…if you think it is progress to return to conscripting people for the purposes of the government.
In the letter below, Don Boudreaux blasts a writer (who I would guess, regards himself as “liberal” or “progressive”) who wants to do just that.
Editor, The New York Times
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10018
Dear Editor:
Martin Dyckman calls on Uncle Sam to reinstate the military draft, accompanied by a “National Service” program for young Americans who don’t wish to be conscripted into the armed services (“To Serve the Nation,” Feb. 15).
Ignore Mr. Dyckman’s mistaken presumption that people serve others only when they are employed by – or obliged on penalty of imprisonment to work for – government. Ignore questions about the probable role of interest-group politics in determining how national-service conscriptees will be used. Ignore the fact that a military manned with workers that the government rounds up at wages well
below market is a military likely to use methods of production (i.e., waging war) that are unnecessarily labor-intensive – and, hence, likely to cause an unnecessarily high number of American fatalities during wartime.
Focus instead on the primitive sentiment underlying such a call as Mr. Dyckman’s. As Milton Friedman wrote in 1966 (when Uncle Sam still conscripted labor for his military), “One of the greatest advances in human freedom was the
commutation of taxes in kind to taxes in money. We have reverted to a barbarous custom.”
Such barbarity is only masked by appending a “national service” option to military conscription.
My son is almost 15 years old. I’ll be damned if he will ever submit to being fodder for the Pentagon or a slave whose labor is at the disposal of politicians longing for the glories of feudalism.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
