit; superiority in virtue.”
Lincoln Douglas Value Debate is all based on the value. The burden of the Affirmative and Negative speaker is to show how their value dictates that we affirm or negate the resolution. My value is positive progress. Positive is defined by Encarta as, “producing good results because of having an innately beneficial character.” And progress is defined by American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language as, “Movement, as toward a goal; advance.”
Today my thesis or main point is that positive competition creates positive progress. Today, we will be discussing how Positive Progress should be our highest value, competition encourages progress, and lack of competition hinders progress.
Contention One—Positive Progress should be our highest value. Just think about it. If we value positive progress, that we would work to attain other good values, better technology, et cetera. So many greats in history have valued positive progress.
Contention Two—Positive Competition encourages positive progress. In 2005, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency held The Grand Challenge 2005: a competition to help design the unmanned battle vehicle in the future. In the previous Grand Challenge, no vehicle finished, but this time five vehicles finished and the competition was won by Sanford University. The competition gave us excellent unmanned vehicles, and a step toward progress.
“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” These are the most famous words from the moon speech by President John F Kennedy. The space race was a competition between the U.S.S.R. and the United States to see who could get to the moon first. The United States won in 1969, and gave mankind a giant leap in progress. These examples demonstrate how competition encourages progress.
Contention Three—Lack of competition hinders progress. Remember our example of a monopoly earlier? Well, President Herbert Hoover once said, “Competition is not only the basis of protection to the consumer, but is the incentive to progress.” If we didn’t have much competition, maybe businesses wouldn’t have an incentive to progress. Henry Ford once proclaimed, “Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs.” If we didn’t have much competition, maybe prices would go up. This is why lack of competition hinders progress.
So now let’s recap. Today my thesis was that positive competition creates positive progress. Also, we discussed how Positive Progress should be our highest value, competition encourages progress, and lack of competition hinders progress.
So now that my time is running to a close, I urge for an affirmative vote, and would like to conclude with a quote from Benjamin Franklin.
“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”
