What i would say to people who think conscription is not slavery because it is high status is that conscripted soldiers did not want that status, and people who do want the status of a soldier can freely volunteer. Look, I hate leading and being responsible for large groups if people, so I would never choose to be a CEO of any organization. If someone forced me to run a company and claimed that this wasn't a form of slavery because of the high status of the position, I would strongly disagree. Conscription is slavery, full stop.
What amazes me most about the pro-conscription arguments is how weasely they are. Oooh, it's not real slavery, you get paid and can vote. Gosh thanks.
The difference between slavery and free markets is entirely in the coercion. No matter how detestable a job is, an employer can always offer more money to find someone willing to do it, even suicide bombers whose families get paid. But at some point, the value returned from having the job done is less than the pay it would take to attract a willing worker.
That's when a free market employer finds another business, and when a slave society employer resorts to kidnapping, imprisonment, and slavery. From a purely economic point of view, slavery enables and encourages inefficient industries. Justifying that with low pay is bonkers ignorant.
I spent four years in the Navy, had a great time, and learned first-hand how inefficient slave labor is. We worked our buns off for one project, got done early, and instead of congratulating us and letting us have a couple of hours off, he found scut work. We never finished early again. Coordinate lunch so someone was always in the shop? You must be joking -- we learned to wait til 15 minutes from the mess decks closing and all go at once.
Stop conflating government, society, and country. A government which can't find willing volunteers to defend against invasion is a government which deserves to be replaced.
For that matter, the US doesn't need a military, period. We are immune to coastal invasion, and the panics over Japan invading even Hawaii, let alone California, in 1941, are as overblown as the similar fears of invasion by China or Russia today. Canada invade? Go hide in your mother's skirts if you are that naive. Mexico? Those cartels wouldn't last long and they value Mexican corruption too much to stray very far. Overseas bases, offensive weapons like carriers? Offensive is indeed the word, and it's fitting that Trump changed the name back from Department of Defense, but he's too ignorant to understand that.
I believe Scott Alexander called 'A is B, where A is a non-central example of B', the 'worst argument in the world'. This seems a fairly central example of the type.
Conscription is slavery, but arguably worth it from an utilitarian perspective. It's easy to imagine someone who loves their country, and would happily fight to defend it from invasion if there's a shot to win. But if loss is guaranteed, they do not want to risk their life. Basically like the stag hunt game theory game. Conscription is how you potentially solve the coordination problem.
That said, there have been wars that aren't actually stag hunts but instead pointless wastes of lives for no gain. E.g. Vietnam, Iraq 2, arguably even WW1. So conscription should be used very carefully. But I don't think you can blame e.g. UK for using conscription in WW2
While I am not in favor of conscription (voluntary service where the government needs to pay enough to entice people to sign up is much better, morally and practically), I think that you are overlooking an important distinction between conscription and slavery, right from the definition of slavery that you used in your post. It is not just servitude. It is servitude "as the property of". I guess you could make an argument that conscripted soldiers are property, but I think that is a tall hurdle to clear. They aren't bought or sold in the commonly understood sense, they have a fair amount of freedom day to day, they are paid for their services, they can get promoted, they get leave, they can vote, etc.
They can be shot for disobeying orders, they can be restricted in their off-duty behavior for having a bad haircut, they are required to feign respect by saluting and calling officers "sir", they get no choice in where they work or what work they do, they can't quit, they don't get to negotiate pay or benefits or look for a better job.
So very free! Some slaves were given as much freedom. They were still slaves.
I don't think compulsory military service for young people is more like slavery than compulsory education.
Another issue, independent of military training, is being forced to kill others without conscientious objection. I think compulsory military service à la Switzerland seems much more efficient, but in the event of war, they should allow you to choose whether you only defend yourself or become a paramedic, or you go to fight with arms.
Delegating your security to agencies that function as insurance is pretty stupid, and I'm surprised that, despite what Nozick pointed out long ago, there are still libertarians who believe it's viable.
1. Compulsory education which allows school choice, private schools, and home schooling, is somewhat better than military compulsion.
2. If your last paragraph refers to "protection agencies", which merge insurance companies and police departments, I wrote a long screed for myself some time ago about being one of the most idiotic ideas I had heard of from so-called libertarians. Someone who approves of them called them "protection rackets" but I do not remember who.
Protection agencies mostly strike me as feudalism reborn. The idea that protection agencies and/or private courts can have different laws, and negotiate away their differences because the alternative is bloody war, makes me wonder if they have never heard of abortion, temperance unions, self-defense vs turn the other cheek, and other issues which cannot compromise. Sometimes I am told that's why the lawsets will coalesce into one standard set with only minor differences, and when I ask why even have private law in that case, I get mumbles. When I ask how that differs from a single monopoly coercive government, and how any individualist could possibly support such a concept ... *crickets*.
One protection agency proposal even went so far as to institutionalize slavery for clients whose insurance companies had dropped them for non-payment, on the grounds slave owners would treat their slaves kindly to get maximum work out of them to pay off their debt as soon as possible, and then release them back into society with a clean bill of health who will have no problems getting coverage again. I guess he has had no experience with recidivism among criminals getting out of prison.
