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Pentagon Pushes Plan for Female Draft Registration – Article by Ryan McMaken

Pentagon Pushes Plan for Female Draft Registration – Article by Ryan McMaken

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Ryan McMaken
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The Pentagon is moving forward with pressuring Congress to add women to the Selective Service program, which will make virtually all young people eligible for the military draft. The Washington Times reports:

The Pentagon says the country should stick with mandatory registration for a military draft, and it advocates a requirement for women to sign up for the first time in the nation’s history.

The recommendations are contained in a Defense Department report to Congress that serves as a starting point for a commission examining military, national and public service.

Congress ordered the Pentagon report, and the office of the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness completed it in the early months of the Trump administration.

Currently, only male citizens and residents age 18-25 are required to register, for a pace of about 2 million each year.

Women, whom the government has never ordered to sign up, would add 11 million to the Selective Service System database “in short order,” the report says.

Not surprisingly, the Pentagon, the report reminds us, wants the Service Program to continue indefinitely. No surprise there. But now, the Pentagon wants to expand draft registration so it can include millions of young people who had not previously been eligible.

This proposed change will be couched in a variety of irrelevant issues like “gender equality” and “women in combat.” At the heart of the matter, however, is the fact that the Pentagon wants an even larger list of potential forced laborers who can be paid below-market wages. In other words, draft registration offers — and has always offered — a list of people who can be forced to pay higher taxes in the form of mandatory “service”:  

“Conscription is slavery,” Murray Rothbard wrote in 1973, and while temporary conscription is obviously much less bad — assuming one outlives the term of conscription — than many other forms of slavery, conscription is nevertheless a nearly-100-percent tax on the production of one’s mind and body. If one attempts to escape his confinement in his open-air military jail, he faces imprisonment or even execution in many cases.

Conscription remains popular among [nation-]states because it is an easy way to directly extract resources from the population. Just as regular taxes partially extract the savings, productivity, and labor of the general population, conscription extracts virtually all of the labor and effort of the conscripts. The burden falls disproportionately on the young males in most cases, and they are at risk of a much higher tax burden if killed or given a permanent disability in battle. If he’s lucky enough to survive the conflict, the conscript may find himself living out the rest of his life as disfigured or missing his eyesight and limbs. He may be rendered permanently undesirable to the opposite sex. Such costs imposed on the conscript are a form of lifelong taxation.

Fortunately for those who escape such a fate, the term of slavery ends at a specified time, but for the duration, the only freedom the conscript enjoys is that granted to him by his jailers.

But, Modern Conscription Won’t be About Combat Duty

The irrelevance of gender issues here is made clear by the fact that the Pentagon’s report is part of a larger effort which is, as the Times describes it, “a commission examining military, national and public service.” We’ve moved well beyond the issue of strictly military or combat service when we’re talking about forced labor through conscription.

Should the American federal government decide that it’s necessary to finally make use of the Selective Service lists, the new draftees won’t be people sent to carry rifles on the front lines. The military doesn’t want poorly trained conscripts in combat, anyway. But this fact by no means precludes the potential usefulness of conscription to the federal government.

What the US federal government does want — especially in case of dropping revenues due to economic crisis — is cheap labor to build military bases, drive trucks, prepare food, load cargo, mop floors, and perform the countless non-combat tasks that are required to further expand military prerogatives both at home and abroad. Yes, the US government can pay people to do all those things now. But conscripts could be much cheaper.

After all, even in the military, few soldiers ever are in combat situations. In active war zones in recent decades (i.e., Iraq and Afghanistan) there have been seven support personnel for every infantryman. In other words, for every rifle-carrying soldier in a combat zone, there are seven computer programmers, cooks, and mechanics keeping that combat soldier well supplied.

But why stop with military-related issues? “National service” can encompass a wide variety of duties. These can include any of the tasks currently performed by civilian contractors who do government work now on all sorts of domestic infrastructure and social benefits programs.

In the future, if young Americans are drafted, they’re going to be fixing vehicles in a garage or sitting at a desk in an office. And they’ll be doing those tasks for the low, low wages that involuntary servitude makes possible.

The issue of whether or not women should be in combat roles is a totally separate issue and beside the point of whether or not draft registration should be expanded further.

