The Philosophy of the Libertarian(cont.)

What is the fairest method of raising an army ? 

If you are a libertarian, the answer is obvious. Conscription is unjust because it is coercive, a form of slavery. It implies that the state owns its citizens and can do with them what it pleases, including forcing them to fight and risk their lives in war. My friend, Ron Paul, made this claim in opposing calls to reinstate the draft to fight the Iraq War :"Conscription is slavery, plain and simple. And it was made illegal under the 13th amendment, which prohibits involuntary servitude. One may well be killed as a military draftee, which makes conscription a very dangerous kind of enslavement." 

But even if you don't consider conscription equivalent to slavery, you might oppose it on the grounds that it limits people's choices, and therefore reduces overall happiness. This is a utilitarian argument against conscription. It holds that, compared to a system that permits the hiring of substitutes, conscription reduces people's welfare by preventing mutually advantageous trades. If Andrew Carnegie and his substitute both want to make a deal, why prevent them from doing so ? The freedom to enter into the exchange seems to increase each party's utility without reducing anyone else's. Therefore, for utilitarian reasons, the Civil War system (conscription allowing paid substitutes) is better than pure conscription. 

It's easy to see how utilitarian assumptions can support market reasoning. If you assume that a voluntary exchange makes both parties better off, without harming anyone else, you have a good utilitarian case for letting markets rule. 

We can see this if we now compare the Civil War system with the volunteer army. The same logic that argues for letting draftees hire substitutes also argues for a full-market solution : If you're going to let people hire substitutes, why draft anyone in the first place ? Why not simply recruit troops through the labor market ? Set whatever wage and benefits are necessary to attract the number and quality of soldiers required, and let people choose for themselves whether to take the job. No one is forced to serve against his or her will, and those willing to serve can decide if military service is preferable, all things considered, to their other alternatives.

So, from a utilitarian point of view, the volunteer army seems the best of the three options. Letting people freely choose to enlist based on the compensation being offered enables them to serve only if doing so maximizes their own utility ; and those who don't want to serve don't suffer the utility loss of being forced into the military against their will. 

A utilitarian could conceivably object that the volunteer army is more expensive than a conscript army. To attract the requisite number and quality of soldiers, pay and benefits must be higher than when soldiers are forced to serve. So a utilitarian might worry that the increased happiness of better-paid soldiers would be offset by the unhappiness of taxpayers who now pay more for military service. 

But this objection is not very convincing, especially if the alternative is conscription (with or without substitution). It would be odd to insist, on utilitarian grounds, that the cost to the taxpayers of other government services, such a police and fire protection, should be reduced by forcing randomly chosen people to perform these tasks at below-market pay ; or that the cost of highway maintenance should be reduced by requiring a subset of taxpayers chosen by lottery either to perform the work themselves or hire others to do so. The unhappiness that would result from such coercive measures would probably outweigh the benefit to the taxpayers of cheaper government services. 

So, from the standpoint of both libertarian and utilitarian reasoning, the volunteer army seems best, the Civil War hybrid system second best, and conscription the least desirable way of allocating military service. But at least two objections can be made to this line of argument. One objection is about fairness and freedom ; the other is about civic virtue and the common good. 

Objection 1 : Fairness and Freedom 

The first objection holds that, for those with limited alternatives, the free market is not all that free. Consider an extreme case : A homeless person sleeping under a bridge may have chosen, in some sense, to do so ; but we would not necessarily consider his choice to be a free one. Nor would we be justified in assuming that he must prefer sleeping under a bridge to sleeping in an apartment. In order to know whether his choice reflects a preference for sleeping out of doors or an inability to afford an apartment, we need to know something about his circumstances. Is he doing this freely or out of necessity ?

The same question can be asked of market choices generally---including the choices people make when they take on various jobs. How does this apply to military service ? We can't determine the justice or injustice of the volunteer army without knowing more about the background conditions that prevail in the society : Is there a reasonable degree of equal opportunity, or do some people have very few options in life ? Does everyone have a chance to get a college education, or is it the case that, for some people, the only way to afford college is to enlist in the military ?

