TheAgitator.com
Draft Punk
Monday, May 3rd, 2004Julian has an excellent piece at Reason today holding the left accountable for this insane talk of conscription.
Frankly, I’m more than a little dismayed that otherwise respectable lefties like Sawicky and Yglesias would climb on board with this, particulary given the very slim likelihood that if Congress were to approve a draft, it would come with the “rich kids are gonna’ die too” stipulations that have motivated Charlie Rangel and company to start agitating for it to begin with.
The more likely outcome? We get a draft. Congress creates the usual holes for privileged kids to crawl through. We get more soldiers. Extra soldiers are to presidents what budget suprluses are to Congress. More men means future presidents find more wars to fight, without ever really needing to quit the old ones.
It doesn’t surprise me that a McCain or a Kristol or a Hagel is on board with conscription. What’s striking to me that alleged leftist, peace-loving, rights-loving people would think it’s okay to send young men and women unwillingly to their deaths as pretext to a debate on foreign policy.
I wrote a bit of satire on the topic called “Affirmative Casualties” back when Rangel first broached the idea in 2002. As with much of satire these days, it really doesn’t seem so farfetched anymore.
The double-talk from Rawls that Sanchez admires is instructive: “each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.”
But then again: “since conscription is a drastic interference with the basic liberties of equal citizenship, it cannot be justified by any needs less compelling than those of national securityâ?¦.The priority of liberty…requires that conscription be used only as the security of liberty necessitates.”
In other words each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override – unless it really, really needs to.
BABY IT’S COLD OUTSIDE
My friend Julian Sanchez, bon vivant and man-about-town, is crediting me and some other worthies with driving the nation towards conscription. My offending post is here, written a year ago last January, over which time several John Kerrys have evolved….
But if there’s a draft, and hawks dodge it, then there’d be a whole new generation giving real meaning to the term “chickenhawk”.
It really doesn’t have the same sting when the military is all-volunteer.
And of course, the rhetoric of congressional hawks would, I think, be compromised if they get their kids out of the draft. (Guess the war on terra wasn’t all that important after all, eh Congressman?)
Small comfort, but a comfort all the same.
“What’s striking to me that alleged leftist, peace-loving, rights-loving people would think it’s okay to send young men and women unwillingly to their deaths as pretext to a debate on foreign policy.”
Why does that surprise you? Leftists have always been in favor of one set of rules for themselves, and one for everybody else.
The left has always believed that individuals are sacrificial lambs for the state.
When business and state hold hands, every individual becomes a sacrifice to both and each gets to pay the bill for his own funeral.
My post “Ayn Rand: The Roots of War” covers this in more detail.
Reinstating the U.S. draft would be yet another nail in the coffin of freedom at home and abroad.
the left will stop talking about the draft after Bush is re-elected.
And you can guarentee that is going to happen. There are no other possiblities. God is on his side, and will make sure his man stays at the helm of our great Nation Under God. Death to the infidels, his truth is marching on.
The Draft
There are a bunch of people who are concerned America is going to reinstate the draft. Some react with pointed humor, some with horror and others with approval. Everybody seems to agree, though, that we’re going to need a draft because, as the CBO says…
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