From the Progressive/Left-wing DemocracyNow.org’s coverage:

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the Kent State Shootings. On May 4th, 1970, National Guardsmen opened fire on hundreds of unarmed students at an antiwar rally at Kent State University in Ohio. The guardsmen fired off at least 67 shots in roughly 13 seconds. Four students were killed and nine others wounded.

The events of May 4, 1970 at Kent State were certainly tragic but the notion that the Nation Guardsmen fired at “unarmed” students engaging in peaceful demonstrations is plainly untrue. In fact these “peace” protesters failed to practice what they preached as they set fires, looted, vandalized cars and buildings, and threw rocks and bottles at the police/National Guardsmen who tried to restore order. These anti-war protesters certainly didn’t practice the Libertarian “non-initiation of force” principle as they, like the U.S. government initiated force to attempt to accomplish a political goal.*

However, sending in the National Guard complete with semiautomatic M1 Garand rifles (.30-06 FMJ rounds) with fixed bayonets to suppress these riots seems to be a bit of an overreaction on the part of the governor.** The methods used to suppress these violent protests were very different from the less lethal methods police use today (which some say is a direct result of this event).

Were the National Guardsmen’s deadly actions justified self-defense? A full 40 years later, this is still a subject of great debate.

One thing which isn’t debatable is that this event was tragic and preventable.

*In the case of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, the political goal was ostensibly to stop the spread of Communism in Vietnam and Cambodia; the political goal of the student anti-war protesters at Kent State was to turn public opinion against the Vietnam War in-general and Nixon’s announcement of the U.S. invasion into Cambodia specifically.

**It’s not too difficult to draw parallels between this event and those of the famed “Boston Massacre” just prior to the American Revolution.

As we mark Veterans Day here in the United States, it is worth remembering that, for the rest of the Western world, today marks the end of what may very well be the most pointless war in human history

The war in which millions of educated and working class men sacrificed their lives to fight over the remnants of a Europe that was still ruled by Hohenzollern’s, Hapsburg’s and Romanov’s —Middle Age Europe’s inbred contribution to insanity.

And what were they fighting over ? The same stupid battles that Europeans were fighting 100 years previously when Napoleon raged across the Russian frontier. Only this time, they were doing it with tanks, planes, and mustard gas.

It was massacre writ large and insanity on display for four long years — and it all started when some guy got shot in Sarajevo.

And yet, somehow, the boys of America ended up in the middle of this mess that the Royalists and Europeans has created. Rationally, there was no reason we should’ve been there and yet we were led by a man convinced that he could remake the world in America’s democratic image.

Sound familiar ?

That didn’t work out so well back then, as people unlucky enough to live in Europe in the 1930s and 40s can attest. Not to mention the men who the United States sent back to Europe in 1941.

So as we remember Veterans today, and thank them for their service, perhaps it’s time to think about how we can stop creating so many gardens of stone in so many corners of the world in the name of misplaced idealism.

It is a unique moment for the idea of national service. You have two presidential candidates who believe deeply in service and who have made it part of their core message to voters. You have millions of Americans who are yearning to be more involved in the world and in their communities. You have corporations and businesses that are making civic engagement a key part of their mission.

If “millions of Americans” wish to be “more involved” in service to others and “their communities” what’s stopping them? Do we really need a President McCain or President Obama to force “inspire” these Americans to serve their fellow Americans? Is their really a “volunteer” deficit?

In Stengel’s original article on this subject A Time to Serve he seems to suggest the opposite:

Polls show that while confidence in our democracy and our government is near an all-time low, volunteerism and civic participation since the ’70s are near all-time highs. Political scientists are perplexed about this. If confidence is so low, why would people bother volunteering? The explanation is pretty simple. People, especially young people, think the government and the public sphere are broken, but they feel they can personally make a difference through community service.

I fail to see the problem here. If people do not have confidence in the government, this is a very good thing*! Ordinary Americans are helping others on their own volition, not because some politician told them to do so.

