How Could the Draft Not Be Slavery?

You conveniently ignored the word “property” in the first definition.

Hayek at The Constitution of Liberty gives this expample, the soldier is not free even though he has food, shelter, etc. On the other hand a poor who has nothing to eat nor shelter it is free.

> Namely: They implicitly regard slavery not as
> mere involuntary servitude, but as low-status
> involuntary servitude.

Yes, and this is a bit more obvious if you think about it historically. In most societies military service was a duty of citizenship and is often limited to classes that owned property and/or exercised some form of political franchise. For instance, consider the “equals” of classical Sparta, the exclusion of the capita censii from the Roman legions (until 107 BC), and the land-owning knights of medieval Europe. There was often a practical purpose to such property qualifications in that only high status men could afford to supply their own arms at times when states were too weak to provide arms. (And indeed, centralized state provision of arms often results in a transition from aristocracy to monarchy, as in 1st c BC Rome). In this historical sense, being eligible for conscription was the opposite of slavery in terms of social status.

You conveniently ignored the word “property” in the first definition.

And what is property? If something is my property, I own it, and that means I am free to determine how it is used and disposed of.

A state in command of conscripts can order them to and fro, force them to do anything it wishes, even unto their certain deaths. It can release them from their bond, or hold them to it indefinitely.

In what way then are they not the state’s property?

Nice job channelling your inner Robin Hanson. Like Robin says people have a very strong innate bias for government over firms, not for profit over for profit, etc. Conscription vs. slavery fits perfectly into this framework.

Conscription is slavery in exactly the same way that taxation is theft: that is, it isn’t really, except in the most superficial form of analysis. And just as your precious bank account is not really yours in some cosmic, absolute, and unqualified way, neither is your body or self, it turns out. The government gets to take a slice of both. Why? Because it’s the government.

The way people around here and Hanson’s blog use the idea of status is fairly obtuse. Instead of saying “people have a very strong innate bias for government over firms”, maybe you should enquire as to why that is.

If you are an anarchist, then OK, you can complain about government all you want. If not, then you really can’t whine when it comes around to collect the bill.

Namely: They implicitly regard slavery not as mere involuntary servitude, but as low-status involuntary servitude

I think its much more likely that people hate slavery because it is malicious and exploitative. Given especially that people are mostly opposed to slavery as they encounter it in school and in the media – a system of agricultural production that where “management” takes pleasure in working captive workers to death. The problems with slavery, in this view, are not only legal but also moral and economic.

Seen this way military conscription is very different from “slavery”.

In the pre-Civil War South it was illegal for a slaveowner to kill a slave without cause, such as self-defense. The right to kill is NOT a component of slavery.

On the other hand, whether or not the worker is paid makes a difference that I think Bryan is ignoring. I seriously doubt that the draft would have survived a constitutional challenge if conscripts were not paid.

Boy this whole thesis is a stretch..Firstly, all conscripts still have civil rights, slaves did not. Conscripts were paid, slaves were not. Conscripts could own property, especially real property,and wait for it, conscripts could VOTE, the most effective way to change one’s government if the majority decides to. But to take the author’s point to the extreme, NONE of us are free; freedom is a myth as the needs of the many ALWAYS outweigh the needs of the few. Liberty is never “free.”

Yancey Ward:

If the ‘slaves’ could neither be bought nor sold, then they would just be serfs. The institution would still be bad, but it would also be different in important ways.

As you continue to modify the institution to make it more like the draft – involuntary servitude for a limited time on an egalitarian basis to a democratically decided end – then it becomes much less bad and also much less slavery-like.

blink:

Are you serious? Do you honestly see no difference between a child working on a factory and going to a government school?

I’m amazed at the defenses and semantic arguments being made to refute conscription as a form of slavery.

In either case, man’s freedom, his liberty, is denied. Whether it be at the behest of an individual or a collective does not alter its morality.

Even in the U.S., as a soldier you are the property of the government. What difference does drawing pay and being allowed to own property make when your owner can consign you to death?

