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Kjetil

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Should military service be compulsory, or should we have a professional army? I'm involved in a discussion on the topic, and here's one of the posts:

One reason the Egyptian troops could not be used against the people was that the army would not permit it. Egypt has 1-3 years of forced military service. In Libya Gaddafi was able to use his troops against the people. Generally it is much easier to manipulate soldiers that are paid to follow your orders.

What do you think?

Edited by Kjetil
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So we should have conscription because if we should ever become a dictatorship in the future, then the troops won't attack us because they'll be conscripts. Umm yeah, that's one of the weakest arguments for conscription I've ever seen. But yeah, I mean, basically what motivates the soldiers to be used against the population is always ultimately the ideas in their heads, not whether or not they are volunteers. It may be true that the fact that Egypt's military is comprised mainly of poor conscripts from amongst the people contributed to their reluctance to fire on their family members, but it is equally possible for a professional army to say "no, we won't follow these orders, for we are being asked to attack our families and countrymen." It seems like someone is drawing an invalid generalization by ignoring the particular characteristics of the Libyan situation versus the Egyptian situation. Libya is divided between East and West, and the West thus far still supports Kaddafi. He has tribal support from those clans that are allied with his. Various military officers in the East had defected to the rebels.

Edited by 2046
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He basically says -- in the words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- that people must be forced to be free. The problem is only relevant in a dictatorship, and if you want to prevent your country from becoming a dictatorship, it's a bad idea to start by giving the government the power to force its citizens to put their lives at stake.

Edited by Kjetil
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Should military service be compulsory, or should we have a professional army? I'm involved in a discussion on the topic, and here's one of the posts:

One reason the Egyptian troops could not be used against the people was that the army would not permit it. Egypt has 1-3 years of forced military service. In Libya Gaddafi was able to use his troops against the people. Generally it is much easier to manipulate soldiers that are paid to follow your orders.

What do you think?

The Libyan mercenaries are not Libyans, they are from Nigeria. That is why they are not difficult to motivate to fight the rebels, they are not themselves citizens or related to them in anyway.

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Conscription is a gross violation of individual rights. It doesn't matter whether it is done by some 3rd World dictatorship or by The Netherlands. A country that has to resort to what amounts to a period of indentured servitude by its citizens in order to maintain its sovereignty doesn't deserve to be sovereign.

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Should it be a requirement that all the soldiers have citizenship?

It should be clear just whom is fighting for whom. Since there is no way to read minds, objective proxies for loyalty are residence and citizenship requirements in addition to oaths. On the other hand, it has long been an accepted practice to let non-citizens enlist in military service in order to gain citizenship, as a kind of proof-of-merit working in the opposite direction.

The word "all" is not supportable, but most should.

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"Scenario: We live in a great country, but we lack motivation to serve in the military on a voluntary basis. We can then choose between

- professional soldiers / mercenaries

- disarmament and dismantling of the military

As a result of this, we may not be able to contribute to the NATO, and that we are attacked.

Conscription is better, because then we know that we will have a military also next year."

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"Scenario: We live in a great country, but we lack motivation to serve in the military on a voluntary basis. We can then choose between

- professional soldiers / mercenaries

- disarmament and dismantling of the military

As a result of this, we may not be able to contribute to the NATO, and that we are attacked.

Conscription is better, because then we know that we will have a military also next year."

"Scenario: Increase pay for the volunteer army until it becomes a job worth doing, just like other jobs."

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"Scenario: We live in a great country, but we lack motivation to serve in the military on a voluntary basis. We can then choose between

- professional soldiers / mercenaries

- disarmament and dismantling of the military

As a result of this, we may not be able to contribute to the NATO, and that we are attacked.

Conscription is better, because then we know that we will have a military also next year."

You should specify when raising this topic that you are or reside in Germany which is a particular case considered that country's military interests are captive to Anglo American interests, and unlike most countries in the Western Hemisphere, has neighboring examples of ongoing military service like in Austria and Switzerland. It is true however that in part thanks to its (by the way very civic) military strength that Switzerland could remain neutral during the last war, and now as a result is not captive to foreign interests - however it is to be noted that the potential aggressor back then was none other than Germany.

