But what happens when the soldier is deprived of the volitional authority to state, “I am fit to fight, and I see a promising future in fighting,” and is instead taken, via the threat of physical harm in the event of non-compliance, into a recruitment center, equipped with “standard” materiel, i.e. the minimum of provisions possible to ensure that he does not drop dead on the spot from strenuous marches, hostile lodgings, and the gruesome muck of non-mechanized ground warfare? He cannot operate a tank, he cannot load a cannon from ten kilometers beyond enemy range, he cannot pilot an airplane; he was chosen merely because he was born on a particular day whose number was drawn in the lottery. Has he a reliable chance of survival in the face of attacks by both nature and malicious opponents who have journeyed to the battlefield solely to kill him? And will his commanders value his services when he has a pitifully minuscule quantity of them to offer, when he can be replaced by the next doughboy who will perform his task just as poorly should he happen to be killed? This reeks of the horrid approach of manual sugar refiners of the Caribbean toward steadily imported slave labor during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The slaves were beaten profusely for the minutest of offenses and worked late into the night with but five hours of rest, perishing like flies from exhaustion, starvation, injury, and disease within months if not weeks. Was that an enormous hindrance to their owners? Considering the backbreaking but primitive nature of the labor involved, and every slave’s utter lack of qualifications for it, the sugar manufacturers needed but to wait for the next ship to sail into harbor from across the Atlantic. 

Draft advocates claim that a nation of freedom entails certain obligations toward the preservation of its institutions, but this is vilely fallacious rhetoric. The sole responsibilities of every citizen toward a purely free society (but, alas, not the food-poison hybrid of today’s mixed economy welfare state) are negative. Joe Citizen cannot initiate a private war against the United States government, nor can he enter a criminal rampage, nor undertake acts of theft, vandalism, threat, or fraud. Such deeds are impositions of physical force that inherently conflict with a free system. Once wanton coercion is removed from a society, free market dynamics enter the scene, or, in the words of classical economist Claude Frederic Bastiat, “work becomes more profitable than plunder”, and further regulation and oversight become unnecessary and harmful. If people relate to each other solely within their mutual interests, what threats are there to guard against?

Now consider what the introduction of a fresh threat, such as terrorism, to a laissez-faire society would entail. Because all persons are free to act in their own interest, they will mount a defense of their own volition, without the need of a costly and intrusive conscription apparatus! After all, their lives and property are at stake, their liberties are the ones hanging on the edge of a fanatic’s knife. But does every man best serve the cause of liberty as a doughboy on the field? Given extensive specialization of labor in a free market society, such a hypothesis is empirically invalidated. A desk clerk who is aware of his capacities can employ himself at a post office and assist in the mailing of military communiqués throughout the world, a railroad tycoon can generate a fortune on the shipping of weapons and troop cars to their desired locations, a scientist can patent and sell to the government a sleek new fighter jet or a smart bomb of more concentrated impact, and a writer, such as myself, can direct his energies toward the campaign for people’s attitudinal and ideological support at home by writing reasoned commentaries on the necessity and/or the efficacy of a given war effort. Despite America’s lack of wholehearted adherence to the philosophy of freedom, this is nevertheless the case today, and the reason for America’s multifaceted success, during wartime and peacetime, in the military and the civil arenas of international relations. It is precisely in this manner that freedom is preserved, and not in the fulfillment of some concocted, mythical, positive obligation of “sacrifice for the greater good.”

Rangel especially among the draft pushers suggests that the draft is a means toward “closing the social gap” between rich and poor and dragging both into a foxhole, thus rendering them “on an even playing field.” Mr. Rangel is correct in asserting that poorer individuals, especially persons seeking money for a college education otherwise unaffordable or those not satisfied with the income of their regular jobs, comprise a significant portion of the military. Yet this is their avenue toward wealth, advancement, and success! In some ten years, should they decide to remain within the armed forces, they will attain a bountiful livelihood as officers, trainers, technicians, or equipment operators. The ambitious ones will become strategists or even generals. Why clog the ranks of the armed forces with “the rich” (who have little incentive to serve, given the plethora of further wealth they can accumulate in the commercial and industrial world) against their will (which will create half-hearted and expendable fighters) and deprive the military of the free market tendency to improve the lives of all of its participants? Moreover, what repulsive communistic worm is the idea that “social gaps” need be narrowed in the first place? True, the rich enjoy a higher standard of living, yet it is deserved, through innovation and effort, the design of products people desire and benefit from, and planned, skillful investment. At the same time, the contributions of a Gates or a Rockefeller or a Ford elevate, through the goods they render available and the economic stimulus they provide, everyone’s lives dramatically, from the lower upper class to the poorest of the poor. The gap widens, because people’s riches are magnified at different rates, but all become wealthier under undiluted capitalism. The vilest taint that can be applied to such a system is the reduction of everyone, regardless of accomplishment, individual fortitude, and ideology, to the muck of the trenches.