Conscription in a democracy is especially perverse. If a cause is truly embraced by “the people”, then there should be no problem filling the ranks with volunteers. If you can find no volunteers, then I guess the people don’t really will it, do they?

Chris K.:

You’ve made a wonderful case that conscription is bad. You haven’t made one that conscription is slavery. Not all bad things, even bad things that involve denying some measure of liberty, are slavery.

This is the same sort of lame rhetorical trope that makes words like “fascism” meaningless, because they end up meaning “something the speaker thinks is bad”.

The same is true of a criminal sentenced to a prison term “at hard labor,” but for some reason imprisonment at hard labor has not been treated as falling afoul of the Thirteenth Amendment.

The Thirteenth Amendment specifically states it does not apply to people who have been convicted and sentenced to hard labor in a fair trial. I don’t believe it has any such loopholes for conscription, however.

I agree that arguing “X is slavery” is a semantic argument, and that pushing this argument too far will just lead to people redefining words to exclude or include what they’re arguing about. But in practice saying that the Draft is slavery, or at least that it is very similar to slavery, can shock people who have previously accepted it complacently out of their complacency.

The libertarian argument Bryan’s using doesn’t really say “the draft is identical to plantation chattel slavery in the Antebellum South,” what it says is “The Draft is similar to that institution in several important ways, and has many of the same characteristics that we all agree are what made slavery bad.”

[I think if there was ever a loaded question that this would certainly be next to it as an example in a phrase dictionary.]

As an person raised and educated in the US — slavery for the general American public equates to the slavery that happened in the South, that picture of slavery comes first, all other historical or current situations comes after.
That particular picture of slavery is not pretty and rather a dark time in US history.

There are various reasons for people to not agree that the draft is similar that have been brought up by others.

The summary of differences seems to be: paid/non-paid, can be beaten to death/can be sent to fight-defend to the death, owner’s property/govt’s property, no rights what so ever/limited rights as an active enlistee..etc etc

So if that’s the case, then what about those working in sweatshops? Or those who were interned in the Japanese/Japanese-American internment/concentration camps during WWII?

The aforementioned people have/had limited rights and were subjected to poor treatment/environment, which they did not deserve. (Unlike prisoners in jails — as they have been deemed by the judicial system that their limited rights and confinement is justified.)

I don’t think its that simple…a list of similarities and differences between slavery and conscription — then you can just do a simple venn-diagram and be done with this question.

While there are similarities and differences between conscription and slavery and obviously different viewpoints due to different value systems — what remains true is the connotation attached to conscription and slavery evokes different emotions and generally the response is: positive for conscription and negative for slavery.

Perhaps if you replaced “conscription” with “draft” the emotions evoked would then be different. As “draft” generally has a more negative connotation than “conscription”.

The 13th amendment conveniently bypasses many of these trivial objections by prohibiting ‘involuntary servitude.’ Denying that conscription is involuntary servitude is pretty hard.

Andy: conscription is pretty permanent if you’re killed in the process. Happens to a lot of conscripts, in fact. Also, if some form of slavery were temporary (as some historically were), would it stop being slavery?

What if you could get a college deferment for slavery? What if you couldn’t get a college deferment for conscription? Speaking of irrelevant features.

Certainly there is nothing logically preventing babies from being conscripted. It’s simply a not very effective policy. If babies were able to form an effective fighting force, they’d be conscripted as well. Also, this reminds me of the Heavy in Team Fortress 2 who says “WHAT SICK MAN SENDS BABIES TO FIGHT ME?”

You may certainly conscientiously object to being a slave. Governments and other slaveowners may sanction or ignore that objection at their leisure, however.

If slaves were eligible for imprisonment, would that make them slaves any less? If a slaveowner wanted to put his slave in a prison cell, couldn’t he do that?

None of your objections refute the idea that conscription is a kind of slavery.

