by Lew Rockwell, Lew Rockwell:
Last week, a most disturbing development took place that should concern all those who value liberty. The House of Representatives passed the National Defense Authorization Act and included in it a provision requiring the automatic enrollment of men from 18 to 26 years old for the draft. Before that, men were required to register for the draft when they turned eighteen, but whether to do that was up to them. Many of them didn’t, even though failing to register subjected them to criminal penalties. But the choice was theirs to make, and now, they won’t have it.
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No one has actually been drafted yet, but calls for “national service” are in the air. This is an excellent time, then, to go over what is wrong with drafting people into the armed services, and this is what I’m going to do in this week’s article.
The fundamental point is easy to grasp. In a free society, everyone owns himself and his legitimately acquired property. Slavery is the greatest possible violation of your right to own yourself, and making the “state” your enslavers (actually the politicians who run the state) does not make things better. It makes them worse. As the great Murray Rothbard puts it in For a New Liberty, “Surely, for one example, there can be no more blatant case of involuntary servitude than our entire system of conscription. Every youth is forced to register with the selective service system when he turns eighteen. He is compelled to carry his draft card at all times, and, at whatever time the federal government deems fit, he is seized by the authorities and inducted into the armed forces. There his body and will are no longer his own; he is subject to the dictates of the government; and he can be forced to kill and to place his own life in jeopardy if the authorities so decree. What else is involuntary servitude if not the draft?”
There is an obvious objection that I’m sure has occurred to many of you. “If we rely on completely voluntary armed services, the why would people volunteer if we were engaged in war? True enough, people join the military now. But most of them don’t expect to fight, and for many in the military being deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq was an unwelcome surprise.” In fact, as Murray pointed out, our so-called “volunteer” military isn’t genuinely voluntary. You are free to join, but not free to leave. You can’t say, “I don’t want to fight—I’m out!” The “volunteer” army we have now is still slavery, albeit one that doesn’t include all men of military age, but only those who enlist. As Murray says, “While conscription into the armed forces is a blatant and aggravated form of involuntary servitude, there is another, far more subtle and therefore less detectable form: the structure of the army itself. Consider this: in what other occupation in the country are there severe penalties, including prison and in some cases execution, for ‘desertion,’ i.e., for quitting the particular employment? If someone quits General Motors, is he shot at sunrise?”
This point about the “volunteer” army returns us to the obvious objection that I mentioned earlier. Suppose we are engaged in a war and a young man of military age supports the war. Still, wouldn’t he prefer that others do the fighting? People will only enlist, under such circumstances, if they are aware that that the government will draft them if they don’t. In short, there is a “market failure” that the government needs to remedy.
The notion that the market cannot provide for defense is ridiculous. If you can buy anything else, why can’t you buy defenders as well? The real “problem” for the government is that people will fight only for what they really think is their vital interest. They won’t volunteer to spread the blessings of that false god “democracy” to savages and barbarians. As Ludwig von Mises notes in Socialism, people will fight if they think their existence is at stake: “War carried on pro aris et focis [for hearth and home] demands no sacrifice from the individual. One does not engage in it merely to reap benefits for others, but to preserve one’s own existence. This of course, is only true of wars in which individuals fight for their very existence. lt is not true of wars which are merely a means of enrichment, such as the quarrels of feudal lords or the cabinet wars of princes. Thus Imperialism, ever covetous of conquests, cannot do without an ethic which demands from the individual ‘sacrifices’ for the ‘good of the State.’”
