 And multinationals are one vehicle for providing productivity. The increase in productivity by promoting technology and capital transfer to these poor countries, which may not have been able to bring in these technology necessary for this increased productivity on their own. Sorry, I've got a little tongue tied there at the end. Also, I think it's worth saying that it's probably unfair to blame every example of an unfortunate consequence in a developing nation on the involvement of the multinationals in that country. And also that I think it's maybe a little bit unfair to label or to disparage every corporation involved in the production of goods for armed forces as a member of the military industrial complex as it used to write off the good things that it has done. So that's all I have to say. I would like to make responses to two of the claims that the other team made. The first is a response to large firms seeking tax havens. The U.S. corporate tax rate is currently the second highest in the world behind Japan. It is due to these very high tax rates that large firms hire lobbyists in order to work to receive the tax breaks for their respective firms. The solution to this is to reform our corporate tax policies. We need to decrease the corporate tax rate in order to bring it closer in line with the rest of the world and make changes to the ability of firms to get to these tax breaks. That is local and federal governments need to stop bending to the will of big business when they say that they will leave if they don't receive the tax breaks. Because it is quite likely that the firm would not in fact leave the country if they had to pay higher taxes. For example, when governments talk about imposing environmental regulations, many companies threaten to leave the country and move to a country that has less stringent environmental regulation. However, there have been studies that have found that when those environmental regulations are imposed, the firms do not in fact leave. So the solution to that is really for the governments to start calling the bluff of these large firms when they say that they're going to leave. And then the second point that I want to respond to is social welfare being held hostage by corporate welfare. As we stated earlier, the social responsibility of a business is to increase its own profits. And an incorporated firm cannot do anything if that action will limit the profitability for its shareholders. However, investing in social endeavors can be beneficial to a firm's bottom line. That is, firms pursue programs of social welfare in order to bolster their revenue by using corporate social responsibility as a marketing ploy, which may seem shallow, but it reaches the same end. One of the benefits of large firms pursuing social welfare is the scale in which they can implement their plans. In 2004, an activist at a coalition meeting of 54 environmental and social advocacy groups remarked that, quote, a small movement by Walmart would have huge ripple effects, end quote. The same holds true for any large corporation. If a large firm makes even a small change to help stop overfishing or switch up labor or any other perceived ill of big companies, it can make large changes across the market. It is not necessarily a bad thing that firms use these topics as a marketing ploy, because it means that socially responsible things get done by these large companies. For example, going back to Walmart, Walmart is buying social and solar and wind power in Mexico. The percentage of their energy consumption that comes from these renewable energy sources is very small, but according to Walmart's 2010 Global Sustainability Report, their emissions per $1 million of sales are falling. And this is real change and it's being done by these large firms that have the resources available to pay the higher upfront costs of making these eco-friendly business decisions. So as long as society wants the social welfare to be upheld and as long as shoppers show their approval of large firms pursuing these socially responsible policies by going to the stores and purchasing their merchandise in greater numbers, social welfare is actually being promoted and powered by corporate welfare. Thank you. So I guess now we'll do some questions from the judges if you have questions for particular debaters that you would like them to address. We're going to go up here so that our voices can be heard on the mic. So for the small business team, I wanted to ask the following. Small businesses are very focused on the customer and their product. At least in my experience, the last thing they want to do is invest in support services for employees. So in the idea of social welfare, my question is, if we have a lot of small firms trying to maximize profits, what's going to protect the workers from exploitation by the managers who are also the owners, who may not even in fact have a human resource department, who may in fact not have standard labor practices, who may in fact not have a lawyer who's warning them about Fair Labor Standards Act regulations and those kinds of things. Thank you. I guess I can try to respond to that. So the question was focusing on customers and product as opposed to focusing on support services and that sort of thing and like workers rights being sort of trampled. All right, so at least in terms of workers rights, I'm just not going to really talk about the fact that large businesses don't exactly look at workers rights that much either. I guess there are definitely standard labor practices that are to a certain extent that can be sort of trampled over. But as the philosophers, Senate and Cobb have spoken on, they wrote a paper on the divided self which talks about managers working against the interests of humans and in doing so creating a system in which there's a divided self, there's a work self in which you look down upon and then there's a home self in which you are like an actual human being and you treat yourself as a human being. And small firms as a result of their tight-knit communities and the fact that there's a smaller number of employees in these firms are able to develop much more in-depth interpersonal relationships. And as a result of this, there is usually a lot less incentive and a lot less desire by managers of smaller firms to do the sort of things that will hurt their workers and hurt their employees because they know them personally. Maybe they've spent years working with them. Maybe they both went up through the company together. Maybe they both even started the company together. Well, my question for the pro-small business team. Luke has insisted on the benefits of clusters. One might reply that what you are proposing in the end is that several small firms may get together and work like a big firm. But if that's the case, that would not be an argument against big firms because one might claim that you have more coordination problems, the more actors, agents you have. So if one of the benefits is for clusters of several small firms, why not go to a big firm after all? I believe the answer to your question can be found in what Daniel brought up about discconomies of scale and what also Luke was just talking about in hierarchies of big businesses and coordination and how managers then may have incentives to work towards bonuses and not actually what's in favor of the business or the workers. So, citing off the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy, which is a highly successful area. It's actually where Ferraris are made. They can make complex products on very small businesses and the benefit that they have then of coordinating with people who want to work towards a similar end goal while keeping their small, in-depth interpersonal relationships. So they get the benefit of economies of scale while also avoiding the negative aspects of discconomies of scale. Let me say first that I've enjoyed this debate. You have raised many issues. In fact, so many that it's hard to know where to begin and how to address this. But let me start by saying that I was very pleased to hear both teams emphasize that in thinking about this we should look at a much broader notion of welfare than just income or traditional economic measures. And both teams have raised some of these issues for the against side. If I understood you correctly, you saw some of the main drawbacks of big business being that it might be bad for democracy in some sense. You saw big business having undue influence on media, elections, health legislation, taxes, a whole range of issues. And I guess I would like to ask not so much the against team but the pro team whether you see any dangers of this kind. And if so, if there are ways that you would address them. Staying on this broad issue of welfare. I understood you to say that some of the big benefits you saw was that big business could go in and actually promote sort of sound values in developing countries. For instance, they could fight corruption or stuff like that. And I guess I would like to ask you if you feel there's a lot of evidence on this. Because I guess my feeling is that we have a number of cases where big businesses have actually been involved in corruption. And I was just wondering how you might look at that. And then for both teams still staying a little bit with these sort of welfare measures. I asked you for data maybe on corruption. But I think both teams could strengthen their case if they had a little bit of more concrete evidence. For instance, if you talk about how workers are doing in large and small companies. There must be evidence on what are average worker incomes in different companies. What are average benefits in different types of companies. And maybe I missed it, but I didn't hear a lot of direct evidence on that. There may also go into your more soft sort of values. There may be some evidence on worker satisfaction in different types of enterprise. I'm wondering if you have any evidence of that kind. So this was all about your sort of broader issues. Okay, so I'm going to try and do that in the order where I remember it. My memory is terrible, so if I forget anything, please stop me. As far as seeing evidence of troubles with democracy due to big corporations, I think we absolutely see that. But I also think that when it comes down to it, a lot of that has to do with the failure of us as a society and as voters. As government officials to more strictly regulate, to demand stricter regulation on these firms about what lobbyists can do. Not just corporate lobbyists, but special interest group lobbyists and foreign government lobbyists and all of that. I think that most of the pairs of democracy from lobbying are not something that's exclusive to big business.