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We Must Abolish the Draft!

By Gordon F. Corbett

    Truth reveals reality, and learning reality promotes survival.  We learn truth with our minds, and this independent discovery makes truth every tyrant’s Nemesis.

    Tyrants pursue twisted hopes and crooked dreams through the exercise of power.  They obtain it, they keep it, and they expand its reach, by keeping their victims ignorant.  Only truth renders these criminals impotent.

    Telling the truth requires courage.  Reality rarely respects our human traditions, especially when they result from plans past tyrants inflicted on our ancestors.

    One such tradition is conscription.  Conscription lets ruthless men attain imperial goals with unrestricted force.  Its ethical arguments collapse under philosophic scrutiny, and its “practical” supports dissolve alongside the benefits of voluntary enlistment.

    Clarity destroys camouflage, and good definitions produce clarity.  “To conscript,” according to Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, means “to enroll into service by compulsion.”  This interesting phrase fascinates when broken into its component parts.

    Webster’s tells us that “to enroll” means “to insert, register, or enter in a list, catalog, or roll.”  “Service,” it says, comes from the Latin word servitium, which means “condition of a slave, body of slaves.”  “Compulsion” derives from the infinitive “to compel.”  “To compel” means “to drive or urge forcefully or irresistibly.”

        Compare those words with our Constitution’s Thirteenth Amendment.  “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.”

    And, no American armed force accepts convicted criminals.

        Add it up.  To conscript, Congress creates an involuntary servitude for non-criminals.  This precisely opposes the Thirteenth Amendment.  Therefore, because it supercedes Congressional statutes, the Constitution forbids the draft.

    Some believe that this settles the issue.  They forget that proving something un-Constitutional may, for some, leave it still desirable.  Conscription’s fans prove that.  Despite every argument, they assert that we need it to defend the country, to mature our young people, or simply to fulfill a civic obligation.

    Look at the behavioral definition of “obligation.”  An obligation is someone’s expectation, perhaps based on a moral premise, that another will either act or refrain.  If the “expectee” flouts this expectation, the “expecter” (or the government) will exact a penalty.

    That penalty must conform to law.  Proper law only enforces a supposed obligation if meeting it protects someone’s right.

    Therefore, the nature of rights determines government’s proper role.  Philosopher Ayn Rand defines a right as “a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.”  Only the individual owns rights.  And, every person’s prime right is his right to his own life.  All other rights flow from this one, because the owner needs them to live.

    Every person has exactly the same rights as every other.  The sum of these rights forms the following simple, but crucial, idea:  every person has a right to do anything, if it will not injure the rights of another person.  As a corollary, no individual may stop another from doing anything unless it would injure the rights of another person.  These sentences explain both the essence of natural human rights and the legitimate purposes of government.

    What creates rights?  Natural rights theorists pose two answers.  The religious agree with the Declaration of Independence that “...all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights....”  The atheists say that man’s rights flow from his ability to reason.  And, although these philosophers’ concepts of “nature” vary with their metaphysical beliefs, they all agree that rights do not come from government.  We inherit them.

    Very important is the right to make contracts.  To do that, we agree to act or to refrain in return for some specific benefit.  The parties create obligations for each to perform as he promises;  they also create, for each, a consequential right to expect that the other will do likewise.  They meet their obligations in one of two ways:  if a person does something to satisfy an obligation, he acts positively.  If, to meet an obligation, he refrains from doing something, he acts negatively.  One party’s default triggers a lawsuit by the other.

    We need not dwell on voluntarily created obligations.  However contractual parties satisfy them, we must remember that the parties create them.  People may make any agreement that defrauds no contracting party and injures no one else’s rights.  Otherwise, what satisfies the obligations is irrelevant because they hurt no one.

    No agreement creates the involuntarily created obligation.  An involuntary obligation, satisfied by negative action, springs from a natural right.  The right’s owner expects that no one will violate it.  When someone does transgress this right, the owner may either protect himself directly or request governmental help.