A conscript is the property of the state in every meaningful sense of the term. Stolen property, to be sure. And if a slave could not be legally bought or sold, would he not still be a slave?

Sorry guys – like Professor Caplan mentioned, what you’re doing is called ‘doublethink.’

I have been conscripted to jury duty next month. Is that slavery as well?

Brian with an i,

There may not be anything that logically prevents babies from being conscripted, but that notion should be rightly regarded as ridiculous.

Secondly, the point of bringing up deferments, objectors, cohorts and imprisonment is to demonstrate the material differences between conscription and slavery – specifically that there are “outs” available to those subject to conscription that are not available to slaves.

Finally, as has been pointed out many times, “involuntary servitude” is not synonymous with slavery though obviously involuntary servitude is a required component of both slavery and conscription. If you want to say that both slavery and conscription are “involuntary servitude” then that accurate IMO, but it is a mistake to extrapolate from there to assert that because both are involuntary servitude they are therefore synonymous. Conscription and slavery are, in fact, two different things that should not be conflated.

And this is leaving aside practicalities – the ability to institute conscription is necessary for the survival of the nation state – slavery is not.

I get the feeling that far too many of us don’t want to give up the possibility of conscripting people to some good, future cause.

Matt Skene makes the point most forcibly with the Mill quote.

Next post on “How Could Taxation Not Be Slavery?” please.

Compulsory activity such as Jury Duty or the Draft does inhibit the liberty of the citizens, allegedly for the common good. Certainly it is a form of servitude. I don’t think status has anything to do with it. It is simply the price we pay for the institutions of our Country.

If we want to separate our military then we have a right to do that. One argument is that draftees are simply cannon fodder so politicians can play war games. However, the correctness of this particular servitude is for the society to discuss and not if it is servitude.

A more useful question is why men are obliged to register for the draft and not women. That, my firend, is the real injustice.

Society does not discuss things. Society does not decide things. Individuals do; politicians do — for the rest of us.

Because 51% of 20-40% of society selects some politician (usually based on party label or some extraneous issue), does not give them the right to send the unwilling to their deaths at their whim. And even if a majority agrees to send some young male minority to its death, that does not make it right.

Whether or not this power to kill-on-demand is “slavery” seems to depend, as others have said, on what you take the word to mean.

Frankly, the thing that impresses me about this whole discussion is that it’s coming from Dr. Caplan. Wouldn’t he normally be calculating utiles here?

You can be a slave, even if you are paid, and even if you have a limited set of rights. Historically, slaves have routinely been paid, and have had rights. In ancient Rome, for example, slaves occasionally purchased their own freedom (i.e., bought themselves). Low status is not slavery. Again, in ancient Rome many slaves were educated Greeks, and had far higher status (and lived better) than the poor of Rome – but they were slaves. And taxation is not slavery; it is simply a cost of doing business – but we are not forced to do business or earn an income.

What defines slavery is the inability to refuse to work: involuntary servitude (whether in law or in fact).

The purpose of the draft is to recruit an army at less than its market cost. The market cost would be where the price offered was sufficient to raise the army required. The price required will depend on the justice of the cause, the degree of threat to country/family/way of life, the danger involved, etc. The price offered will depend on the value of winning, to those who want to win (for reasons of national pride, or simply because they don’t want their property seized by invaders). If society as a whole is not willing to put up enough cash to recruit the army, then the value of winning is not worth the cost – either the potential gains/losses are low, or the cost of winning (in blood and treasure) too high. If a draft is necessary, quite simply, the war should not be fought. This is basic economics.

The draft, therefore, causes a project (the war) to go forward when it should not, because its cost exceeds its benefits. And it transfers that excess cost to a few – the soldiers – by force, through a vote of the many (who will capture the benefits). Democracy is no excuse for tyranny. The draft is not alone unwise, it is morally indefensible.

It also meets any commonsense definition of “slavery.” In fact, I distinctly recall when the US went to war in Iraq the first time, we heard talk of “Saddam’s slave armies.” That talk was accurate. To pretend that our own slave armies of years past were anything but, is dishonest.