Despite this seemingly positive news, this isn’t enough for Stengel:

[T]he way to keep the Republic — is universal national service. No, not mandatory or compulsory service but service that is in our enlightened self-interest as a nation. We are at a historic junction; with the first open presidential election in more than a half-century, it is time for the next President to mine the desire that is out there for serving and create a program for universal national service that will be his — or her — legacy for decades to come. It is the simple but compelling idea that devoting a year or more to national service, whether military or civilian, should become a countrywide rite of passage, the common expectation and widespread experience of virtually every young American.

Am I missing something here? How does a president “persuade” people who otherwise would not be inclined to national service without using some form of coercion? Toward the end of the article, Stengel offers a 10-point plan on how the next president should implement a national service agenda:

1. Create a National-Service Baby Bond (a.k.a. forced wealth distribution)

2. Make National Service a Cabinet-Level Department (a.k.a. taking money from citizens to pay for another Bureaucracy)

3. Expand Existing National-Service Programs Like AmeriCorps and the National Senior Volunteer Corps

4. Create an Education Corps

5. Institute a Summer of Service (a.k.a. teenagers serving the government to learn that all great things come from government)

6. Build a Health Corps (a.k.a. “volunteers” helping low income people access government healthcare programs which they are not already taking advantage of such as SCHIP)

7. Launch a Green Corps (similar to FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps but would improve infrastructure and combat climate change).

8. Recruit a Rapid-Response Reserve Corps (a.k.a. volunteers doing the job the National Guard traditionally does in the wake of natural disasters).

9. Start a National-Service Academy (a.k.a. a school to train government workers)

10. Create a Baby-Boomer Education Bond (a.k.a. forced wealth distribution).

In one way or another, every one of these proposals requires government to use force**. While this form of coercion is not as visible as directly “drafting” people into government service, make no mistake, coercion is still very much part of the equation.

To Time’s credit, the magazine did offer a counterpoint to Stengel’s article. Michael Kinsley calls B.S. on this whole notion of national service (particularly on the part of young people):

One of the comforts of middle age — a stage that the editor of TIME and I have both reached — is that you can start making demands on young people, safe in the knowledge that they won’t apply to you. Having safely escaped the Vietnam era draft ourselves, we are overcome by the feeling that the next generation should not be so lucky. Many of these young folks are volunteering for socially beneficial work, and that’s good. But it’s not good enough. “Volunteerism” is so wonderful that every young person should have to do it.

[…]

I’m perfectly prepared to believe that today’s young people are deplorable specimens, ignorant and ungrateful and in desperate need of discipline. Or I am also prepared to believe that they are about to burst with idealism like a piñata and only await somebody with a giant pin. But they aren’t the only ones who could use a lesson about social obligation. What about grownups? Grownups, who still have some hope of collecting Social Security and Medicare before they go broke, who have enjoyed the explosion in house prices that make the prospect of home ownership so dim for the next generation; who allowed the government to run up a gargantuan national debt, were miraculously bailed out of that, and immediately allowed it to be run up a second time; who may well have gone to college when tuition was cheap and you didn’t automatically graduate burdened by student loans. We are not in much of a position to start dreaming up lessons in social obligation for the kids.

As I pointed out in my last post, many people are in favor of “service” and “sacrifice” if it is being done by someone else. Kinsley also points out that the answer to serving the needs of others is good old fashioned Capitalism!***

Let’s be honest. If you really want to “serve your country/community/world,” again I ask you: What’s stopping you? Your level of service has not one thing to do with who occupies the White House at any given time.

*Though I am not optimistic that this is the case. It doesn’t seem to matter how many problems the government creates, these same people likely are looking to government to solve these problems. The very fact that John McCain and Barack Obama are the leading candidates to be the next POTUS seems to bear this out.

**This will be the subject of a future post. Anytime the government does something it does one of three things: (1) Applies force to make individuals respond in a certain way, (2) Removes force to allow individuals to do as s/he wishes, or (3) Keeps the same level of force in place.

***Where have we heard that before? Its good to see that there are MSM pundits who still understand Adam Smith’s concept of the “Invisible Hand.”

