Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → how tax resistance fits the bill → taxation compared with conscription

Feel a draft? A while back a Selective Service System recruitment drive for new members to fill up its draft boards was posted to a US Defense Department public website. After the blog world and the media picked this up and started speculating, the Pentagon took down the recruitment notice, but the speculating hasn’t stopped.

On , Democratic Underground reported that “Bush is gearing up the draft — there is no longer any doubt about it.” They cite the SSS Annual Performance Plan for (dated ) as evidence for that assertion. The Democratic Underground post seems to me to have an inflated hysteria-to-facts ratio, but it too is making its way around blogland.

Among the weirder side effects of this new anxiety about the draft has been arguments from anti-war folks who say that a military draft would be a good thing because it would bring the war home and force people to think about how it effects them personally. Case in point: Draft Offered Courageous Choice by Johann Christoph Arnold.

My generation (I became a teen during the McCarthy era) came of age when opposition to war cost something. My peers and I had to decide to either join the military or volunteer for alternative service as conscientious objectors. And no matter what we chose, we all saw combat, in a sense: not one of us could evade the battle that takes place inside when one is faced with such a question.…

As a young man, I knew what my faith demanded, and I knew that I had to honor its demands. Looking back I feel being forced to make this decision made me stronger.

That’s why I believe it could be healthy for today’s youth to face a similar choice. Deciding which side to stand on is one of life’s most vital skills. It forces you to test your own convictions, to assess your personal integrity and your character as an individual.

As I have argued on this site, we don’t need to have a draft in order to be confronted with a choice like this. We all confront the choice of whether to support or oppose the war.

But if you haven’t already, now’s a good time to think about how you will confront the draft if it happens. If you think it won’t affect you directly, you may be surprised. For instance, a number of current presidential candidates are saying that they would support ending the men-only draft and forcing women also to register (as far as I can tell this is the first presidential election in which contenders have supported this position).

Also, the draft has been changed over the years. It is not only designed to fill the front lines with young cannon fodder, but is also () designed to draft experienced medical personnel. There are also plans underway to create other specialty drafts designed to fill holes in the military in any number of areas, from engineering to language instruction, by drafting professionals from these fields.

So while this site will continue to encourage you to examine your response to the conscription of your money for the war effort, today I encourage you to imagine what you will do if the government starts conscripting bodies — yours or those of your friends and family.

David Wiggins has written a good primer on draft resistance if that route appeals to you.

“Why shouldn’t we ask all of our citizens to bear some responsibility and pay some price?” asked Senator Chuck Hagel to a roomful of his colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during their discussion about how things are going in Iraq and what they’re going to ask “our citizens” to do about it. What he was suggesting was the military draft. And what was significant about it was that he was on the record saying, “I would not favor going back to a draft.”

The Republican Senator now joins a handful of Democrats in calling for a return of the draft — ostensibly of course for nice reasons like “sharing the burden equitably” and so forth, but, more honestly-stated, because it is starting to look like only with slave labor can this monument to arrogance and stupidity that is our Pharaoh’s war in Iraq be built.

Libertarians, anarchists and liberals alike may profit from reading Julian Sanchez’s take on conscription and taxation and slavery. Does the common anarchist rhetorical point of calling taxation a species of slavery hold up under scrutiny? Is it in fact not just an exaggerated metaphor, but a counter-productive rhetorical device — tending not to make taxation look as bad as conscription but to make conscription look no worse than taxation?

More ominous news about conscription:

The chief of the Selective Service System has proposed registering women for the military draft and requiring that young Americans regularly inform the government about whether they have training in niche specialties needed in the armed services. The proposal, which the agency’s acting Director Lewis Brodsky presented to senior Pentagon officials just before , also seeks to extend the age of draft registration to 34 years old, up from 25.

Q: How then can one be effectively non-violent? By simply refusing to take up arms?

Gandhi: I would say that merely to refuse military service is not enough. To refuse to render military service when the particular time arrives is to do the thing after all the time for combating the evil is practically gone. Military service is only a symptom of the disease which is deeper. I suggest to you that those who are not on the register of military service are equally participating in the crime if they support the State otherwise. He or she who supports a State organized in the military way — whether directly or indirectly — participates in the sin. Each man old or young takes part in the sin by contributing to the maintenance of the State by paying taxes. That is why I said to myself during the war that so long as I ate wheat supported by the army whilst I was doing everything short of being a soldier, it was best for me to enlist in the army and be shot; otherwise I should retire to the mountains and eat food grown by nature. Therefore, all those who want to stop military service can do so by withdrawing all co-operation. Refusal of military service is much more superficial than non-co-operation with the whole system which supports the State.

William Rivers Pitt recently wrote an op-ed about how frustrated he is about trying to get Americans to care about the disaster that is the Iraq war.

I am tired of trying to figure out a way to jar the American people into understanding how unutterably wretched the situation is over there, so that pressure from the citizenry at large can be brought to bear upon the Administration and this disaster can be brought to an end.…

People ask me if the draft, or advocacy for the draft, would put this war into people’s back yards and gather their attention to the matter. Of course it would, I tell them. Vietnam became an issue of pressing national concern because of the draft. It forced people to pay attention, to speak up if they thought the war was wrong, because the next lottery number read over the television might have belonged to their son.

With no draft today, with our volunteer army, most people are not staring down the barrel of having to practice what they preach. Patriotism, nationalism and the kill-em-all ethic is a safe place to stand these days, because no civilian is going to get a letter containing orders to report.

So I dropped him a line:

I disagree. For every one soldier that the U.S. expends in this war, it spends over a million dollars. And as much as the war machine needs soldiers, it needs dollars even more. And for this the government does have a draft — it drafts our money from every paycheck.

The burden “of having to practice what they preach” therefore falls on everybody, every day. But it falls most heavily on “us,” not “them.” The hawks can just keep doing what they’ve always been doing and paying their taxes and, in that way at least, practicing what they’re preaching. It’s those of us who consider ourselves opposed to the war who have to change our behavior to actually join the opposition.

When the draft is on our money, conscientious objection is a choice that everybody must consider.