A Huge Repudiation of Property Rights

Ultimately, the only aspect of the women-as-draftees debate that is important is the issue of whether it is morally acceptable to force young people into temporary slavery. Precious few conservatives, of course, have a problem with this, which is why they ultimately can only oppose the expansion of draft registration to women on the grounds of gender politics. For the conservatives, it’s simply a given that forced government labor is entirely justified.

But, even outside the hard-core of the pro-military right-wing regime, it’s hard to find anyone in Washington who seriously opposes draft registration. It’s now been decades since the 1970s when there had a been a movement to abolish both the draft and draft registration. Ron Paul, not surprisingly, was among the supporters of that plan. Not even the end of the Cold War could end mandatory draft registration.

Now we’re talking about expanding the program. But make no mistake about it. Expanding Selective Service from 50 percent of young adults to 100 percent is not about equality, or progress, or patriotism. While these notions will no doubt be used to bully people into supporting such a move, the real-world effect will be a massive expansion in government power over the lives of the population.

Even if modern conscripts avoid all combat, the idea of conscription will always be nothing more than a wholesale repudiation of property rights. The argument that the draft is a necessary “insurance policy” in case of military crisis is no different than saying that nationalization of private industry should always be on the table as an important “insurance policy” in case of economic crisis. Or perhaps the abolition of freedom of speech should be an option as an “insurance policy” in case of social and ideological upheaval.

If young Americans can’t be convinced to fight in the federal government’s wars, then that’s an indication that the federal government doesn’t quite command the respect it thinks it deserves. Often, this is an indication that young people don’t believe the federal government’s propaganda that a war is necessary to “defend freedom,” “fight global communism,” or “end all wars.”  If Americans would rather take their chances not taking up arms for the federal government, that’s a serious problem for the federal government, indeed. But what’s a problem for the federal government is by no means necessarily a problem for the taxpayers who pay the bills. Nor is it a problem the federal government is morally entitled to “rectify” by forcing millions of Americans into involuntary servitude.

Ryan W. McMaken is the editor of Mises Daily and The Free Market. He has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado, and was the economist for the Colorado Division of Housing from 2009 to 2014. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre. 

This article was published on Mises.org and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

This article has been edited in accordance with TRA’s Statement of Policy.

Drafting Women Means Equality in Slavery – Article by Ron Paul

Drafting Women Means Equality in Slavery – Article by Ron Paul

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The New Renaissance HatRon Paul
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Last week the House Armed Services Committee approved an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act requiring women to register with Selective Service. This means that if Congress ever brings back the draft, women will be forcibly sent to war.

The amendment is a response to the Pentagon’s decision to allow women to serve in combat. Supporters of drafting women point out that the ban on women in combat was the reason the Supreme Court upheld a male-only draft. Therefore, they argue, it is only logical to now force women to register for Selective Service. Besides, supporters of extending the draft point out, not all draftees are sent into combat.

Most of those who opposed drafting women did so because they disagreed with women being eligible for combat positions, not because they opposed the military draft. Few, if any, in Congress are questioning the morality, constitutionality, and necessity of Selective Service registration. Thus, this debate is just another example of how few of our so-called “representatives” actually care about our liberty.

Some proponents of a military draft justify it as “payback” for the freedom the government provides its citizens. Those who make this argument are embracing the collectivist premise that since our rights come from government, the government can take away those rights whether it suits their purposes. Thus supporters of the draft are turning their backs on the Declaration of Independence.

While opposition to the draft is seen as a progressive or libertarian position, many conservatives, including Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, and Robert Taft, where outspoken opponents of conscription. Unfortunately, the militarism that has led so many conservatives astray in foreign policy has also turned many of them into supporters of mandatory Selective Service registration. Yet many of these same conservatives strongly and correctly oppose mandatory gun registration. In a free society you should never have to register your child or your gun.

Sadly, some opponents of the warfare state, including some libertarians, support the draft on the grounds that a draft would cause a mass uprising against the warfare state. Proponents of this view point to the draft’s role in galvanizing opposition to the Vietnam War. This argument ignores that fact that it took several years and the deaths of thousands of American draftees for the anti-Vietnam War movement to succeed.

A variation on this argument is that drafting women will cause an antiwar backlash as Americans recoil form the idea of forcing mothers into combat. But does anyone think the government would draft mothers with young children?