Hat Tip: Cato on Campus

“The noblest fate that a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war’s desolation.” Robert Heinlein Starship Troopers

For as long as I can remember, people interested in politics have been debating various crises where the main question was whether or not the U.S. military should go and bomb somebody who was doing something bad. All too often the debate involved two camps talking past each other, with the proponents arguing that the bad guys were really bad, and the opponents arguing that it was a waste of tax-payer money. Eventually Hitler is brought up, and then the debate becomes useless because few things kill rationality in a conversation quicker than accusing someone of supporting the Holocaust.

These arguments pit two truisms against each other. The first is Jon Stuart Mill’s observation that “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing.” The second principle is Thomas Jefferson’s observation that “War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.” Both truisms are correct yet seem to be irreconcilable.

Often, when two principles that are correct seem to contradict each other, it is because the thinker is making a bad assumption, and this is the case here. The choice is not between “looking on and doing nothing” on the one hand and “war” on the other. There are many ways to resist or oppose evil that do not involve “war”.

The modern conception of war works in the following way: a nation state commandeers some quantity of resources and, if need be, conscripts people. It then attacks another group of people in an attempt to break the will or the capability to fight of those the nation state has decreed to be an enemy. This manner of fighting is quite successful and yet is profoundly immoral on three counts:

1) The commandeering of goods leave those who owned the goods worse off.

2) Any conscription is slavery. Conscripts who are killed have been deprived of their lives.

3) The people killed or injured by the nation state are often not its enemies but people who have the misfortune to live in territory controlled by the attacking nation-state’s enemies.

4) Ditto for the people who own property that is destroyed by the nation state.

Note that none of these moral objections impinge on opposing evil! If I were to purchase a sniper’s rifle and bullets and go out and assassinate Adolf Hitler I would not be injuring any innocent. Nor would I be endangering anyone but myself.

There is nothing immoral about a group of people getting together to decide to fight some evil and pooling their resources, like the American citizens who volunteered to fight the Nazi war machine in Spain by joining the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. If George Bush had raised a private army to liberate Iraq, staffed it with people who volunteered specifically for that cause, and equipped it with voluntary donations, we would not be having this debate. Those who wanted to see Saddam dancing the Danny Deever could work toward that end, while those who wanted nothing to do with the enterprise could continue on with their daily lives.

“But isn’t that a classic case of allowing good men to do nothing? Doesn’t that ensure that evil will be victorious?” some of you may be wondering. Perhaps. But, let us examine this question with a Reductio Ad Absurdum: should everyone in the world drop everything they are doing and do nothing but hunt for the killer until they have caught him every time a murder is committed? What can someone living here in Massachusetts do but “look on” when a rape is committed in Shanghai?

Obviously, we must decide what evils require us to act, and which evils we cannot do much about, which brings up the question of who decides which cases require us to act and which don’t? To me the obvious answer is that the people who can act are the ones that should be making the decision, that these decisions should be individual ones!

What the interventionists are really claiming is that they should have the power to substitute their own judgments for those of the people whose resources and services they wish to commandeer. They seek to force people to fight or sacrifice property to a cause those people do not support. Regardless of how just the interventionists’ cause, compelling people to support it is inherently immoral – and there is no way to convert that wrong into a right.

At this point, I am sure one of you is thinking, “Okay, but the Abraham Lincoln brigades were a military failure! Franco won and ruled Spain into the mid 1970′s! It took total war – the commandeering of all the production of the most industrially advanced nation on earth – to defeat Hitler! By the time people could have been persuaded to fight him, it would have been too late!”

The fact is, a substantial number of people who came under Nazi or Stalinist control collaborated with those regimes. It was the people who lived in the occupied territory who were the “good people who did nothing”. Had they actively resisted, destroyed the census records, refused to fight on behalf of the German army etc, the Nazi war machine would have collapsed. The Germans never attempted an invasion of Switzerland, since the well armed population was thought to be unconquerable.
Nor was massive bombardment and total war required to wipe Nazism off the face of the earth. The Soviet Union, as nasty and evil an empire as the Nazi one, collapsed without a single U.S. bomb dropped on a single city. They did not collapse because of the Reagan arms build-up. They did not collapse because the CIA gave Stinger missiles to the Afghani resistance. They collapsed because the victims, the people living within the Soviet Union, had stopped cooperating with the Soviet government.

