In the past five weeks, I have written two draft articles for the Hoover Institution’s online publications. Define your idea. beginning He argued against conscription. Number 2 He argued against universal conscription.
In response to Define your idea Some commenters on this site have argued that one benefit of the draft is that it gets people who benefit from defense “in the game.”
In response to my first article, one commenter wrote:
Our freedoms don’t come for free, and David Henderson wants those who are willing to risk their lives for our freedoms to do so for those who want theirs for free.
In response to my second article, one commenter wrote:
When American men are not serving their country, they have no responsibilities and, as a result, feel no obligation to fight and defend.
But in reality, if the goal is to hold defense recipients accountable, an all-volunteer military will do a better job than conscription.
why?
The reason is that conscription places a disproportionate burden on those who are conscripted, whereas an all-volunteer military spreads the burden across defense benefits, whether they serve in the military or not.
In the late 1970s, there was a real movement, spearheaded by Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA), to reinstate conscription. I got copies of all of the bills to do so. There were many of them, but all of them explicitly provided for large cuts in pay, often for the first term. Why pay a salary when you can threaten people with prison time if they don’t comply? In other words, it placed a disproportionate burden on those who were drafted.
In contrast, consider an all-volunteer military. The military struggled to recruit talent in the late 1970s because of a booming economy combined with high inflation. It was a double whammy: the booming economy gave potential volunteers a good alternative to military service, but the failure of salaries to increase in line with the Consumer Price Index made military service even less attractive.
President Jimmy Carter realized the situation relatively late in his four years in the White House and worked with Congress to raise the salaries during his first term, and then Ronald Reagan came into office and raised the salaries again, and that’s how we got out of the hiring slump of the late 1970s.
Look what happened there: Because our military was all-volunteer, the burden of defense couldn’t be placed on the shoulders of young service members. Instead, all taxpayers shared the burden.
Something similar happened during the second war against Iraq in the mid-2000s. I have written Based on an academic paper co-authored in September 2015 with then-Marine Corps Major Chad W. Seagren,
Henderson and Seagren point out that as the number of soldiers in Vietnam has increased since 1964, real military personnel expenditures per soldier have remained almost constant. In contrast, as the U.S. government has entered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, real military personnel expenditures per soldier have increased substantially. From 1996 to 2001, real expenditures averaged $73,887 per soldier, but from 2004 to 2010, real expenditures rose to an average of $103,772, a 40 percent increase. The reason is that the government had to raise pay to meet its manpower targets. Henderson and Seagren point out that this high cost per soldier has resulted in an extra $45 billion in U.S. government spending per year. To be sure, the high cost is primarily funded by budget deficits, not current taxes. But current budget deficits lead to future tax increases unless the government later defaults on its debt or cuts spending.And while the future tax system may be broadly similar to the current system in that it taxes higher earners at a higher rate, the wealthy and powerful are likely to receive less. Intention We need to pay more for the war.
Ultimately, if we want everyone who benefits from defense to be involved, rather than just focused on a small group, then we should oppose conscription and support an all-volunteer military.
postscript:
While researching this article, I came across an Econlib article by Chad Seagren:Service in a Free Society”, May 2, 2011. I prepared and edited this paper when I was an articles editor for Econlib and forgot about it. This paper speaks to many of the problems in the draft and puts it very well.
