Dear Government, I Think I’ll Pass on the Draft

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war, draft, civil war
Maryland Army NG in Baltimore. Photo: Staff Sgt. Ron Lee.

To all the officials in the  United States government,

You should be ashamed of championing the drafting of women into the Selective Service System. No, this is not a letter saying that men are superior to women; this is an open letter showing the cowardice and insanity within the ranks of our government.

It should be obvious that if you need to force men, and now women, into the military to win a war, the support for that war or crusade is miniscule.

On June 17, 1775, the Continental Congress formed the Continental Army. Congress envisioned having a sort of conscription-based system, however, attempts at enforcing such a policy failed heavily in the past. What ended up happening, instead, was that most of the Continental Army compromised of militias which volunteered, or had been hired to fight. Not only did the Army continuously combat lack of supplies, but it also continuously had to battle with ill-disciplined soldiers, and various other negatives which scaled the probabilities of the Revolutionary War towards a British victory. When taking these probabilities into account, it was quite a miracle that George Washington defeated the British Empire.

If Washington managed to defeat a whole empire, with a large amount of supplies, men, connections, supply roots, and other various other essentials for any military, it is shameful that the US government today wants to implement conscription, or a contingency plan for conscription, in order to fight its wars or battles.

Not only is the US Army one of the largest armies on the planet, it can be regarded as one of the most advanced armies as well. However, it is also apparent that recent campaigns in Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan show the failures of this institution. Why do such failures occur when the war is being waged against “terrorists”? In simple truth, the US Army is no longer an army composing of generals, soldiers, and other military units defending the liberties and freedom of US citizens, but it now fights wars without the intention to protect the liberties and freedom of US citizens.

However, not only is it shameful that the US government is even considering the draft , but it shows that the US government is a danger to world peace. This is because it puts war before negotiation, in nearly all situations now. It uses  the “iron fist” in situations it wishes to dominate. If war is the predominate answer to situations, then not only does it show peace is a forgotten option, but peace is intentionally ignored by the psychopaths who hold the levers of power. It is essential for this reason, that you psychopaths who have these powers, should have these powers taken away from you. In fact, these powers should not exist in the first place.

The government has also failed to look at more cost efficient forms of fighting tyranny and power-crazed dictators around the world. If the United States truly wanted to fight against these tyrannies, then it would support the use of free trade and open markets. These not only diffuse tense and potentially hostile relationships, but they also encourage the building of trust and strength of not just one nation, but all the nations involved.

Capitalism is the only mechanism to fight off the tyranny and insanity that plagues the Earth today. But the US government has poisoned the essential principles  of capitalism, which arguably existed at some point during America’s earlier years. Not only had capitalism limited and reduced the use of slavery over time, but it had also managed to lift many people out of poverty. In fact, when looking at the movement of unemployment, wages, and other key poverty drivers or reducers, the more capitalist society which existed throughout the 19th century, lifted a rough estimate of 5.7 million people out of poverty, despite the fact that occurrences like the Civil War and the earlier central banking periods showed that the US did not have a completely capitalist system. Arguably, if it did, many millions more would have prospered.

With the ill intentions of the government, it had allowed for the destruction of capitalism, by subsidizing, over-regulating, manipulating interest rates, and manipulating money during the 20th and 21st centuries. This is only a brief list of how the government had destroyed capitalism. But not only did it destroy capitalism, but  by choosing war over peace, it had fostered the growth of violence in the last two centuries which we are still plagued by today.

Today, America faces a crisis with so called “gun violence”, however, the US also faces violence with all types of weapons and other methods of homicides. The US leads in all other causes of homicides within OCED nations, and is also ranked as the 4th highest in knife/sharp object related homicides. This shows that even with the government’s so called intention to promote peace by “regulating” the sale of firearms, it has failed to understand that its choices of wars had fostered the growth of such violence.

This list can go on for at least another million pages on how the  government is an instigator of war and violence, and hence now I come to my reasoning of why the draft, otherwise known as the Selective Service System should not only not be expanded to include women, but should also be abolished completely.

If one truly believes in the freedom, peace, and prosperity of other individuals, society, as well as other species, then one must support the tools of peace and prosperity.

This is why I officially announce now that I will not be signing up to the Selective Service System. From this point on, I will officially use the tools of peace and prosperity to promote the well-being of myself as well as others.

These tools are, among other things, education of what real capitalism is, the need for natural rights and natural laws, and that individuals – not institutions (as the US government had demonstrated) – are much more efficient and beneficial to the promotion of a humane and prosperous society. I say ‘no’ to war, and ‘no’ to the draft, or, at least, more accurately, the contingency of drafting my fellow men and women which stand beside me, and are the key towards the advancement of human civilization as a whole.

I leave the American government with this final quote by Tom Woods  in his lecture this year on war at Mises University 2016:

“You know, the human race extends a lot of sympathy to people who have been the victims of misfortune, whether famine, or shipwreck, or railway accidents, etc. However, compare the feeling of which the community hears the loss of a few human lives by these accidents with which of the news death or mutilation of thousands of men, equally precious on the field of battle is received, how different is the valuation, how different in universal sympathy, war seems to reverse our best and boasted civilization, to carry back human society to the dark ages of barbarism, to cheapen the public appreciation of human life almost to the standard of brute beasts, and this demoralization of sentiment is not confined to the two or three nations engaged in war, it extends to the most distant and neutral nations, and they read thousands slain, or mangled in a single battle, but with a little more human sensibility than they would read the loss of so many pawns on a move of a chest board, with what deep sympathy, the American nation, even to the very slaves heard of the suffering in Ireland of the potato famine, what shiploads of corn and provisions they sent over to relieve that suffering. But how little of that benevolence sympathy, and of that generous aid would they have given to the same amount of suffering inflicted by war, upon a people of a foreign country.

This is one of the very worst works of war. It is not only the demoralization, and almost the transformation of human nature. We can generally ascertain, how many lives we have lost in war, the tax gatherer lets us know how much money it costs, but no registry kept on earth, can tell us how much is lost to the world, by this insensibility to human suffering, of which a war produces in the whole family circle of nations.”

* Baland Rabayah is a student of praxeology and contributor at the Being Libertarian Facebook page.

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Baland Rabayah

Baland Rabayah is a student of accounting and finance at Bangor University and is also pursuing a Graduate Diploma in Economics at the University of London. Baland holds a Diploma in Accounting and Finance from the Bahrain Institute of Banking and Finance. He plans to pursue to continue his studies by doing a master's in economic history and a PhD in Economics. Baland follows a mixture of Chicagoan and Austrian principles in economics, with his influences being Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, George Selgin, Lawrence H. White, Peter G. Klein, Ronald Coase, and Milton Friedman. He is currently part of the Being Libertarian Merchandise Project’s management, and runs his own investments. Baland is also the former CEO of MoreTech Bahrain, a start-up company which attempted to launch Bahrain's and the Middle East's first flagship smartphone. He is a racing enthusiast, and regularly races professionally in Bahrain's SWS races.