And this is precisely what the prospective structure of today’s draft would bring upon us. If Franklin Roosevelt can be deemed Rangel’s intellectual grandfather, his father is another Democratic President, Jimmy Carter, who had reinstituted the draft registration requirement in 1980 (incidentally, also as a lame-duck measure!). Congressional adjustments to the draft in 1971 coupled with Carter’s initiative generate a menacing scenario that could stifle the dreams of the most intelligent and ambitious people in the country. A U.S. Military website (http://usmilitary.about.com/library/milinfo/bldrafthistory.htm.)  explains that “if a draft were held today, there would be fewer reasons to excuse a man from service. Before Congress made ‘improvements’ [quotations are mine] to the draft in 1971, a man could qualify for a student deferment if he could show he was a full-time student making satisfactory progress toward a degree. Under the current law, a college student can have his induction postponed only until the end of the current semester. A senior can be postponed until the end of the academic year.” If a striving young man, perhaps even a prodigy, who studies to become a scientist, a physician, a humanities professor, a businessman, holds expectations for himself to generate millions from his efforts in addition to an incalculable amount of self-esteem gained from self-fulfillment, the government cares not and dismisses his rational desires with a casual, one-size-fits-all “Pah!” He is relegated to the front lines, or, in the best possible scenario, to a branch of the armed forces which he does not select and in which his particular comfort in the performance of required tasks is disregarded. He may be grouped with thugs, scoundrels, ex-convicts, and what will unite them will be naught but a date on a birth certificate. Imagine the grueling torment, internal and external, that a man robbed of a college education will face, imagine the ruin or at least the crippling delay it will pose to his life, imagine the chronic terror, the cringing submission, the futile appeasement, and the never-relenting barrage of insults he will need to endure before his malicious prankster peers and his slave-driving officers. Those who neither desire nor are currently undertaking higher education will pay the same physical price, yet endure no psychological burdens; they are already apathetic to their fate in all regards. It is he, the one for whom life would have been bliss, who is degraded to the greatest possible level, all for the sake of egalitarianism in the armed forces.

A clever but unsubstantiated argument employed in favor of conscription is that it would deter popular support for military involvements by imbuing the populace with a more direct “sense of responsibility” in regard to the conflict. Risky engagements, say the draft advocates, can be avoided by persons who would in the instance of their occurrence be required to place their lives on the line. As a first line of defense against this contention it is fitting to refer to historical facts. Did a draft during World War I deter against U.S. involvement in World War II? Did a draft during World War II deter against U.S. involvement in Korea? Did a draft during the Korean War deter against U.S. involvement in Vietnam? Of course not. Why?

The draft does imbue the populace with a certain hesitancy to fight, but this is a hesitancy to retaliate against murder and crime. It took a year following the sinking of the Lusitania for the United States to declare war on the Kaiser’s Reich. Two years of Axis troops overrunning Europe and Asia had passed before the United States responded, only once the conflict had arrived at its own doorstep. In Vietnam, the hesitancy was never dispelled at all, as troops were prohibited from retaliating against the Viet Minh to their full capacity, instructed but to defend and not exterminate the source of the Communist menace, their jungle strongholds in the north. Given such hesitation and given the draft, any use of military force, even an entirely justified one, a plethora of which reasons permeated United States involvements in nearly all of its historical conflicts, potentially places all young men’s lives on the line. And those not specifically conditioned to soldiering are well aware that they will not escape the struggle unscathed and intact. So they oppose the war effort and create a substantial political force, similar to the hippie movements of the 1960s. The retaliation stalls, and every two-bit dictator, every mullah with half-trained bodyguards, every commissar with a century-old printing press emerge from their trembling hibernation and realize that their raids, their acts of sabotage, their hostage takings and hijackings and massacres of intellectuals will pass without resistance, for years on end at least. The threat to national security magnifies, and the enemy is fueled to a status of an army to be reckoned with, instead of a gang of petty criminals to be hunted down by small, elite commando groups. The probability of genuine, large-scale war soars to heights which would not have been imaginable absent the draft! And eventually all people, even the most blundering and least conscious of the venom that the enemy pumps into the veins of their country, can bear it no more. No more can politically correct shrouds conceal the impending doom before them unless they respond with a war. Only this war will demolish countless lives and national infrastructure, as opposed to a mild regional conflict which could have been flawlessly remedied with a concentrated, coordinated offensive some months or years earlier. Delaying a war renders it only more grievous in the end, as the strength of the aggressor is fortified. Perhaps what advocates of the draft imply by their argument is that one day their conscription will yield a clash of such colossal proportions that it will exterminate all mankind, and then, only then, shall there be no war.  That is the only means by which a draft can deter military engagements.

If we are to have a shred of hope in defeating Saddam and terrorism, we must defeat an equally ruinous menace at home, which shall condemn a free and prosperous nation to the same misery and slavery that Saddam and the fundamentalists would inflict in their wildest dreams. All the specious conscription laudations must be refuted, and circulation of articles such as this is the most efficient means of doing so. Military professionals at the Pentagon, persons who know well the optimal conditions for practicing their trade, have rejected the draft proposal. You can as well.

But temporarily holding back men like Rangel is not a lingering remedy to the malignancy of totalitarianism. So long as the means exists to implement the draft, the next Carter will fortify the process and the next Roosevelt will enact it. Therefore it is necessary to undertake a step which had already once been aspired to and obstinately rejected by Democratic reactionaries, the abolition of all draft registration requirements. This the Pentagon has not yet consented to, yet this is what may preserve the efficacy and integrity of America’s armed forces in a hypothetical future conflict. The draft is not a fallback resort, even if there exists a manifest shortage of troops, for conscription, in its material and more profound philosophical consequences, inevitably serves to augment the miseries of any land that plunges the best and brightest of its denizens into a damp, fetid battlefield grave.

G. Stolyarov II is a science fiction novelist, independent philosophical essayist, poet, amateur mathematician, composer, contributor to Enter Stage Right, Le Quebecois Libre, Rebirth of Reason, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Senior Writer for The Liberal Institute, and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator, a magazine championing the principles of reason, rights, and progress. His newest science fiction novel is Eden against the Colossus. His latest non-fiction treatise is A Rational Cosmology. Mr. Stolyarov can be contacted at gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com.