    Anyone can name involuntarily created obligations that negative action satisfies.  Follow these steps:

                   1.  Think of a right.
                   2.  Think of how people can violate it.
                   3.  Think of prohibiting that action.

Step No. 3 gives the involuntary obligation.  Not doing the action in Step No. 2 is the negative action meeting the obligation in Step No. 3.

    People violate others’ rights by initiating either, or both, of two destructive processes:  force and fraud.  Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines force as:  “violence, compulsion, or constraint exerted against a person or thing.”  Webster’s defines fraud as:  “intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right.”

    To envision how involuntary obligations prohibit force, consider the natural right to live.  Individuals can violate that right by murdering other people.  A law prohibiting murder protects that right.  Not initiating deadly force satisfies that law.

    Similarly, consider the natural right to own.  Individuals can violate that right by defrauding others.  A law prohibiting fraud protects that right.  Not lying to others for gain satisfies that law.

    So far, we have examined voluntarily created obligations satisfied by both positive and negative action, and involuntarily created obligations which negative actions satisfy.  One more category remains:  involuntarily created obligations satisfied by positive action.

    This category has one occupant:  obligations created consequentially, as when a couple’s conceiving a baby obligates them to care for their baby.

    Otherwise, this category is empty.  No one must act positively to preserve another’s natural right, because natural rights function only negatively:  they prohibit initiating force or fraud.  When we hire people (e.g. bodyguards, policemen, soldiers), to prevent, deter, or redress such aggression, the obligations impelling their acts originate contractually.

    That relative emptiness exposes our government’s worst operational defect.  Remember that government’s only proper task is enforcing obligations that protect individual’s rights.  This limits governmental power categorically and functionally.  If government does more than protect rights, it violates the rights of those who pay for its protection.

    To prove that, note that most of our laws make us meet obligations government creates.  The pretext usually advanced for them is that they are morally right.  “The people are ‘unwilling’ to do what they ‘ought to,’ so ‘we’ have to ‘make them.’”  Give politicians the power to over-rule the peaceable citizen anywhere, and you suggest implicitly their doing it everywhere.

    The levy is their most powerful tool.

    A levy requires delivery to government of some value, such as goods, money, or labor.  Excepting  banned products, governments today do not seize   goods.  Nevertheless, they seize money in taxes, and  they seize labor.  They even do both by forcing businessmen to collect taxes.

    Levies are dangerous.  They have no direct connection between any specific human right, its obligation, and the remedial action characterizing purely protective government.

    That separation lets government usurp power.

    Consider warfare.  Besides actual fighting, how does a modern government wage war?  It imposes levies.  It raises overt taxes, inflates the currency (a covert tax), imposes economic controls, and otherwise reduces civilian freedoms.  Then, to enforce these measures, all created to win a possibly unnecessary war, it erects a huge bureaucracy and metamorphoses from servant to master.

    It also imposes conscription.  As do other levies, it lacks the right-obligation-action functional discipline of purely protective government.  Unlike the others, it enables government to make the citizen risk death, perhaps to further some leader’s geopolitical scheme.

    Want proof?  Look at the “police actions” we fought to save South Korea and South Viet-Nam.  We owned neither beleaguered nation;  no Red takeover in either could have endangered us.  These conflicts cost us 112,341 soldiers, sailors, and airmen.  They cost us incalculable damage from our enemies’ psychological and psycho-chemical warfare against our armed forces and our civilians.  They cost us billions of dollars.  And, because we were not defending our rights, that blood and pain and treasure bought us only a bigger government.

    We must make our paid public guardians depend on natural feedback.  Citizens will enlist when someone threatens their rights.  Then, they train, fight, and, one hopes, eliminate the threat.  And, as a bonus, when no threat exists, the lack of volunteers precludes the danger of a standing army.

    By way of contrast, conscription disconnects the citizens’ rights from natural feedback and makes a standing army possible.

    Now, we examine one final “argument from obligation.”  While its fellows spring from individually owned rights, this one stems from a premise of collectively owned rights.  It says that only collectives, such as groups, tribes, cities, or nations, can own rights.