Of course Germans are human beings as well, and as such a universal deprivation of liberty for any number of months is almost as terrible as compulsory education at a young age.

Naturally, army skills, just as early education, are desirable. It is the voluntary vs compulsory character of it the problem.

Back to the German military, it's a very interesting case, but why should it need a military? Terror acts and prevention obviously requires professional squads and intelligence, either public or private the sheer level of professionalism required makes recruits useless. And front line defense seems out dated for Western Europe.

Germany has already lost its Eastern third in compensation to the Poles and Soviets. Poland and even the Baltic Nations are within the EU so there's enough of a buffer zone.

Are you worried that NATO dissolves and America stops paying for Europe's defense? America is now spending millions a minute to pay for half a small African country's defense.

You say that it is Germany that contributes to NATO (maybe politically and allowing the U.S. to use German soil and airfields) but in reality is the other way around.

The harsh reality is that the Germans tried to make a scapegoat of the jews for the problems of Western Culture and in turn Western Culture and its true heartland countries like America, the British Commonwealth, and Russia, took the opportunity to make Germany a scapegoat for our problems.

Of course this whole deal is about to expire and the White Man's Burden can no longer be paid by Germany alone.

Germany is now a new different country, in the context of this new European Union. the EU already has a currency. As soon as it has a standing army that is able to defend itself from the Russians without American help, something like a new stage of sovereignty will occur, and it probably will be just as disappointing as the Euro.

Mercenaries are moral. The issue of citizenship and residence of them is amoral / it doesn't matter.

Edited by volco
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Answer:

"Because the motivation of the soldiers is related to salaries, the operating costs of a professional military defense are higher than the costs of conscription."

Yes. In general, it is true that stealing things is cheaper in the short term than paying for them. The arguments against theft as a way of life all apply here against conscription.

Also, if you are going to engage in economic analysis then you need to think about consequences two and three steps beyond your proposed intervention. Reconsidering the Fiscal Advantages of Conscription

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the fiscal advantages and the social desirability of conscription in an economy in which individuals differ in their military and civilian productivities and these productivities are private information. The informational asymmetries imply that the government cannot sort individuals according to their civilian and military productivities. Instead, we assume that the government can either let individuals self-select into the military or it can randomly draft them. Under a volunteer army, the government offers a wage suciently high to fulfill the necessary amount of enlistments. Under a draft, the government pays soldiers a wage as compensation for their service. The goal of the government is to design taxes so as to maximize social welfare subject to a set of constraints. Following Mirrlees (1971), we assume that to cover any budgetary costs of the military (whether drafted or not), the government relies on a distortionary nonlinear labor income tax among the individuals who remain in the civilian sector.

The model allows us to make the basic point that a draft and a voluntary system lead to different tax bases and that the voluntary system's tax base is larger. This larger tax base raises revenue with fewer distortions than under a draft, particularly when military needs are large. The key intuition is that under a volunteer army, self-selection allows for comparative advantage in raising revenue. A draft inducts high-income earners, leading to a loss of revenue. Thus, when these high-earning individuals are drafted, the government loses revenue that must be obtained from those who remain in the civilian economy, producing efficiency losses that may exceed those of a voluntary system.

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Here's a little historical thing to share, hope it's not too tangential:

That is fantastic. I had no idea Objectivism qua social movement had ever accomplished anything. The "It's earlier than you think" essay diminished my expectations.

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  • 1 month later...

What do you think of the following hypothetical:

A country is __already__ at war with another. Compulsory military service is legislated. A certain citizen doesn't wish to obey the draft. Does he has the right to?

To me it seems that on one hand, freedom is an axiomatic primary. So he does have the right. On the other hand, fairness is also. What he does can be called unfair towards others.

Is there any way to solve it from objectivist axioms?