Reinstating the draft will not diminish the war party’s influence as long as the people continue to believe the war propaganda fed to them by the military-industrial complex’s media echo chamber. Changing the people’s attitude toward the warfare state and its propaganda organs is the only way to return to a foreign policy of peace and commerce with all.

Even if the draft could serve as a check on the warfare state, those who support individual liberty should still oppose it. Libertarians who support violating individual rights to achieve a political goal, even a goal as noble as peace, undermine their arguments against non-aggression and thus discredit both our movement, and, more importantly, our philosophy.

A military draft is one of – if not the – worst violations of individual rights committed by modern governments. The draft can also facilitate the growth of the warfare state by lowing the cost of militarism. All those who value peace, prosperity, and liberty must place opposition to the draft at the top of their agenda.

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

No Doubt: US Taxpayers Will be Robbed to Arm Poroshenko – Article by Ron Paul

No Doubt: US Taxpayers Will be Robbed to Arm Poroshenko – Article by Ron Paul

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Ron Paul
February 5, 2015
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President Petro Poroshenko, who the US, along with the Europeans and NATO, helped place in power after last year’s coup, has declared that he has “no doubt” America’s taxpayers will provide the lethal weapons he desires to fight the separatists in eastern Ukraine. I never had any doubt, either. Of course it’s all to stop “Russian aggression.” NATO’s expansionism is never considered an important issue in the very dangerous war.

Our policy in Ukraine is a far cry from “neutrality,” staying out of the internal affairs of others, or avoiding entangling alliances. It is more like being the policeman of the world and claiming the title of the greatest arms manufacturer of all history. The military-industrial complex must be pleased with its repeated successes.

I’m sure the neo-cons are also ecstatic. And sadly it looks like Sen. Lindsey Graham may get his way and get US troops further involved.

The claimed need for our sending lethal weapons to Ukraine is to combat the Russian troops supposedly already in Ukraine. Yet the propagandists never provide any evidence to verify this assertion.

Both sides are now recruiting and even drafting the young to prepare them to do the fighting. There’s evidence that resistance is building to this effort. It would be nice if the young victims of wars started by old people and foreigners would just go on strike and refuse to fight. Let the instigators of the war put their own “boots on the ground.”

Reprinted with permission from author’s Facebook page.

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Once-Peaceful Canada Turns Militaristic; Blowback Follows – Article by Ron Paul

Once-Peaceful Canada Turns Militaristic; Blowback Follows – Article by Ron Paul

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Ron Paul
October 30, 2014
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In 1968 the government of Canada decided to openly admit Americans seeking to avoid being drafted into the US war on Vietnam. Before, would-be immigrants were technically required to prove that they had been discharged from US military service. This move made it easier for Americans to escape President Johnson’s war machine by heading north.
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Although a founding member of NATO, Canada did not join the United States in its war against Vietnam. The Canadian government did not see a conflict 7,000 miles away as vital to Canada’s national interest so Canada pursued its own foreign policy course, independent of the United States.

How the world has changed. Canada’s wise caution about military adventurism even at the height of the Cold War has given way to a Canada of the 21st century literally joined at Washington’s hip and eager to participate in any bombing mission initiated by the D.C. interventionists.

Considering Canada’s peaceful past, the interventionist Canada that has emerged at the end of the Cold War is a genuine disappointment. Who would doubt that today’s Canada would, should a draft be re-instated in the US, send each and every American resister back home to face prison and worse?

As Glenn Greenwald pointed out this past week:

Canada has spent the last 13 years proclaiming itself a nation at war. It actively participated in the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and was an enthusiastic partner in some of the most extremist War on Terror abuses perpetrated by the U.S.

Canada has also enthusiastically joined President Obama’s latest war on Iraq and Syria, pledging to send fighter jets to participate in the bombing of ISIS (and likely many civilians in the process).

But Canada’s wars abroad came back home to Canada last week.

Though horrific, it should not be a complete surprise that Canada found itself hit by blowback last week, as two attacks on Canadian soil left two Canadian military members dead.

Greenwald again points out what few dare to say about the attacks:

Regardless of one’s views on the justifiability of Canada’s lengthy military actions, it’s not the slightest bit surprising or difficult to understand why people who identify with those on the other end of Canadian bombs and bullets would decide to attack the military responsible for that violence.