    In our country, this theory functions within the bigger context of “democracy.”  Democracy says that the citizens own rights, not individually, but in common;  and, to determine their kind and function, they vote.  They also vote to decide who will protect them.  The result, in theory, gives government total control of the citizens.

    Those who advance this argument should review their geometry.  Long ago, Euclid said:  “The whole is equal to the sum of its parts.”

    Remember?  Governments govern nations.  Nations comprise citizens.  Citizens are individuals.  Individuals may only empower governments to protect their rights.  They may not ask government to protect the rights of some by violating the rights of others.  Therefore, so-called “collective” or “national” powers cannot exist.

    So, in summary, the nature of individual’s rights rules out any obligation to serve in the armed forces, and logic precludes the existence of collective rights.  The arguments from obligation are false.

    Now look at the argument from maturation, which asserts that being drafted matures people.  Supposedly, growth results from conscription per se, and thereafter, service life fosters sound development.

    The key is what constitutes sound maturity.  Those who say that conscription matures say that conscription teaches youngsters the importance of obedience, flexibility, and courage.  They rarely admit that civilian jobs teach the same things.

    Further, no one can tell whether Service experience matures more soundly than civilian work does;  there are too many variables.  Some argue that working at a civilian job affords growth at least equal to that from “a hitch in the Service.”  On the other hand, soldiers’ and sailors’ service does facilitate maturation.

    What really counts is that they should work voluntarily.  Any employer will tell you that willing workers work best.  Service commanders know this too.  They know that, thousands of miles from the nearest battle, the unsung labor of support personnel can tilt the scales toward victory or defeat.

    Moreover, only volunteers have the intelligence, motivation, and time needed to master the complexity of modern weapons.

    Consider some basic strategy.  To protect our rights best, we must decide what we want from our armed forces.  We decide who will likely attack us with what weapons, and what strategy, tactics, and armament we  need to defeat  them.  Then we devise contingency plans against each foe and scrap any men and machines that fit none of the plans.

    Today’s plans will differ radically from older ones.  In the past, with few exceptions, our weapons’ limited power forced our fighting men to capture enemy territory.  Soon, that necessity will disappear.  Our advancements in rocketry, computers, and atomic science already allow the reduction of an enemy in hours;  they presage weaponry restoring complete peace in days.

    Freedom fosters such advancements by allowing us to prove our efficacy.  We detect problems, devise solutions, implement them, collect material rewards, and repeat the cycle, which lets us feel that we are sovereign beings who, being sovereign, may choose.

    We choose freely and widely.  We choose to travel or to rest;  to study or to play;  to spend or to save;  to gorge or to diet.  We choose work, residence, spouse, and philosophic or religious creed.  When danger threatens our freedom, we fight to keep it.

    We tailor our fight to the threat.  That makes an all-volunteer war machine not only legally right and morally right, but strategically and politically right as well.  It is legally right:  the Constitution permits the federal government to raise armies and navies.  It is morally right:  qualified applicants have a right to enlist.  It is strategically right:  when danger threatens, we will enlist.  And it is politically right:  unless danger threatens, most of us will not enlist.

    Foreswearing conscription gives us one other advantage.  It gives our defense a synergy of patriotism, economic freedom, and technological ingenuity.  We put our strongest points into our strongpoints.

    Fifty-one long years ago, someone suggested doing just that.  Renowned strategic theorist Alexander P. de Seversky predicted in his book Air Power:  Key to Survival that in future wars, we shall neither need nor want to capture an enemy country.  We shall want to eliminate it with maximum  speed.  In a later book, America:  Too Young to Die, de Seversky said that this will require an aerospace war machine comprising fighters, bombers, and ballistic missiles based on land and in submarines.  Today, we could add cruise missiles, orbiting anti-missile missiles, lasers, and particle-beam weapons.  This system would render any enemy attack suicidal.