Rothbard's discussion is full of assumptions that make no sense to individualists and anarcho-capitalists.
I haven't read a single defense of the idea that makes a lick of sense and doesn't brush off all objections as if they were too trivial to discuss.
Of course conscription is slavery. What about voluntary exchange instead. Recall the Robert Heinlein novel, Starship Troopers, in which "franchised" citizens had given military service. What about that idea>
I think that many people believe that slavery by that very definition cannot apply to would-be "government slaves". Note the part "property of a slaveholder or household".
I’m inclined to agree that, as a matter of the ordinary meaning of the terms, conscription is slavery. However, as a constitutional matter, I doubt it violates the 13th Amendment's prohibition on involuntary servitude. Article I section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the power “To raise and support Armies.” One might plausibly take that to include a power to conscript, rather than just the power to entice people to join a volunteer army. So when the 13th Amendment was ratified, without any explicit mention of what this might mean for the previously assumed ability to conscript soldiers for an army, one might well claim that the best overall interpretation is that the 13th Amendment should not be read as prohibiting conscription.
Only those you'd ever been conscripted in the U.S., would be without doubt is stating that conscription is slavery. Experience is everything. But, outside of ending all wars, is voluntary military enlistment the only way to defend a country like the U.S.? Is enlistment a form of mercenary service?
The low-status part may be more important than the involuntary part, too. The same people who won't apply the "slavery" label to conscription will instinctively apply it to demeaning, low wage service jobs.
"Wage slave" was invented by Marx or some other early socialist, I believe, in disgust at the idea that factory workers had no tools or workplace of their own, unlike artisans and crafts workers under the apprentice system.
All great comments. It seems to me that Dr. Caplan's problem with conscription is the coercion, not the status of conscription. The vast majority of government actions, perhaps not all, involve coercion. The government sponsored welfare state is actually a modified version of slavery, as I have written here: https://regovernance.substack.com/p/slavery-re-institutionalized
What i would say to people who think conscription is not slavery because it is high status is that conscripted soldiers did not want that status, and people who do want the status of a soldier can freely volunteer. Look, I hate leading and being responsible for large groups if people, so I would never choose to be a CEO of any organization. If someone forced me to run a company and claimed that this wasn't a form of slavery because of the high status of the position, I would strongly disagree. Conscription is slavery, full stop.
I speak as a draft dodger and volunteer sailor.
What amazes me most about the pro-conscription arguments is how weasely they are. Oooh, it's not real slavery, you get paid and can vote. Gosh thanks.
The difference between slavery and free markets is entirely in the coercion. No matter how detestable a job is, an employer can always offer more money to find someone willing to do it, even suicide bombers whose families get paid. But at some point, the value returned from having the job done is less than the pay it would take to attract a willing worker.
That's when a free market employer finds another business, and when a slave society employer resorts to kidnapping, imprisonment, and slavery. From a purely economic point of view, slavery enables and encourages inefficient industries. Justifying that with low pay is bonkers ignorant.
I spent four years in the Navy, had a great time, and learned first-hand how inefficient slave labor is. We worked our buns off for one project, got done early, and instead of congratulating us and letting us have a couple of hours off, he found scut work. We never finished early again. Coordinate lunch so someone was always in the shop? You must be joking -- we learned to wait til 15 minutes from the mess decks closing and all go at once.
Stop conflating government, society, and country. A government which can't find willing volunteers to defend against invasion is a government which deserves to be replaced.
For that matter, the US doesn't need a military, period. We are immune to coastal invasion, and the panics over Japan invading even Hawaii, let alone California, in 1941, are as overblown as the similar fears of invasion by China or Russia today. Canada invade? Go hide in your mother's skirts if you are that naive. Mexico? Those cartels wouldn't last long and they value Mexican corruption too much to stray very far. Overseas bases, offensive weapons like carriers? Offensive is indeed the word, and it's fitting that Trump changed the name back from Department of Defense, but he's too ignorant to understand that.
Fuck the draft.
This still happens in South Korea. In many respects, I often question whether I live in the North.
I believe Scott Alexander called 'A is B, where A is a non-central example of B', the 'worst argument in the world'. This seems a fairly central example of the type.
Conscription is slavery, but arguably worth it from an utilitarian perspective. It's easy to imagine someone who loves their country, and would happily fight to defend it from invasion if there's a shot to win. But if loss is guaranteed, they do not want to risk their life. Basically like the stag hunt game theory game. Conscription is how you potentially solve the coordination problem.
That said, there have been wars that aren't actually stag hunts but instead pointless wastes of lives for no gain. E.g. Vietnam, Iraq 2, arguably even WW1. So conscription should be used very carefully. But I don't think you can blame e.g. UK for using conscription in WW2
While I am not in favor of conscription (voluntary service where the government needs to pay enough to entice people to sign up is much better, morally and practically), I think that you are overlooking an important distinction between conscription and slavery, right from the definition of slavery that you used in your post. It is not just servitude. It is servitude "as the property of". I guess you could make an argument that conscripted soldiers are property, but I think that is a tall hurdle to clear. They aren't bought or sold in the commonly understood sense, they have a fair amount of freedom day to day, they are paid for their services, they can get promoted, they get leave, they can vote, etc.