To evade their victims’ anger, every totalitarian regime points to some outside threat as a justification for the privations suffered by their victims. “Don’t have enough food? It is the Yankee embargo.” “You can’t take shampoo on a plane because of terrorists.” “You must flee the city and abandon your possessions because the Americans are about to bomb it.” How much easier is it, then, when the threat is real? If Khmer Rouge had tried to use the specter of a coming Swiss bombardment as the explanation for the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh, they would have faced far more resistance. Because the American government had a track record of bombing cities controlled by communists, the population believed their leaders’ lies and cooperated in their own destruction.

Furthermore attacks where non-combatants are hurt tend to backfire; when American bombs rained down on Germany, did the Germans blame Hitler? No. It stiffened their resolve and made them much more willing to obey the German government, much as when German bombs rained down on England, the English banded behind their government.

A expansionist totalitarian government can only be stopped when the leadership gives up, dies, or the populace stops obeying it. Generally it is doomed once it cannot expand any more since the looting accompanying the expansion is what keeps the system going. If left to their own devices, eventually majority of the population will come to see the regime as their enemy rather than outsiders. But if they are injured or killed by outsiders that process will not occur. Thus invasive or punitive war is a needlessly destructive, rarely successful, and inherently immoral method of attempting to free people from tyranny.

“Interventionism”, a scheme that depends on semi-indiscriminate state violence – or the threat thereof – using confiscated men or materiel to alter the actions of people whom the interventionists don’t like is thus inherently immoral. “Non-interventionism” is not a declaration of a willingness to do nothing and sit idly by, it is the rejection of an immoral tool.

Here’s his answer:

I think it makes sense to certainly consider it, and I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table, but ultimately, this is a policy matter between meeting the demands for the nation’s security by one means or another. Today, the current means of the all-volunteer force is serving us exceptionally well. It would be a major policy shift — not actually a military, but a political policy shift to move to some other course.

What is interesting though is that he a minute before had been describing the manpower shortages bedeviling the U.S. military:

As an Army officer, this is a matter of real concern to me. Ultimately, the American army, and any other all-volunteer force, rests with the support and the morale and the willingness to serve demonstrated by our — especially our young men and women in uniform. And I am concerned that those men and women and the families they represent are under stress as a result of repeated deployments.

There’s both a personal dimension of this, where this kind of stress plays out across dinner tables and in living room conversations within these families, and ultimately, the health of the all-volunteer force is going to rest on those sorts of personal family decisions. And when the system is under stress, it’s right to be concerned about some of the future decisions these young men and women may make. I think our military leaders are right to be focused on that.

There’s also a professional and broader strategic argument to this, and that is that when our forces are as engaged as they have been over the last several years, particularly in Iraq, that we’re concerned as military professionals that we also keep a very sharp edge honed for other contingencies outside of Iraq.

So, the good general basically said that the all-volunteer military was under a great deal of stress, that a draft was not yet needed, but that the military wouldn’t have a problem with one.

This of course is 180 turn around from a few years ago when the senior officers were opposed to conscription.

Meantime the media had a very different take on the interview. Notice the spin:

Frequent tours for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have stressed the all-volunteer force and made it worth considering a return to a military draft, President Bush’s new war adviser said Friday.
“I think it makes sense to certainly consider it,” Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said in an interview with National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”

“And I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table. But ultimately, this is a policy matter between meeting the demands for the nation’s security by one means or another,” Lute added in his first interview since he was confirmed by the Senate in June.

President Nixon abolished the draft in 1973. Restoring it, Lute said, would be a “major policy shift” and Bush has made it clear that he doesn’t think it’s necessary.

“The president’s position is that the all volunteer military meets the needs of the country and there is no discussion of a draft. General Lute made that point as well,” National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.

In the interview, Lute also said that “Today, the current means of the all-volunteer force is serving us exceptionally well.”