That is the danger of intervention in other people’s wars thousands of miles away. Those at the other end of foreign bombs – and their surviving family members or anyone who sympathizes with them – have great incentive to seek revenge. This feeling should not be that difficult to understand.

Seeking to understand the motivation of a criminal does not mean that the crime is justified, however. We can still condemn and be appalled by the attacks while realizing that we need to understand the causation and motivation. This is common sense in other criminal matters, but it seems to not apply to attacks such as we saw in Canada last week. Few dare to point out the obvious: Canada’s aggressive foreign policy is creating enemies abroad that are making the country more vulnerable to attack rather than safer.

Predictably, the Canadian government is using the attacks to restrict civil liberties and expand the surveillance state. Like the US PATRIOT Act, Canadian legislation that had been previously proposed to give the government more authority to spy on and aggressively interrogate its citizens has been given a shot in the arm by last week’s attacks.

Unfortunately Canada has unlearned the lesson of 1968: staying out of other people’s wars makes a country more safe; following the endless war policy of its southern neighbor opens Canada up to the ugly side of blowback.

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

National Service is Anti-Liberty and Un-American – Article by Ron Paul

National Service is Anti-Liberty and Un-American – Article by Ron Paul

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Ron Paul
October 19, 2014
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Former Clinton Administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently called on the government to force young people to spend two years either “serving” in the military or performing some other type of government-directed “community service.” Neoconservative Senator John McCain has introduced legislation creating a mandatory national service program very similar to Reich’s proposal. It is not surprising that both a prominent progressive and a leading neocon would support mandatory national service, as this is an issue that has long united authoritarians on the left and right.Proponents of national service claim that young people have a moral obligation to give something back to society. But giving the government power to decide our moral obligations is an invitation to totalitarianism.
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Mandatory national service is not just anti-liberty, it is un-American. Whether or not they admit it, supporters of mandatory national service do not believe that individuals have “inalienable rights.” Instead, they believe that rights are gifts from the government, and, since government is the source of our rights, government can abridge or even take away those rights whenever Congress decides.

Mandatory national service also undermines private charitable institutions. In a free society, many people will give their time or money to service projects to help better their communities, working with religious or civic associations. But in a society with government-enforced national service, these associations are likely to become more reliant on government-supplied forced labor. They will then begin to tailor their programs to satisfy the demands of federal bureaucrats instead of the needs of the community.

The very worst form of national service is, of course, the military draft, which forces young people to kill or be killed on government orders. The draft lowers the cost of an interventionist foreign policy because government need not compete with private employers for recruits. Anyone who refuses a draft notice runs the risk of being jailed, so government can provide lower pay and benefits to draftees than to volunteers.

As the burden of our hyper-interventionist foreign policy increases, it is increasingly likely that there will be serious attempts to reinstate the military draft. General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, continues to suggest that US troops on the ground may be needed to fight “Operation Inherent Resolve” in Iraq and Syria. A major escalation requiring a large US troop deployment will likely add pressure to consider a military draft.

The only real way the American people can protect their children from the military draft is to demand an end to the foreign policy that sees the US military as the solution to any and every problem — from ISIS to Ebola — anywhere in the world.

Some who share my opposition to a militaristic foreign policy support the draft because they think a draft will increase public opposition to war. However, the existence of a draft did not stop the American government from launching unconstitutional wars in Vietnam and Korea. While the draft did play a role in mobilizing political opposition to Vietnam, it took almost a decade and the deaths of thousands of American draftees for that opposition to reach critical mass.

It is baffling that conservatives who (properly) oppose raising taxes would support any form of national service, including the military draft. It is similarly baffling that liberals who oppose government interference with our personal lives would support mandatory national service. Mandatory national service is a totalitarian policy that should be rejected by all who value liberty.

