When the military is only voluntary you get a military with specific ideas about foreign policy and how you see the enemy, whoever they are.
If you introduce the draft you have a more heterogenous military.
Every American presidential election has a side show about the candidates military record and a meaningful number appear to have dodged their service - current president included.
I think we should just accept that the hypocritical institution is dead after Vietnam and stop trying to use it for power fantasies over society or advocacy - its only function is to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory as it makes reasonable ideas grossly unreasonable.
I talk about it in episode 138 in my podcast: http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/rants-raves-monologues-volume....
General McChrystal wrote about it in Time Magazine: Every American Should Serve For One Year https://time.com/4824366/year-national-service-americorps-pe...
Infastructure work's limitations are based on funding and skilled labor - not a mass of gruntwork.
I see the margin the parent commentator is trying to make, but feel it misses people who join the military to obtain gainful employment, get education, or numerous other reasons.
The people involved are certainly imperfect (and some are more imperfect than others), but we're always just a few years away from a course correction if the electorate sees fit.
The military gets no say - wars are declared, or not, by elected politicians. What you say is only true in countries where the military runs the government.
You're right. But I wonder what kind of "politics" they would adopt when needed if they didn't feel the rest of the army has one way of thinking.
If the influential always go to the coast guard or whatever, war is less meaningful for those in power.
Exactly. That’s why I despise ppl whose connections got them out of the draft. For everyone of those punks, another one of McNamara's morons had to be drafted.
Mohamad Ali, on the other hand, he had the courage to go to jail.
Burn your draft card, escape to Canada, or simply refuse. But those who use university exemptions or bone spurs can go to hell.
The only difference between your methods is consequences for the person undertaking it, not those that have to replace them. You appear to want people avoiding being drafted to suffer. Pretty odd if you otherwise sympathise with them.
Perhaps you won’t go so far as to call conscription kidnapping, but you seem to sympathize at least a bit with people having scruples over being shipped off involuntarily to wage aggressive war. Now, you may admit that some are principled objectors, and others may simply believe that dirty work is beneath them. The more important question is whether the draft is just. If so, then any refusal by the able is wrong, and if not, we may not condemn resistance in any peaceful form.
The reality of deferments for the politically connected and most especially those for the children and grandchildren of politicians who vote for war makes utter propaganda the notion that disinterested philosopher-kings or a technocratic elite are merely acting to promote the greatest good for the greatest number.
Has the US suffered fewer war-fatalities in the era(s) where it had a draft (including the Civil War, WW1, WW2, & Vietnam), or in the era where it has an all-volunteer force (since 1973)?
The quality of weapons and armor (and training and medical care!) also isn't independent of the draft/volunteer dimension. A all-volunteer-force may find it necessary to invest more in each, because fewer people will volunteer to be part of a military force that tries to win with raw & disposable strength-of-numbers.
So maybe the all-volunteer-force "raises the cost of war" even more, considering financial costs & second-order effects, and thus best deters war? It's possible, which is why such claims need to be evaluated against history, not just asserted.
Assuming you even recruit the officer class from draftees, you're going to recruit the ones that think like you, or at least that you respect, which in practice means they know someone you respect, were taught somewhere you respect, in short they're probably from the same circles as you.
Plus if you don't want to join the military, are you really going to give a toss about contributing?
Now, those programs are complicated, involve a lot of overhead, often underutilized, and create unintentional disincentives to work when the "marginal tax rate" (in taxes or lost benefits) sometimes goes over 100%. Offering a simple & big-enough UBI instead can fix all that.
(A UBI can also replace minimum-wage laws and most if not all unemployment insurance. And perhaps, many workplace regulations, because a citizenry where everyone can say "this job sucks, I'm outta here" can be a better check on abuses than the current system of compliance-surveillance, regulatory-fines, and court-cases.)
UBI is transparently an attempt to redistribute tax income to private companies such that no opportunity for profit stays with or is limited by government. UBI would mean no more Medicare stipulations, no more existing conditions protections. Just your ten grand a year or whatever and a bunch of private companies who have what you need, at whatever price they set.
Indexing the UBI amount to some basket-of-subsistence-consumption could likely address this concern.
(The handling of existing-conditions is a regulatory issue orthogonal from UBI. I'd prefer a UBI replace all "income-supporting" programs – including things like food stamps and housing vouchers – and also obviate many rules premised on the idea that the threat-of-privation captures people in bad jobs/relationships. But "structure-of-market" or "acceptable offerings" or "required minimum standards" regulations are a separate matter.)
That is exactly what they want. The modern world of cost-benefit analysis and economic modeling has been unkind to the whimsical. They want emotions, narrative, and oratory--not reason and data--to guide policy.
Statistics and measurement are insidious like that. Sometimes you're just not measuring the right things, or the way you are measuring just tells you exactly what you think it should.
What does GDP mean to a worker making only enough to afford to pay medical bills or the rent?
What does * per capita do to assuage the suffering of the mother of 3 working 3 dead end jobs and living out of her car?
What good is the S&P500 closing up 6 points when most can barely afford to put more than what there company matches into the market?
What does anything the Dow does mean to anyone who's retirement on Social Security barely covers what they need to merely remain alive?
Economic modeling seems like it has done one and only one thing well.
Create work for economists to do.
What you're talking about was one of his biggest regrets.
> "It never occurred to me at the time that I was helping to develop machinery that would make possible a government that I would come to criticize severely as too large, too intrusive, too destructive of freedom. Yet, that is precisely what I was doing. [My wife] Rose has repeatedly chided me over the years about the role that I played in making possible the current overgrown government we both criticize so strongly."
[1] : https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/nov/16/post65...
* end the draft, replace with well-paid all-volunteer military
* let international exchange rates vary
* evaluate regulations based on the cost-to-save-a-life
Does Applebaum want to bring back the draft? Put exchange rates back under direct political control (as is attempted in places like Venezuela & Argentina)? Have a purely "feel-it-in-our-guts" approach to regulation, without regard to whether the same $X million dollars in imposed costs could save 1 life in one case, or 100 lives somewhere else?