Still, he said the repeated deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan affect not only the troops but their families, who can influence whether a service member decides to stay in the military.
“There’s both a personal dimension of this, where this kind of stress plays out across dinner tables and in living room conversations within these families,” he said. “And ultimately, the health of the all-volunteer force is going to rest on those sorts of personal family decisions.”

The military conducted a draft during the Civil War and both world wars and between 1948 and 1973. The Selective Service System, re-established in 1980, maintains a registry of 18-year-old men.
Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., has called for reinstating the draft as a way to end the Iraq war.
Bush picked Lute in mid-May as a deputy national security adviser with responsibility for ensuring efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan are coordinated with policymakers in Washington. Lute, an active-duty general, was chosen after several retired generals turned down the job.

Now, to my jaded eye this is quite interesting. The wire report makes it sound like the General was suggesting that there be a political debate to bring back conscription, when in fact he was declining to rule it out after the interviewer raised the subject.

Folks, this is Fabian socialism in action: Let’s say that these news reports prompt a furor. The General can point to his actual comments and claim, truthfully, that he didn’t recommend a return to the draft. Those who kick up a fuss about the draft are made to look stupid, and the idea will float in the back up people’s consciousness, ready to be raised again.

On the other hand, if there is no furor, then the debate will probably take place. In the meantime, the media has actually made a case that the draft is reasonable and a traditional part of U.S. history. In effect the wire report is an editorial in favor of bringing it back.

Why the change on the part of the Bush administration? The problem is that to continue occupying Iraq, they will have to continue to activate and deploy reserve units. This means middle aged people with families and mortgages will find themselves deployed 3 or 4 times every 10 years. This tempo is not sustainable.

I think that with this interview, the White House is signalling an interest in returning to conscription, because General Lute is lying about the ease with which the military can adopt conscription. Instituting conscription requires a massive change in a millitary’s doctrine and organization. Imagine you managed a business that made whiskey with free laborers, and one day the owner called you into his office and told you that he would be bringing in slaves to do much of the labor. Now, would you be able to put the slaves immediately to work? No. You would need to arrange for overseers to watch them closely. You’d have to put locks on the doors so that slaves can’t escape. You’d have to stop work periodically to count your slaves etc. The claim that such a change is not a “military shift” does not pass the B.S. test. The lie effectively torpedoes the most effective argument against the draft, which is that the military does not want one. In this way, the Bush administration could get conscription without seeming to agitate for it. In fact, given their unpopularity and political weakness, the only way they will get a return to the draft is by having someone else do the heavy lifting while they put up an seemingly ineffectual false resistance.

It is shameful that, over a hundred years after the U.S. government claimed that it had eliminated slavery within its borders, its officers are still infatuated with it and wish to bring it back. Slavery has no part in civilization, and it is high time that the U.S. government, and governments thoughout the world for that matter, abandoned this disgusting practice of systematically enslaving young men.

But if Murtha is so enamored of citizen service, why don’t we replace our legislature with a drafted body? At the age of 18, rather than registering for selective service, our young people will register for KP duty congressional service. Those who can pass a basic American history and civics test get put into the system.

The first thing we need is term limits. One term sounds like enough to me. The next thing we do is get rid of the elective process, and choose people from the “Congressional Service” pool by random. So we’ll be replacing our entire House contingent every two years, and 1/3 of our Senate contingent in the same period.

Sure, Murtha will be out of a job… But can we really say that our “volunteer” legislature has been a success? How can we expect our legislators to enact good policies when they’ve been outside the real world for most of their lives, and are trying desperately to ensure they never go back to it? At least if we’re turning over our Congress, the people who make policy know they have to go actually live under that policy. Some would say that with such high turnover, Congress wouldn’t get very much done. Considering what they’re usually doing, I’d call that a Good Thing™.

Think about it: a Congress full of plumbers, secretaries, engineers, nurses, cooks, bank tellers, etc. We’re talking about people who actually know how to put things together and make things happen. I think it’s be a damn sight better than a Congress that’s about 40% full of lawyers, a class of people trained to field a debate team, don’t you?

So, Mr. Murtha, I presume we can count on your support?