“What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted!
Thrice is he armed that has his quarrel just,
And he but naked, though locked up in steel,
Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted.”
“Over the past decade, this all-volunteer force has been put to the test and has succeeded,” wrote Thomas E. Ricks, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, in Sunday’s Washington Post.
But Ricks argues that this success is “precisely the reason” that now is the “time to get rid of the all-volunteer force. It has been too successful.”
Scrap success! Instead, Ricks raves we should “[resume] conscription . . . to reconnect the people with the armed forces” even though, admittedly, a draft “would cause problems for the military.”
Though on this latter point I catch a whiff of understatement, Ricks has a legitimate concern. “Our relatively small and highly adept military” makes “it all too easy for our nation to go to war,” he wrote, “and to ignore the consequences.” America now takes to war far too easily. Only one man (the president) decides, really, where and when the U.S. goes to war, and he puts it all on the national credit card.
So the answer is giving the Commander-in-Chief more resources? What Ricks risks is giving the president and his back-room boys a blank check on the manpower of our children.
The only effective check (as in check-and-balance) would be, I guess, a vote every four years. Oh, and the presidential term limit.
You are probably thinking: What about Congress? Unfortunately, it’s congressional dereliction of duty that’s got us here in the first place.
Which brings us back to first principles. And here the case is clear: Ricks’s prescription is wrong because conscription is wrong. Dictators conscript “their” subjects; a free society finds voluntary defenders.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Townhall: Rationally green
It’s Earth Day, so let’s cerebrate. Go to Townhall.com and help out in the great collective struggle to rethink environmentalism.
And then come back here for a whole ecology of further food for thought!
- Bruce Yandle’s PERC report: Earth Day 2012
- The Wikipedia entry on Bruce Yandle’s “Bootleggers and Baptists” thesis
- Economist Russ Roberts chats with Yandle about regulation, on EconTalk
- And another fascinating conversation with Yandle:
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Pat Tillman
“It doesn’t do me any good to be proud. It’s better to just force myself to be naïve about things, because otherwise I’ll start being happy with myself, and then I’ll stand still, and then I’m old news.”
On April 22, 1898, U.S. Navy began a blockade of Cuban ports and the USS Nashville captured a Spanish merchant ship in the early days of the Spanish-American War.
On April 22, 1889, at high noon, the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889 began with roughly 50,000 people lined up for their piece of the available two million acres of land in what is today Canadian, Cleveland, Kingfisher, Logan, Oklahoma, and Payne counties in Oklahoma.
On April 22, 2004, Pat Tillman, the professional football star who left his lucrative career after 9-11 to join the U.S. Army Rangers, was killed in action in Afghanistan. The Pentagon would later determine that Tillman died from friendly fire.
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Video: Randy Barnett on the Obamacare Case
This is fascinating:
“Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the source of humanity, and the mother of truth.”
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Chinese students gather in Tiananmen Square
On April 21, 1989, six days after the death of Hu Yaobang, the deposed reform-minded leader of the Chinese Communist Party, some 100,000 Chinese students gathered at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to commemorate Hu and voice their discontent with China’s authoritative communist government. At an official memorial service for Hu Yaobang, held the next day in Tiananmen’s Great Hall of the People, student representatives carried a petition to the steps of the Great Hall, demanding to meet with Premier Li Peng. The Chinese government refused the meeting, leading to a general boycott of Chinese universities across the country and widespread calls for democratic reforms. Days later, on April 27, students from more than 40 universities marched to Tiananmen Square and were joined by workers, intellectuals, and civil servants. By mid-May, more than a million people filled the square, the site of communist leader’s Mao Zedong’s proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
On April 20, 1898, President William McKinley asked Congress to declare war on Spain, two months after two explosions sank the USS Maine in Havana, Cuba. During those two months, newspaper baron Randolph Hearst and others whipped up public sentiment to go to war to give Cubans their independence and attacked McKinley for weakness in not acting more aggressively.
On April 20, 1999, two teenager students planned and carried out a shooting spree at their Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, killing 13 people, a teacher and 12 fellow students, and wounding 23 others, before committing suicide by shooting themselves.
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Regressive Europe
Some folks love to compare the U.S. to Europe unfavorably.
Not me.
Though I’m fine with learning from European states and cultures (hey: I like Switzerland!), I shudder when I hear someone suggest that America should be “more like Europe.”
Obviously, I’m not with our current president on this. He says we should tax the rich more, make them pay “their fair share.” And his left-leaning admirers append the phrase, almost under their breath, “like in Europe.”
Ugh.
But reserve some of that “ugh” not at the proposal, but at the assumption that European states tax the rich with higher “progressivity.” Veronique de Rugy, reporting on a new book by Bruce Bartlett, says that view is off base. European states tend to rely on the VAT, which is heavily regressive. Additionally, Europe’s high income tax rates kick in at lower incomes, so that Europeans lower down on the middle class ladder feel the bite of high taxes.
De Rugy concludes that America is a lot like Europe, on the whole, but that America’s “tax framework may be worse. . . . It disproportionately relies on the top earners to raise revenue, it exempts a large class of taxpayers from paying any income taxes, and it conceals spending in the form of tax breaks.”
This is all very interesting. But my take-away is not to emulate Europe, but — instead — the distinctively American policies we’ve let slip away. Our limited government principles don’t require us to endlessly chase new revenue streams.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.