Robert Taft, champion of a non-interventionist foreign policy and leader of the Republican resistance to post-FDR foreign policy, gave a stirring speech against conscription in 1946.
There is one step now proposed, supported by government propaganda, which seems to me to strike at the very basis of freedom. It is the proposal that we establish compulsory military training in time of peace. The power to take a boy from his home and subject him to complete government discipline is the most serious limitation on freedom that can be imagined. Many who have accepted the idea favor a similar government-controlled training for all girls….
Military conscription is essentially totalitarian.
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As Taft says, conscription is slavery and the ability to use this ultimate power over your fellow human beings dissolves all limits on government.
Someone said that a government that has to compel people to defend it probably isn’t worth defending. The United States government is afraid of its own people with good reason.
How is conscription even possible, in light of the 13th ammendment?
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Some moron at Townhall just penned an article advocating mandatory national service, his very heart bleeding for freedom, of course. In order to defend your freedom we must enslave you for a spell.
http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/RossMackenzie/2007/12/06/what_sort_of_universal_service_will_the_candidates_embrace
Conscription is a perfect example of a teacher’s worst nightmare. You give students the tools necessary to survive and succeed in the outside world…you encourage individual choice…you teach them to think for themselves. Then the government comes along, drafts them, “breaks them down” in boot camp just so they can make them “army strong.”
I sometimes wonder how mucy of their previous personalities remain at the end of a tour of duty.
as a 25 yr retired officer and currently a logistics instructor at the command and general staff college, I have personal, professional and philosophical objections to a draft. Conscription enables an aggressive, adventurous, speculative, interventionist foreign policy that can not be supported by thepopular will; basic training crushes the individualism of all but the strongest personalities, and the net result of a professional military career is one that supports the loss of liberty and individuality. Its a machine that inevitably constrains your outlooks. I do not encourage my children to follow me into the military and consider it to be an unattractive and demoralizing career. I echo the sentiment that a country worth defending does not need the draft
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