He comes to the right conclusion, but I don't think I agree with too many of Michael Kinsley's premises in his column "What's Fair About a Draft?" He does score a few good points, though:
The country's main reaction to the need for more troops in Iraq is that we should get other countries to help us out. In other words, draft foreigners.
Nice touch.
Kinsley then goes on to deal with questions of the fairness of military conscription:
Unless and until Bush's preemption doctrine has us fighting a half-dozen Iraqs at the same time, the military simply doesn't need most of the soldiers a universal draft would produce. The legendary unfairness of the Vietnam-era draft was more the result of the government's looking for ways to reduce the number of draftees than of actual draft dodging.
Draft enthusiasts have two solutions to this dilemma. One is a universal mandatory service program for young people in which military service would be just one option. This is truly the tail wagging the dog. You start with demographic concerns about the military and end up with a vast new government bureaucracy dedicated to forcing people against their will into jobs that mostly have nothing to do with the military.
True enough, and it would happen just that way. But is that all?
During Vietnam, the columnist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote, "Draft old men's money, not young men's bodies." His point was that in America, when you want more of something -- even soldiers -- the way to get more is to pay more. A draft allows the government to pay less for soldiers than they would cost in the free market. It is, in essence, a tax on young people. Or a pay cut for those who would have volunteered anyway. What kind of triumph of fairness is that?
Now, I enjoy von Hoffman and Kinsley as much as any other reader, and clever, verbally adept fellows they are, to be sure. And yes, yes, a tax on young people it would be, and again, unfair. But by now, it becomes uncomfortably clear that Kinsley isn't going to address anything truly fundamental about the issue of military conscription. I expect few pundits will.
But: back during the preamble to the Summer of Love, precisely those fundamentals were addressed--by Ayn Rand. Compare Kinsley's objections (and again, I largely agree with them) to Rand's fighting words:
Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man's fundamental right--the right to life--and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man's life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.
If the state may force a man to risk death or a hideous maiming and crippling, in a war declared at the state's discretion, for a cause he may neither approve or nor even understand, if his consent is not required to send him into unspeakable martyrdom--then, in principle, all rights are negated in that state, and its government is not man's protector any longer. What else is there left to protect?
Rand deals with the fundamental issues much more squarely Kinsley does, and therefore much more forcefully. She then handles the "obligation" objection to her argument, and even adresses an important concrete:
Politically, the draft is clearly constitutional. No amount of rationalization, neither by the Supreme Court nor by private individuals, can alter the fact that it represents "involuntary servitude."
Maybe I don't get out much, but I'm not hearing this level of discourse from any of the candidates, or any of the pundits, on the trail, or from any of the critters in Congress. Nor do I expect to.
And for those of you who notice the title of Rand's piece and declare, "Why, I don't recall 'consensus' looming particularly large in the pantheon of values in Ayn Rand's philosophy," I invite you, especially, to read, and to ponder, "The Wreckage of the Consensus."
And then think on the fairness, or otherwise, of the draft.
("The Wreckage of the Consensus" was a speech delivered at the Ford Hall Forum, Boston, on April 16, 1967, and published in the April and May 1967 issues of The Objectivist. It is available in the anthology Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and in the bound volume The Objectivist, and on The Objectivism Research CD-ROM.)
(DISCLAIMER: Your humble correspondent is neither anarchist nor militarist, and in fact spent twelve years in the U.S. Marine Corps, into which I was not drafted, and which span included a short but hot excursion in lovely Beirut. As I recall, the elimination of Selective Service was one of the first campaign pledges voided by Ronald Reagan upon his assumption of the office of president of the United States.)
(Hat tip: Mises Blog)
Posted by Craig Ceely at July 20, 2004 12:32 PM