On July 1, 1973 the draft ended in the United States and Milton Friedman deserves a great deal of the credit. He was so passionate about its abolition that he personally lobbied Congress and was a member of Nixon’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Force. He discussed the following commission exchange in his memoir:
In the course of his [General Westmoreland's] testimony, he made the statement that he did not want to command an army of mercenaries. I [Milton Friedman] stopped him and said, ‘General, would you rather command an army of slaves?’ He drew himself up and said, ‘I don’t like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves.’ I replied, ‘I don’t like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries.’ But I went on to say, ‘If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general; we are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher.’ That was the last that we heard from the general about mercenaries.
That was 36 years ago but unfortunately Tony Blankley has rediscovered slavery the draft and figured he could get support for a universal version from conservatives at the Heritage Foundation. A disgusted FR33 Agent tipster sent us the following:
Tony Blankley, author of American Grit: What It Will Take to Survive and Win in the 21st Century, spoke at the Heritage Foundation Tuesday.
Blankley started with a story about when someone referred to him as a neo-con, he corrected her and said he liked to think of himself as a “nationalist.”
These are the views of a conservative nationalist, asked to speak at the Heritage Foundation:
Once he confirmed his appropriate title, Blankley went through the chapters of his book, starting with the first: The need for a universal military draft. And if young people couldn’t serve in a military capacity, the government should coerce them to serve two years of national service.
Blankley named two reasons why this would be a good idea: First, we need more men and women to replenish military ranks. Fighting wars throughout the Middle East and keeping peace around the world is not something we can continue to do with a volunteer army alone. The second reason is because we need to instill a sense of national pride back into the new generation. The reason, Blankley explained, that the WWII generation was great was because the war gave them that sense of nationalism.
The draft he described would be a permanent one, much like the compulsory service in Israel.
If the Heritage Foundation continues to promote the servitude of future generations they should at least have the decency to remove “limited government, individual freedom [and] traditional American values” from their mission statement. I covered the Heritage Foundation’s support of the Bush Bailouts here.