From the standpoint of market reasoning, the volunteer army is attractive because it avoids the coercion of conscription. It makes military service a matter of consent. But some people who wind up serving in the all-volunteer army may be as averse to military service as those who stay away. If poverty and economic disadvantage are widespread, the choice to enlist may simply reflect the lack of alternatives. 

According to this objection, the volunteer army may not be as voluntary as it seems. In fact, it may involve an element of coercion. If some in the society have no other good options, those who choose to enlist may be conscripted, in effect, by economic necessity. In that case, the difference between conscription and the volunteer army is not that one is compulsory while the other is free ; it's rather that each employs a different form of compulsion --- the force of law in the first case and the pressure of economic necessity in the second. Only if people have a reasonable range of decent job options can it be said that the choice to serve for pay reflects their preferences rather than their limited alternatives. 

The class composition of today's volunteer army bears out this objection, at least to some extent. Young people from low-to-middle-income neighborhoods (median household income of $30,850 to $57,836) are disproportionately represented in the ranks of active-duty (non-officer) army recruits. Least represented are the poorest 10 percent of the population (many of whom may lack the requisite education and skills) and the most affluent 20 percent (those from neighborhoods with median household incomes of $66,329 and above). In recent years, over 25 percent of army recruits have lacked a regular high school diploma. And while 46 percent of the civilian population has some college education, only 6.5 percent of the 18-to-24-year-olds in the military's enlisted ranks have ever been to college.

In recent years, the most privileged young people in American society have not opted for military service. Of the 750 members of Princeton's class of 1956, the majority --- 450 students --- joined the military after graduation. Of the 1,108 members of Princeton's class of 2006, only 9 students enlisted. A similar pattern is found at other elite universities---and in the nation's capital. Only 2 percent of members of Congress have a son or daughter serving in the military. 

Congressman Charles Rangel, a Democrat from Harlem who is a decorated Korean War veteran, considers this unfair, and has called for reinstatement of the draft. "As  long as Americans are being shipped off to war," he wrote, "then everyone should be vulnerable, not just those who, because of economic circumstances, are attracted by lucrative enlistment bonuses and educational incentives." he points out that, in New York City, "the disproportionate burden of service is dramatic. In 2004, 70% of the volunteers in the city were black or Hispanic, recruited from lower income communities.

Rangel opposed the Iraq War, and believes it never would have been launched if the children of the policy-makers had had to share the burden of fighting it. He also argues that, given the unequal opportunities in American society, allocating military service by the market is unfair to those with the fewest opportunities : 

     The great majority of people bearing arms for this country in Iraq are from the poorer communities in our inner cities and rural areas, places where enlistment bonuses of up to $40,000 and thousands in educational benefits are very attractive. For people who have college as an option, those incentives---at the risk of one's life --- don't mean a thing. 

So the first objection to the market rationale for a volunteer army is concerned with unfairness and coercion --- the unfairness of class discrimination and the coercion that can occur if economic disadvantage compels young people to risk their lives for a college education and other benefits.

Notice that the coercion objection is not an objection to the volunteer army as such. It only applies to a volunteer army that operates in a society with substantial inequalities. Alleviate these inequalities, and you remove the objection. Imagine, for example, a perfectly equal society, in which everyone had access to the same educational opportunities. In such a society, no one could complain that the choice to enlist in the military was less than free, because unfairly pressured by economic necessity. 

Of course, no society is perfectly equal. So the risk of coercion always hovers over the choices people make in the labor market. How much equality is needed to ensure that market choices are free rather than coerced ? At what point do inequalities in the background conditions of society undermine the fairness of social institutions(such as the volunteer army) based on individual choice ? Under what conditions is the free market really free ? To answer these questions, we'll need to examine moral and political philosophies that see freedom --- not utility --- at the heart of justice. 

We will later make such examination.