They can be shot for disobeying orders, they can be restricted in their off-duty behavior for having a bad haircut, they are required to feign respect by saluting and calling officers "sir", they get no choice in where they work or what work they do, they can't quit, they don't get to negotiate pay or benefits or look for a better job.
So very free! Some slaves were given as much freedom. They were still slaves.
I don't think compulsory military service for young people is more like slavery than compulsory education.
Another issue, independent of military training, is being forced to kill others without conscientious objection. I think compulsory military service à la Switzerland seems much more efficient, but in the event of war, they should allow you to choose whether you only defend yourself or become a paramedic, or you go to fight with arms.
Delegating your security to agencies that function as insurance is pretty stupid, and I'm surprised that, despite what Nozick pointed out long ago, there are still libertarians who believe it's viable.
1. Compulsory education which allows school choice, private schools, and home schooling, is somewhat better than military compulsion.
2. If your last paragraph refers to "protection agencies", which merge insurance companies and police departments, I wrote a long screed for myself some time ago about being one of the most idiotic ideas I had heard of from so-called libertarians. Someone who approves of them called them "protection rackets" but I do not remember who.
Protection agencies mostly strike me as feudalism reborn. The idea that protection agencies and/or private courts can have different laws, and negotiate away their differences because the alternative is bloody war, makes me wonder if they have never heard of abortion, temperance unions, self-defense vs turn the other cheek, and other issues which cannot compromise. Sometimes I am told that's why the lawsets will coalesce into one standard set with only minor differences, and when I ask why even have private law in that case, I get mumbles. When I ask how that differs from a single monopoly coercive government, and how any individualist could possibly support such a concept ... *crickets*.
One protection agency proposal even went so far as to institutionalize slavery for clients whose insurance companies had dropped them for non-payment, on the grounds slave owners would treat their slaves kindly to get maximum work out of them to pay off their debt as soon as possible, and then release them back into society with a clean bill of health who will have no problems getting coverage again. I guess he has had no experience with recidivism among criminals getting out of prison.
Rothbard's discussion is full of assumptions that make no sense to individualists and anarcho-capitalists.
I haven't read a single defense of the idea that makes a lick of sense and doesn't brush off all objections as if they were too trivial to discuss.
I volunteered, and served as a Regular Army officer for 15 years.
My understanding is that the basis for conscription, in extremis, is the need to defend the nation.
If people are unwilling to serve in a national emergency, they should relinquish their citizenship.
Conscription's purpose is to defend the government, not the nation.
Of course conscription is slavery. What about voluntary exchange instead. Recall the Robert Heinlein novel, Starship Troopers, in which "franchised" citizens had given military service. What about that idea>
Yea I was just thinking about that. Good alternative. Would prolly require a constitutional amendment in the US tho.
Terrible alternative. You can only be a citizen if you do what the government demands?
Sorry. Government is supposed to serve the people, and not in the culinary sense.
I think that many people believe that slavery by that very definition cannot apply to would-be "government slaves". Note the part "property of a slaveholder or household".
Makes me think of gladiators in Ancient Rome. Most were involuntary. Some were high status.
I’m inclined to agree that, as a matter of the ordinary meaning of the terms, conscription is slavery. However, as a constitutional matter, I doubt it violates the 13th Amendment's prohibition on involuntary servitude. Article I section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the power “To raise and support Armies.” One might plausibly take that to include a power to conscript, rather than just the power to entice people to join a volunteer army. So when the 13th Amendment was ratified, without any explicit mention of what this might mean for the previously assumed ability to conscript soldiers for an army, one might well claim that the best overall interpretation is that the 13th Amendment should not be read as prohibiting conscription.
Thank you for your service, Mr. homeless vet.
What if we had a draft for peace instead of war. But then it wouldn't be peaceful if it was forced.
Only those you'd ever been conscripted in the U.S., would be without doubt is stating that conscription is slavery. Experience is everything. But, outside of ending all wars, is voluntary military enlistment the only way to defend a country like the U.S.? Is enlistment a form of mercenary service?
The low-status part may be more important than the involuntary part, too. The same people who won't apply the "slavery" label to conscription will instinctively apply it to demeaning, low wage service jobs.
"Wage slave" was invented by Marx or some other early socialist, I believe, in disgust at the idea that factory workers had no tools or workplace of their own, unlike artisans and crafts workers under the apprentice system.
All great comments. It seems to me that Dr. Caplan's problem with conscription is the coercion, not the status of conscription. The vast majority of government actions, perhaps not all, involve coercion. The government sponsored welfare state is actually a modified version of slavery, as I have written here: https://regovernance.substack.com/p/slavery-re-institutionalized
Do you see big differences between compulsory military service for young adults and compulsory education for children and teens?
The only difference would be the 2% to 4% chance of being KIA for the military. It is good that Nixon stopped the draft in 1973.