I have a question for you: who decides what your obligations to your fellow citizens are?

Let’s say you lived on an island with 399 other people split into two tribes. Your tribe, A numbers 50, and the other tribe, B, numbers 350.

Let’s say that tribe B announces that they intend to kil all them members of tribe A unless tribe A kills one of its female members and serves her up as a nice roast for tribe B’s next feast.

So your fellow tribesmen get together and come to a nearly unanimous decision; the 48 other tribesmen decide that your wife, whom you love very much, is going to be killed and cooked. Your wife is, understandably not enthusiastic about this. Your chief tells her that she must make this sacrifice to for the sake of the community; that she has a moral obligation to die for her tribe, that she will die anyway should tribe B attack.

So, Dave, what will you tell your wife? Will you tell her to submit meekly to the strangler’s cord? Will you risk your life defending her?

The only time I disagree with long-shot dark horse Ron Paul is when Mataconis tells me to.

Your viewpoint is called Collectivism.

The right to life supersedes the states’ interest. If one volunteers to potentially lose their life for the good of many, fine. What you are suggesting is that it is one civic duty– I call that collateral damage!

BTW–We are a Republic; not a Democracy.

E pluribus unum !!!

Do you honestly mean to say, on top of a tax system that keeps me working for the state three and a half hours every weekday (which is the amount of my day it takes to pay for the taxes taken out of my paycheck), you’d want to press me and every other young citizen into the servitude of the government for two years, when the very organization I would be joining doesn’t want me? Sounds like a plan that, all other arguments aside, is beneficial for neither the state nor the individual.

The current administration is so enamored with the free market. Let them use free market principles here. If they need more qualified soldiers, they can just raise their salaries until the recruits show up. The soldiers will then have a contract specifying how long and how often they can be deployed overseas. If the military needs more or longer deployments, they can renegotiate the contracts.

Does this sound like a mercenary force? Yes – that’s what it is. Iraq has nothing to do with defending the United States, so it should be fought by mercenaries. If the survival of the United States is at stake, the country will do what it must to survive, but for now, this is all about business. Long live the free market!

And you do not address the fundamental fact that the draft is, at it’s core, slavery.

The main reason is that many feel that the general populace should have skin in the game. Right now we esentially have a private army. There are no (significant) anti-war protests (even though the sentiment is generally anti-war) because we have a military of voluntary enlisters. If the military consisted of conscripts rather than volunteers, the actions of our government would be more in line with the people’s desires.

I would argue that an army of conscripts – even if significantly larger than our current one – could NOT “accomplish nearly anything” per the will of the government. To the contrary, all citizens would have a tremendous vested interest in ensuring we are undertaking a valid and just cause.

Contrast Iraq to Vietnam. Why no mass protests in the street? Because it doesn’t affect anyone who did self-select to be affected.

Outside of an immediate threat to the internal security of the United States, what right does the Federal Government have to force me, you, or our children to fight and die in a foreign land ?

IMHO, The Fed’s have NO right to force anyone to fight, in any situation.

In the word’s of Lazarus Long (aka Robert Heinlein):

No state has an inherent right to survive through conscript troops and in the long run, no state ever has. Roman matrons used to say to their sons: “Come back with your shield, or on it.” Later on, this custom declined. So did Rome.