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What do you think of the following hypothetical:

A country is __already__ at war with another. Compulsory military service is legislated. A certain citizen doesn't wish to obey the draft. Does he has the right to?

To me it seems that on one hand, freedom is an axiomatic primary. So he does have the right. On the other hand, fairness is also. What he does can be called unfair towards others.

Is there any way to solve it from objectivist axioms?

If someone has a right to do X, it means they may not be prevented from doing X by the initiation of physical force, regardless of whether X is unfair or not. But this asks whether refusing to be kidnapped and forced to kill or be killed against your will is unfair, which is like asking the slave who refuses to permit his body and life to be used by his master is being unfair to his master. We don't know what is fair or unfair unless we know who deserves what, and if I have a right to my life, then asking that I sacrifice it would be not only unfair but unjust.

Also, it may be pertinent to mention that Objectivism, in contrast to other more modern libertarian political philosophies, does not actually hold freedom to be an axiomatic primary or approach the problem to be solved from axioms. Rand isn't a traditional rationalist or apriorist in her method of defining a theory of rights or morality. Her epistemology favors a more inductive and direct realist foundationalist approach, so she would approach the problem from the ground up by investigating the relationship between personal virtue and social freedom, which requires a whole philosophy of man and ethics (which actually constitutes the major part of her thought rather than politics.)

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The argument would be that if you do not enlist in the army, you rely on other people to kill and be killed for you.

That would be living _from_ others.

Well, we might be able to imagine such a scenario where refusing to volunteer would be that you are being a "free rider" off the national defense, and you may be condemned morally for doing so. But again, if you have a right to do X, then this would establish a moral prohibition against other people violating one’s right to do X. It doesn't mean that it is necessarily virtuous or good to do X, just that other people have no right to prevent you from doing it via physical aggression.

But really, the hypothetical is so vague that we face the prospect of confusing what "living from others" means. The division of labor and comparative advantage prevents everyone from not "living from others" in some way, that is the whole point of society. If you fund the government (in a purely capitalist state, but I guess we could extend this also to current conditions) then you are not "living from others" or parasitically leeching off the fruits of others' labors, you are paying professional soldiers for the service of protection. Just like when I go get a burger from McDonald's, I could have made every part of the food myself, but what would be the point of that? Instead, I am paying professional cooks and servers to do it for me.

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But doesn't society has the right to protect itself from free-riders?

Yes and no, depending on what you mean by that. Society as such has no rights whatsoever, but society as a group of individual people has the rights of the individual people making it up; the same rights as the hypothetical free rider. In dealing with free riders in any situation, yes, they can protect themselves by boycotting the free rider, refusing to deal with him, or exerting other social pressure on him (Yaron Brook and others have suggested this route in dealing with noncontributors.) The point is that physical coercion is not the only action that can be taken against what some consider to be immoral persons or activities. There are also entirely voluntary and persuasive actions which rely on using reason to show people what the right thing to do is. So when it comes to the draft, no, according to Objectivist ethics, they can't "protect" themselves by aggressing against him as long as all he has done is withheld that which was within his right to withhold.

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"Well, we might be able to imagine such a scenario where refusing to volunteer would be that you are being a "free rider" off the national defense, and you may be condemned morally for doing so."

That was exactly the situation my Paternal Grandfather was in during WW2. Being a Dual Swiss/Canadian citizen he could not fight for Canada against the Germans as he feared losing his Swiss citizenship which is standard. He (and my father in turn) was vilified as either a coward or alternatively because his name was German in origin, was accused of being a closet Nazi.

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2046,

So you could argue that what is considered a free rider (a person that lives on the account of others) is something that would not exist in a free society - in a free society, a person could not live on the account of others; others would be protected from this. Ergo, he would die.

But suppose one doesn't live in a society that is free to that extent. One is faced with the dillema of enlisting to the army, killing and possibly be killed according to what others tell him - or being a free rider.

From the person's point of view, what should he do?

Edited by samr
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