You don’t want to rely on conscripted slaves to fight your wars. From Kym Robinson at libertarianinstitute.org:
The drumbeats of war seem to be the heartbeat of history and most often requires a generation of boys to wage it. Boys of a certain age are assumed to become combatants, to be used as fodder and be made killers or charged guilty of such potential, regardless of individual deed. Whether a man agrees with his government’s policies does not matter. It was decided for him that he should serve, either enslaved into a uniform or as a volunteer seduced by pay, duty bound. In the case of survival, when a people face extinction, the fighting males become the last vestige of hope for a society or nation. The instincts and roles becoming policy and normality.
“In America, conscription is unknown; men are enlisted for payment. Compulsory recruitment is so alien to the ideas and so foreign to the customs of the people of the United States that I doubt whether they could ever dare to introduce it into their law.”- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835)
Alexis de Tocqueville, in his book Democracy in America, praised the virtues of the United States, one being that it refrained from the use of conscription. It’s a practice essential for great wars, one that assumes men are the property of government. American governments would go onto disprove his boasts about the greatness of such exceptional ideals. The American Civil War would introduce conscription in both north and south. Eligibility for the draft is a government tradition that haunts the lives of men of a certain age even into the twenty-first century, and no doubt soon the other gender will also be invited to enjoy this “duty.” If a nation could enslave people for labor. it was inevitable that it would also do so for war and the United States has been no exception.
The call to duty demands that all moral discipline be abandoned in the pursuit of managing any other territory and people for plunder that the current Mafioso government would have its people kill for.
Very well said by de Tocqueville, it is the admission of the government that its citizens are slaves to expended at will for the governments own murderous and plundering ambitions.
Chad Chadburn