Drafting Sowellby
Dmitry Chernikov For Thomas Sowell, the draft is a way to enforce an obvious duty of every citizen to protect his country, the motherland. (The only problem is that the potential draftees are not patriotic enough due to bad influence of the universities; hence they may spoil the tough purity and resolve of our armed forces.) We must all band together in an effort to safeguard our great nation, of which we are justifiably proud. Indeed, we are encircled by enemies who hate us for our values, for our daring, for our idealism. They envy us, too, for we are the vanguard of the world, leading it towards a glorious and blissful future, at the time when much of the rest of the world wants to slink back into the darkness and hopeless oppression of man by man. But not for us is "isolationism," either. Indeed, as the great man himself said, "as the greatest power on the face of the Earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom. We have an obligation to help feed the hungry. … We have an obligation to lead the fight on AIDS, on Africa. And we have an obligation to work toward a more free world. That's our obligation. That is what we have been called to do, as far as I'm concerned." At this point, we might as well sing: Rise up, o
enormous country, Let the noble
wrath They – evil; we – good. Feels good, doesn't it? I remember the feeling well, as I was fed this kind of thing in the old country from day one. The verses, too, are a translation of a Russian song written in 1941. Now several arguments are typically given for the draft. First, that it is necessary because the country would be conquered unless everyone is conscripted. Only if tens of millions-men armies can be fielded can victory be assured. In a way, we "agree" to coerce each other to ensure that nobody free rides. Well, this, of course, cannot be an argument for the draft now. Everybody knows about the "4th-generation warfare" that is standard nowadays. Vast armies are useless for fighting such wars. Plus, of course, no one is threatening to invade the United States. In addition, there are grave problems with the idea of such mutual coercion. Ultimately, if people cannot be roused on their own free will to protect themselves, they don’t deserve to live free from foreign aggression. Second, that military service, courtesy of our paternal government, will teach our young people discipline and the meaning of duty. It’s difficult to know even where to begin with this. If discipline is taught by obeying the orders of someone else, it can be just as well taught in the workplace or even, say, in a religious order. You do your job or you get fired. How is the military any better? On the contrary, it is a commonplace that military bases are dens of moral corruption, sexual license, and debt. At any rate, the true meaning of discipline is the ability to accomplish your goals, to control your passions, to set priorities, to master the techniques of your trade or art or science. The military is not an appropriate means for a young person to becoming disciplined, because orders do not come from himself but are imposed from above. And, although in the military commercials it is routinely implied that the skills gained during the years of soldiering are transferable to normal life, I think this is false advertising. (But I am open to counter-arguments.) What of "duty"? Sowell writes that the military is one of the few institutions "with a sense of purpose for which it is prepared to make sacrifices." What is he talking about? Every human being and institution has purposes. Every human action is undertaken in order to attain some end; therefore it is purposeful. And every action entails a sacrifice of the happiness that alternative actions would have yielded. In fact, that is how "profit" is defined: it is the utility gained minus the utility that you would have received if you had chosen to satisfy the next most urgent desire on your value scales. By making a choice you sacrifice all the less valued alternatives. This sacrifice is the cost of an action, the most important opportunity forgone. I suppose that for Sowell the trivial little plans of our lives pale in comparison to the grand purposes of the state. Has Sowell converted to statolatry? But perhaps he is talking about charity. The military, because it loves us "civilians" so much, selflessly seeks to serve us and in so doing makes sacrifices. If that’s what Sowell means, he is more deluded than I imagined. Is it not rather more plausible to suggest that the military is being used by the state to pursue global domination, not to protect the freedom of the American public? I’m sitting in my apartment in Kent, Ohio; exactly which of my freedoms are the soldiers in Iraq defending? This is not a rhetorical question; I really do want to know. And, needless to say, there are numerous opportunities for displays of charity and self-sacrifice in private life, if that is Sowell’s concern. To elevate government bureaucrats as somehow more virtuous than the rest of us is a most absurd myth. Yet here we have an eminent economist preaching it. Lastly, Sowell may be trying to argue that the military is incorruptible. If incorruptibility means never or rarely disobeying the law, this is false, as incidents such as the Haditha murders, the neverending collateral damage, or attempts to use the military to prosecute the drug war or in other type of law enforcement indicate. But this is a red herring anyway. If the orders are bad, what does it matter if they are obeyed to the letter? Third, that the draft is "fair" because even the children of the elites will have to humble themselves enough to serve. It will "share [the war’s] burdens more widely and equitably." Now look, conscription is government-sanctioned kidnapping and slavery. Is it OK when everyone is equally a slave? Slavery is crawling on your belly in self-contempt begging for mercy. It is despising your God-given right to your own happiness. Is that what we want to reduce our children to? And this is not private slavery, in which a slave is valued property. It is government slavery, where an individual is nothing, a dispensable cog. Economically, it is more efficient if the government competes for employees freely on the labor market rather than takes them at no cost. At least it will have an incentive not to treat the soldiers as atrociously as it would if they were public slaves. This way, too, only persons who wanted to be part of the war machine would join the military; those who did not, wouldn’t have to. Greater happiness for all would result. Sowell continues: "On the home front, life goes on today as if there were no war. Consumer goods are as abundant as ever and no real sacrifices are demanded of the civilian population, who are spectators rather than even tangential participants. None of this is healthy." Has our author forgotten his economics? That consumer goods are abundant is beside the point. The key question is whether there is economic progress, whether a path is open for future entrepreneurs to make our lives still better. That’s why goods cannot be as abundant as ever; they should be more abundant than ever. Is war making wealth grow less quickly? How can it do anything else? Only labor is productive; death, destruction, and chaos wrought by the military make everybody, except a small group of people living off the state, poorer. What are we to make of his statement that peaceful life is not "healthy"? Sowell must prefer a total war, in which everyone is a participant. (Don’t you just love the phrase "the home front"?) You are either a soldier or you work for the state producing equipment, food, and armaments for the troops. And everyone then turns into a legitimate target. There is a name for this system: war socialism. And here I was, naïvely imagining Sowell as a laissez-faire economist. And then, finally, there is this zinger: "More dangerously, TV reporters broadcasting from where shells are falling blithely say such things as ‘the shells are landing about five miles north of here.’ "Does it ever occur to them that their internationally broadcast comments will reach those who are doing the shelling, who can adjust their range accordingly and then kill more efficiently?" Three things. 1. Why is "here" necessarily a better target than five miles north of "here"? It cannot be because of that one reporter and his camera crew, who, besides, allegedly supply valuable information to the enemy, can it? 2. The people who do the shelling certainly don’t get their tactical data from CNN. If they do, they are nuts. 3. To use Sowell’s own logic, does it ever occur to him that these "internationally broadcast comments" might reach the regular folks who live on the lands near those that are being shelled, who might then, God willing, get out of the way?
August 3, 2006 Dmitry Chernikov [send him mail] is a graduate student in philosophy at Kent State University. Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com |
This
is my second piece on Sowell’s newfound