American History11 Dec 2009 01:48 pm
Opposition to the Vietnam war is often considered an almost-exclusively left-wing phenomena: radical students with long hair and peace signs painted on their faces; socialist admirers of Ho Chi Minh; that sort of thing. But it was a group of right-wing economists and theoriticians — most notably Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan — who did the most to advance one of the biggest causes of the time: ending the military draft.
By 1964, there were 23,000 American soldiers (euphemistically referred to as “military advisers”) in Vietnam. Four years later, that number had grown to 543,000. (Suddenly, President Obama’s call for an additional 30,000 troops in Afghanistan doesn’t seem so extraordinary.) The only way that number of troops could be amassed was by instituting military conscription: American citizens were forced to serve in the Army.
There were many who called this forced service — or any forced service — “slavery.” It’s a strong word, one that sounds like it would come from the lunatic fringe of the left. As it happens, it was the word conservative economist Milton Friedman used to describe the draft. He first did so at a four-day symposium held at the University of Chicago in 1966, led by anthropologist Sol Dix. The papers from that symposium were published as The Draft the following year, and they argued strongly for its abolition.
Three years later, in 1969, President Nixon set up a 15-member commission (known as the “Gates Commission”) to review compulsory, military conscription and suggest whether it should continue to be used. The results, published on February 20, 1970, were unanimous: the commission suggested that the draft be abolished. The most important arguments against it were those of the libertarians like Alan Greenspan and Milton Friedman. The latter called the draft “a tax on youth”:
“When a young man is forced to serve at $45 a week, including the cost of his keep, of his uniforms, and his dependency allowances, and there are many civilian opportunities available to him at something like $100 a week, he is paying $55 a week in an implicit tax. … And if you were to add to those taxes in kind, the costs imposed on universities and colleges; of seating, housing, and entertaining young men who would otherwise be doing productive work; if you were to add to that the costs imposed on industry by the fact that they can only offer young men who are in danger of being drafted stopgap jobs, and cannot effectively invest money in training them; if you were to add to that the costs imposed on individuals of a financial kind by their marrying earlier or having children at an earlier stage, and so on; if you were to add all these up, there is no doubt at all in my mind that the cost of a volunteer force, correctly calculated, would be very much smaller than the amount we are now spending in manning our Armed Forces.”
Not the sort of rousing, rhetorical argument most opponents of the draft would have preferred, but it worked.
One Response to “Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, and the End of the Draft”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
[...] http://www.theintellectualdevotional.com/blog/2009/12/11/milton-friedman-alan-greenspan-and-the-end-... (In this Article the author on “The Devoted Intellect” found conservative economist Milton Friedman’s words about the Vietnam war to sound somewhat leftest. Saying the forced services were like “slavery”) http://weeklysift.blogspot.com/2009/12/sifting-sifts-of-2009.html (The author of this post seems to be very strict about how he sees political parties. Saying Democrats represent people and Republican’s represent corporations.) [...]