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Tim O’Brien’s Collectivist Psyche as His Arch-Nemesis in “The Things They Carried” (2004) – Essay by G. Stolyarov II

Tim O’Brien’s Collectivist Psyche as His Arch-Nemesis in “The Things They Carried” (2004) – Essay by G. Stolyarov II

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G. Stolyarov II
July 29, 2014
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Note from the Author: This essay was originally written in 2004 and published on Associated Content (subsequently, Yahoo! Voices) in 2007.  The essay earned over 1,400 page views on Associated Content/Yahoo! Voices, and I seek to preserve it as a valuable resource for readers, subsequent to the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices. Therefore, this essay is being published directly on The Rational Argumentator for the first time.  
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~ G. Stolyarov II, July 29, 2014

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Why does an avid opponent of the Vietnam War, with the opportunity to flee from fighting it, voluntarily succumb to the draft? Why, being so close to the Canadian border, does he lack the courage to jump into the water and swim across? Tim O’Brien’s moral opposition to the Vietnam War is clouded by his desire to be accepted by others in his community, and this demon of adherence to the collective will is his prime antagonist in The Things They Carried, and the source of all his further woes and crises.

Had O’ Brien dodged the draft, this would have been a sign of moral fortitude, rather than the weakness it is commonly portrayed to be. O’Brien clearly recognizes this at the time of his attempt to flee to Canada. He knows that the motives behind the war are questionable, and states his belief that “when a nation goes to war, it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause” (41).

Moreover, O’Brien recognizes himself to be physically and psychologically unfit for war, referring to himself as one whom “the sight of blood made… queasy, and [who] couldn’t tolerate authority” (41). Enlisting in the U.S. Army is a betrayal of O’Brien’s objective self-interest and his own recognition of the nature of his individual character. Consenting to the draft is O’Brien’s tacit allowance of a great moral evil perpetrated by the United States government, a government that would claim the right to employ him as cannon fodder and subject him to all of his subsequent shocking experiences during the Vietnam War. Thus, such a decision is at the root of all of his further struggles.

O’Brien recognizes that his decision to obey his draft notice is a moral travesty on all counts, and, even twenty years later, describes it as a shameful act, which had tarnished his very belief in man’s capacity for heroic, principled action. Rather than adhere to his own understanding of morality, O’Brien gives in to the prevailing perception in his community of draft dodging as cowardly, unpatriotic, and scandalous. When imagining the entirety of his community staring at him as he tries to swim for Canada, O’Brien’s psyche magnifies the impact of this collective superstition far beyond the ability of the people espousing it. O’Brien is physically distant from the ignoramuses who would wantonly sacrifice his life, and they cannot affect his decisions, if he does not let them. O’Brien, however, is so maniacally afflicted with the desire for acceptance at any cost that his very physiology revolts against him. He recalls, “I did try. It just wasn’t possible” (59).

Despite O’Brien’s professed disgust with the simplistic platitudes of the collective with which he lives, his collectivist psychological malady is pervasive enough to place these platitudes in full control of even this, the most critical decision he would ever face. O’Brien’s desire for acceptance is irrational, suicidal, and perverse. His safety, his intellect, his understanding, and his future all stand in opposition to his society, yet, he selects his society over them. There is neither excuse nor justification for this act of moral weakness. O’Brien’s community, the draft board, the Viet Minh, and the routine physical hardships of war, would never have harmed him at all, if only he had the internal consistency to follow the course dictated by considerations of reason and justice.

Because O’Brien’s perceived exaggeration of the importance of the opinions of others in his community motivates his decision to heed his draft notice, O’Brien’s greatest foe is that part of him which impels him to act against himself.

Military Conscription Shows the Evil of Ukraine’s Government – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Military Conscription Shows the Evil of Ukraine’s Government – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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G. Stolyarov II
May 1, 2014
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I have, in the past, expressed ambivalence regarding the government of Oleksandr Turchynov and Arseniy Yatseniuk in Ukraine, but that government’s decision on May 1, 2014, to impose military conscription for men aged 18 to 25 clearly reveals it to be evil and unworthy of even verbal support, not to mention the material assistance and economic bailouts currently lavished on it by Western governments and the International Monetary Fund.

As I wrote in 2008 in “Why Freedom is Free and Rights Are Right: The Case Against Conscription, Compulsion, and Confiscation”, conscription is murder by lottery: “By fielding an army of conscripts, a government necessarily guarantees that some of those conscripts will be killed – although nobody knows in advance who will die. In effect, this is no different from selecting a large number of fit young men, assigning numbers to each of them, and picking a few of the numbers out of a hat – whereafter those whose numbers have been picked will be shot. Conscription is just such a murder by lottery – except that the picking of numbers is performed by the vicissitudes of the battlefield rather than the luck of a draw. The responsibility for the deaths of millions of young men from conscripted armies throughout world history lies solely on the shoulders of the governments who conscripted them. The enemy soldiers who killed them were mere instruments of murder; they were likely only following orders – and were likely themselves under compulsion to do so. The government officials who drafted the men, however, did so of their own free will and even with enthusiasm.”