    It may also refine warfare ethically.  Every major war in the last century began when dictators attacked their neighbors.  The neighbors and their allies then targeted not only the dictators’ armed forces, but their civilians too.  Infantry looted and raped them;  blockades starved them;  artillery, armor, and aviation slaughtered them.

    The gangsters’ crimes forfeited the gangsters’ rights.  But, what about the gangsters’ subjects?   Did they deserve to die because political thugs stole their freedom and made them attack equally innocent people?  Why should millions suffer penalties only their rulers deserve?

    If we can kill criminal enemies without harming innocents, we will solve that problem.  An airborne or orbiting particle-beam weapon could let us vaporize enemy rulers and free their subjects without great cost in lives or property.

    The warp and woof of our American system is freedom of choice.  Impose conscription and you diminish that freedom.  Reduce that freedom and you  undermine the foundation of our will to fight.  Weaken our will to fight and you hasten our conquest.

    That makes this an excellent place to introduce the  subject of patriotism.  Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines patriotism as, “love for or devotion to one’s country.”  President Theodore Roosevelt wrote a behavioral definition.

        “Patriotism means to stand by the country.
        It does not mean to stand by the President
        or any other public official save exactly to
        the degree in which he himself stands by the
        country.

        “It is patriotic to support him insofar as he
        efficiently serves the country.  It is
        unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact
        extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he
        fails in his duty to stand by the country.

        “In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell
        the truth--whether about the President or
        anyone else--save in the rare cases where
        this would make known to the enemy
        information of military value which would
        otherwise be unknown to him.”

    In the name of patriotism, let us tell the truth.

    The draft violates the Constitution.  It permits government to ignore our rights.  It works against building military, naval, or aerial effectiveness.  It fosters needless wars fought with inefficient weapons.  If patriotism means to stand by the country, how can any patriot push conscription?

    Thomas Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence:  “...all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are  sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”  Conscription’s bloody history certainly proves this.

    We have three ways to abolish conscription.  They are:  Congressional abolition;  judicial abolition;  and abolition by Constitutional amendment.  Each has its advantages and drawbacks.

    Superficially, Congressional abolition looks attractive.  Pressure on Congress could result in outlawing conscription more quickly than either of the other two methods could do.  Nevertheless, Congress is fickle.  As the Viet-Nam war waned, they discontinued the draft;  later, they ordered America’s  eighteen-year-olds to register for possible future conscription.

    Many decades ago, we might have sought abolition from the courts.  We could have relied on the Thirteenth Amendment at least, and perhaps the Ninth Amendment as well.  (The Ninth Amendment protects all rights not mentioned in the Constitution.)  Unfortunately, Supreme Court decisions have long  foregone interpreting the Constitution literally;  and,  unlike their predecessors, today’s justices no longer revere the precedent-building system of stare decisis.  A Supreme Court decision abolishing the draft today could be overturned later.

    That leaves the amendment process.  It offers the virtue of durability;  and although an amendment abolishing conscription would be difficult to pass, repeal would demand equal effort.  We can therefore expect a repealer amendment to last.

    We must persuade the public that abolishing conscription will calm their lives and protect their country better.  Only then will they exert on Congress and on our State legislatures the necessary pressure.

    Our young people will plan lives untrammelled by Selective Service.  Our armed forces, sparsely staffed by highly trained and resolute volunteers, will control  firepower sufficient to deter any prospective foe.  Our civil populace will marvel as the threat of war recedes and the tranquility of peace deepens.

    Those benefits form only a beginning.  This amendment will secure our Republic.  No longer will politicians easily rob our people of their wealth, their lives, and their freedom by fostering needless wars.  It will finish what the Thirteenth Amendment began, wiping the last stain of slavery from our national escutcheon.

    As we enact further corrections, binding our public servants to the letter of the Constitution and freeing the light of liberty, the world will watch and wonder.  When they see that the torch of freedom is every man’s birthright to build and to burn, they will light their own.

    We have shrouded this magnificent glow too long.  Summon the courage to free that blaze and it will light our path to the stars.  For so long as we understand and guard our freedom, its brilliance shall banish tyranny from the brows of men.
 

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