The quote below is from an article in today’s Union Leader by Vietnam Navy veteran Jim Adams (he was in the Navy and in Vietnam around the same time I was in the Marines in Vietnam):
“In 1940, as World War II loomed, Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie gave his support to his opponent — Franklin Roosevelt — in his push for a peacetime draft. Later in life, Willkie remarked that on his epitaph, he would rather have that he “contributed to freedom” than that he was a President.” But wait….
How does forcing people to join the military—whether in peacetime or in war—“contribute to freedom”? As any conservative and any libertarian knows, having a military draft is “involuntary servitude”…plain, simple, and vanilla.
That’s why iconic Liberty-&-Freedom conservative Barry Goldwater said during his 1964 Presidential campaign that if elected he’d abolish the draft. Democrats, “liberals,” and other regressives were aghast. Both they and their emerging media lapdogs pilloried Goldwater for making the proposal. But he was right. And as the sainted Ayn Rand wrote later, any society that has to enslave people in order to protect itself doesn’t deserve to be saved (yes, friends, this is why all government functions now paid for by forced taxation should be voluntarily funded…but that’s an entirely different subject…and, not incidentally, one not easily achieved).
And no, I’m not a silly “anarchist.” I stand for liberty & freedom. As the Founding Fathers knew, it takes a very minimalist, small-size government to ensure “the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.”