It would be a complete contradiction of the principles of liberty and peace to support any government that conscripts its young men to become cannon fodder – disposable pawns in the power struggles of older, powerful leaders who will not themselves bear the physical costs of their desires to dominate over one group of people or another. Vladimir Putin’s regime is evil, too, and so are many of the militants aligned with it, as I have acknowledged previously. But supporting one evil just because it is arrayed against another is neither moral nor effective. American foreign policy engages in this support for the “enemy of the enemy” at almost every available opportunity, and this always comes back to hurt Americans in both the long and the not-so-long term.

Ironically, it was the overthrown Viktor Yanukovych who had abolished conscription in 2013 – perhaps the only good and liberty-friendly decision he made. Yanukovych deserved to be overthrown for instigating the killings of his own people, but this new government of thugs is no better. Indeed, it has managed to undo the one good legacy of Yanukovych’s reign! And yes, it is a government of thugs. This March 5 article from Channel 4 News in the United Kingdom – no Putin mouthpiece! – explains how many of the top posts in the Ukrainian government are occupied by leaders of Svoboda and Right Sector, two ultra-nationalist groups that grew out of explicitly fascist movements that use explicit Nazi symbols such as the Wolfsangel. Here are two images: at the top, Svoboda’s Oleh Tyahnybok delivers a Nazi salute; at the bottom, he poses with arch-interventionist and neoconservative warmonger John McCain. Right Sector’s leader Dmytro Yarosh is Ukraine’s Deputy Secretary of National Security – security, that is, for those who meet Yarosh’s standards of ethnic and linguistic “purity”.

Neither side in the conflict in Eastern Ukraine is just or right, or anything but destructive to the interests of the only innocent parties in the mix – civilians who seek to live and work in peace. No principle, no signal, no feverish nationalistic pride, no set of lines drawn on a map is worth the life of a single human being. As Voltaire poignantly and perceptively expressed it in his Philosophical Dictionary, “It needs twenty years to lead man from the plant state in which he is within his mother’s womb, and the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of the reason begins to appear. It has needed thirty centuries to learn a little about his structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes an instant to kill him.” No worthless, ephemeral power struggles and posturing can ever justify sacrificing the existence of the rich individual universe – the incomparably intricate and sophisticated mind and body – of any actual human being.

The Ukrainian government is forcing young men to kill their fellow Ukrainian and Russian young men, against whom they have no individual grievances. This is vile and reprehensible, and the Ukrainian government deserves to fall. It would be easy for it to fall and would not require active external intervention; the West would just need to withdraw its support and let the situation unfold as it would with only the involvement of local actors. If the West continues to prop it up with aid, this would only prolong the spree of destruction engaged in by people who should never have had a chance at high office in any civilized society, who should have been marginalized much like the Ku Klux Klan and various neo-Nazi parties are treated in the United States today. No government that uses its own people as cannon fodder against their will deserves to exist; no country whose “territorial integrity” must be maintained by a conscript army deserves for its territory to remain intact.

As to the young Ukrainian men about to suffer under the yoke of military conscription, my advice to them can be found in my poem “The Draft Dodger”, written in 2004 but still just as relevant ten years later. As one who proudly escaped Alexander Lukashenko’s Belrusian military conscription myself (I have subsequently become a US citizen – so I am thankfully safe from that particular tyranny), I wish these innocent young men all the best in finding peaceful, prosperous lives outside the heinous havoc which they did not create.

The Draft Dodger (2004)
G. Stolyarov II

I have been sentenced to a war.
And my offense? Naught but my age.
I’ll suffer pestilence and gore,
And die upon a foreign stage.
The verdict has been passed by those
Who wish to equal me to rags,
Plug sand into a breathing nose,
Borrow my life, return dog-tags.

They tell me, “Freedom is not free,”
And thus they seek mine to deprive.
But no! I’ll courage have to flee,
To choose to prosper and survive!
The right that mine was from the womb,
That I had bought with Reason’s gold,
I shall not lay before a tomb,
But will Self’s Shrine from robbers hold.