Finally, I cannot understand why military people tend to be so sympathetic to the draft. If others can be forced to serve, why should volunteers be treated well? Why properly paid? Why given career opportunities? Why given proper equipment or armor, when they can be so readily replaced with the victims of involuntary servitude? Not only is the draft an attack on those who are drafted, it undermines those who serve voluntarily.

It’s certainly not worthy of us.

Boy this whole thesis is a stretch..Firstly, all conscripts still have civil rights, slaves did not. Conscripts were paid, slaves were not.

Conscripts are denied the freedom of movement. The freedom of movement is a civil right. Therefore, conscripts are denied some civil rights.

If slaves did not get paid, then they could not have saved their wages to buy their freedom. Some slaves saved their wages and about their freedom. Therefore, some slaves did get paid.

Thomas Boyle @ 6:24,

Yes, the most powerful nation in history currently practices neither. How do you think we got here? There was conscription during all of America’s major wars until relatively recently. Conscription began during the revolutionary war before this country was even formed. The idea that able-bodied men should be organized into militias was written into the founding documents of this country and was required by law for many years in most states.

Conscription is not slavery because our rights and freedoms are socially constructed. They’re wise constructs, but we have an obligation, at some point to our mates, who protect and recognize our rights to extend the same courtesy to them.

A conscript is a member of a compact that is being called upon to live up to the terms of the deal. A slave is not a member of the social contract, but a subjugated outsider.

Andy,

I was born in a country that is today an independent nation state, has been one for longer than most modern European states, successfully fought a war of independence against a world power to become a nation state, and has never practiced slavery, neither to perform agricultural labor nor to perform military service.

It has also operated a volunteer army since independence, and that army has been involved in active conflicts in one place or another, almost my entire life (I’m middle aged).

Just because the US took a while to catch on, doesn’t mean it can’t be done, or is necessary to survival.

But then again, they said you couldn’t profitably grow cotton without plantation slaves. They were wrong about that, too.

@MikeDC

Contracts? Where? I don’t recall signing away my rights. I don’t recall chattel slaves in the 18th and 19th centuries doing so either. What in the world are you talking about?

Slavery is a special kind of involuntary servitude, in which the slaves have no rights at all. Simply finding some rights lacking in conscripts is not enough to make them slaves. Slavery is also usually either a permanent condition, or one that the slaves can only get out of with great effort, and not as a matter of right. Slaves who historically purchased their freedom did so only with the consent of their owners. Killing your slaves was not illegal in the antebellum South; certainly not in all slave states, and hardly at all, in practice, with all-male all-white jurors, most of whom either owned slaves or wanted to. Nor is it true that US conscript soldiers could be ordered to do anything; they had not only the legal right to refuse unjust orders, they had the legal duty to do so.

Others have already pointed out that many historical slaves were high-status, such as the Greek slaves in ancient Rome. It’s also false that slaves have never been soldiers; the Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire were slave soldiers who ended up taking over the Empire via coup d’etat. It was the Ottoman practice of capturing Serbian boys (slavs) and forcing them to become their soldiers that gave rise to the very word “slave” in the English language. Before that, they were called “captives.”

Finally, to address a completely unrelated point someone tried to use in an analogy, the atomic bombing of Japan was not intended to kill civilians. It was targeted at Japanese military headquarters (Hiroshima), war production that had been dispersed amongst civilian neighborhoods (Hiroshima & Nagasaki), and other resources (e.g., Nagasaki was a main port for the Japanese Navy). A great many Japanese civilians were killed in the process, of course, but only as collateral damage, and a great deal less than would’ve died of famine if the war had continued much longer. Meanwhile, the Japanese were killing hundreds of thousands of civilians per month in the parts of Asia remaining under their control (mainly China).

@Scott Summer:

How do you aggregate welfare? I don’t mean how you measure it to come up with a number. That is obviously impossible. I mean, what is the aggregation of welfare in your book?