I claim no more than what is mine;
To rise each morning when I will,
To build, compose, create, refine,
And heed no Congressman’s dread bill,
Whose parasitic voting bloc
My soul as spoils of war would claim,
No noble war of awe and shock,
But rabble-rousers’ power game.

When nations seek me for their slave,
Their cause, their plight shall pass in vain.
Let no man give but what he gave,
Of his own will, for his own gain.
Freedom can’t stand on sacrifice;
With blood and bones I shan’t it craft.
I shall not offer prey to vice,
And, proudly, I shall dodge this draft!

Is Serfdom an Executive Order Away? – Article by Sheldon Richman

Is Serfdom an Executive Order Away? – Article by Sheldon Richman

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Sheldon Richman
July 7, 2012
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Sometimes a step back helps to provide perspective on a matter. President Obama provided such a step with his March 16 Executive Order, National Defense Resources Preparedness. In it we see in detail how completely the government may control our lives—euphemistically called the “industrial and technological base”—if the president were to declare a national emergency. It is instructive, if tedious, reading.

President Obama claims this authority under the Constitution and, vaguely, “the laws of the United States,” but he specifically names the Defense Production Act of 1950. As Freeman columnist and Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs observed, “Under this statute, the president has lawful authority to control virtually the whole of the U.S. economy whenever he chooses to do so and states that the national defense requires such a government takeover.”

We shouldn’t assume this is merely an academic exercise or that a third world war would need to break out. In the last decade, under circumstances representing no “existential threat” to our society, the executive branch has exercised extraordinary powers.

Reading the Executive Order, I was reminded of a quotation of Leonard Read’s: “[A]nyone who even presumes an interest in economic affairs cannot let the subject of war, or the moral breakdown which underlies it, go untouched. To do so would be as absurd—indeed, as dishonest—as a cleric to avoid the Commandment ‘Thou shalt not steal’ simply because his parishioners had legalized and were practicing theft.”

The Executive Order begins by authorizing executive-branch officers to “assess on an ongoing basis the capability of the domestic industrial and technological base to satisfy requirements in peacetime [!] and times of national emergency, specifically evaluating the availability of the most critical resource and production sources, including subcontractors and suppliers, materials, skilled labor, and professional and technical personnel.”

But these officials are to do more than assess. They are to be prepared to “ensure the availability of adequate resources and production capability,” to “improve the efficiency and responsiveness of the domestic industrial base to support national defense requirements,” and to “foster cooperation between the defense and commercial sectors. . . .”

Further, the President’s order notes his authority to “require acceptance and priority performance of contracts or orders (other than contracts of employment) to promote the national defense over performance of any other contracts or orders, and to allocate materials, services, and facilities as deemed necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense” (emphasis added).

That is, the executive branch is first in line for whatever it wants (except civilian labor—perhaps).

Under the section titled “EXPANSION OF PRODUCTIVE CAPACITY AND SUPPLY,” the heads of agencies engaged in procurement are authorized to “guarantee loans by private institutions,” “make loans,” and “make provision for purchases of, or commitments to purchase, an industrial resource or a critical technology item for Government use or resale, and to make provision for the development of production capabilities, and for the increased use of emerging technologies in security program applications, and to enable rapid transition of emerging technologies.”

Think of the potential for corporatist rent-seeking.

In the section on personnel we learn that the secretary of labor shall “collect and maintain data necessary to make a continuing appraisal of the Nation’s workforce needs for purposes of national defense and upon request by the Director of Selective Service, and in coordination with the Secretary of Defense, assist the Director of Selective Service in development of policies regulating the induction and deferment of persons for duty in the armed services.”

So along with the commandeering of private resources, there will be a draft, the commandeering of military (and other?) labor—that is, slavery by another name.

Advocates of the freedom philosophy have a dual concern: that the executive has virtually unchecked authority to declare an emergency and that in an emergency the private economy would be commandeered by government officers. The Executive Order is a breathtaking reminder that, as Higgs put it, “private control of economic life in the United States, to the extent that it survives, exists solely at the president’s pleasure and sufferance.”

Sheldon Richman is the editor of The Freeman and TheFreemanOnline.org, and a contributor to The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. He is the author of Separating School and State: How to Liberate America’s Families.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.