“Today,” Lt. Colonel Joe Plenzler (USMC, retired) writes at Military.com, “the military needs only about 160,000 youth from an eligible population of 30 million to meet its recruitment needs. But after two decades of war — both of which ended unsuccessfully — and low unemployment, many experts believe the all-volunteer force has reached a breaking point.”

Plenzler suggests a “limited” military draft to make up for recruitment quota shortfalls. “We should have our military recruiters sign up new troops for 11 months out of the year,” he writes, “and then have the Selective Service draft the delta between the military’s needs and the total number recruited.”

As a practical matter, Plenzler’s proposal “solves” an artificial problem that needn’t and shouldn’t exist. The US armed forces are far too large and far too expensive if their purpose is “national defense.” If they were cut by 90%, the risk of a significant foreign attack on the US would remain the same as now — virtually non-existent, and mostly a matter of air and missile defense. Stop trying to rule the world militarily. “Problem” solved.

As a legal matter, the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution remains the Supreme Law of the Land: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” While the government and its courts have a long history of ignoring that unambiguous ban on conscription.

Which brings us to the most important consideration: Where Plenzler’s proposal falls on the moral axis.

The aforementioned 13th Amendment, while obviously applicable to military conscription, was proposed and ratified on the premise of outlawing chattel slavery.

Plenzler suggests returning to that evil and immoral practice: “We should hire cotton pickers 11 months out of the year,  then enslave as many additional people as needed to get the crop in.”

Three swings (practical, legal, and moral), three misses. If policy proposals are like baseball, Plenzler strikes out.

Unfortunately, policy proposals aren’t like baseball. The same awful ideas come back around periodically, and no matter how many times they strike out they never get cut from the team. Occasionally they get a base hit — and we get an extended military debacle like the war in Vietnam.

No matter how many turns at bat we allow it, a bad idea remains a bad idea. And Plenzler is preaching an irredeemably evil idea.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“RFK Jr., You’re No JFK” proclaims John Turres in The Wetumpka Herald (August 1). Although “early on, Kennedy was getting a lot of attention and even support, because, well, he’s a Kennedy, and that’s what the family label gets,” Turres doubts that the halo effect will last as Democratic voters find out more about how Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. substantially differs from his uncle John Fitzgerald Kennedy — and, for that matter, Robert F. Kennedy père.

The “Kennedy for me” of JFK’s campaign promised to be “not so doggoned seasoned that he won’t try something new.” In the current decade, new (or even lightly used) tricks are viewed as a menace to the gerontocratic order. As Andy Page noted in a 2021 letter to The Wall Street Journal, few Democrats would still join JFK in championing “the mobility and flow of risk capital from static to more dynamic situations.”

Even radical leftists chide the 69-year-old junior Kennedy’s lack of enthusiasm for reviving similarly senior-citizen-aged programs. Current Affairs magazine’s Lily Sánchez and Nathan J. Robinson berate RFK Jr. for substituting a “delusional faith in the free market” for a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and “the general policies of social uplift that progressives support.”

Sánchez and Robinson consider RFK Jr.’s description of the economy as combining “a cushy socialism for the rich and this kind of brutal, merciless capitalism for the poor” a too-little-too-late “mimic[ry of Bernie] Sanders’ language of class antagonism.” They should know better, since they are aware that such “language of the populist outsider” draws from Noam Chomsky — who has traced his own view that “the state is there to provide security and support to the interests of the privileged and powerful sectors in society while the rest of the population is left to experience the brutal reality of capitalism” back to Adam Smith. It was the precedent of “bourgeois economists” who shared Smith’s laissez-faire convictions that led Karl Marx to acknowledge in an 1852 letter that “I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them.”

Sánchez and Robinson view “the profit motive of the pharmaceutical, health insurance, and other related industries” as the root of their dysfunction — when in fact it is their scrupulous restraint of trade that enables them to reap revenue while ill-serving the public. (RFK Jr.’s claim that “some corporations don’t want free markets … they want profits” actually underestimates how antagonistic market competition is to corporate profit.) Rediscovering how class privilege springs from political power would do more to undermine it than dusting off FDR’s New Deal — or JFK’s New Frontier.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Kennedy: For free or not for free?” by Joel Schlosberg, The Wilson, North Carolina Times, August 3, 2023
2. Kennedy: For free or not for free?” by Joel Schlosberg, The Enterprise [Williamston, North Carolina], August 3, 2023
3. Kennedy: For free or not for free?” by Joel Schlosberg, The Johnstonian News [Smithfield, North Carolina], August 3, 2023
4. Kennedy: For free or not for free?” by Joel Schlosberg, The Butner-Creedmoor News [Creedmoor, North Carolina], August 3, 2023
5. “Kennedy: For free or not for free?” by Joel Schlosberg, The Wake Weekly [Wake Forest, North Carolina], August 3, 2023
6. “Kennedy: For free or not for free?” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], August 3, 2023
7. “Kennedy: For Free or Not For Free?” by Joel Schlosberg, Newton, Iowa Daily News, August 8, 2023
8. “Kennedy: For Free or Not For Free?” by Joel Schlosberg, The News [Kingstree, South Carolina], August 9, 2023

Testifying before the US House Oversight Committee on July 31, Devon Archer allegedly claimed that his former business partner, Hunter Biden, trafficked in the “illusion of access” to his father, then vice-president Joe Biden.

Republicans took a victory lap on Archer’s testimony,  saying it proves the “Biden brand” played a key role in various corrupt dealings, up to and including multi-million dollar bribes to the “Biden crime family.”

Democrats took a slightly less convincing triumphal tone, claiming the testimony establishes that, as White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said last week, Joe Biden “was never in business with his son.” The “brand” was Hunter Biden’s own. Any exploitation of Joe’s position presumably occurred without his direct knowledge, let alone any “10% for the big guy” type arrangements.

As I wrote when the “Hunter Biden laptop” story broke the month before the 2020 presidential election:

“Everyone who might care one way or another knew years ago that Biden the younger got a sweetheart job with Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, because Biden the elder was vice-president ….  Everyone who might care one way or another also knew years ago the Joe Biden used his position as vice-president to intervene in Ukraine’s internal affairs, pressuring Kiev to fire a prosecutor who had investigated Burisma, because Biden bragged about doing so on camera.”

Trump’s voters didn’t care about his hush money payments to Stormy Daniels when they voted in 2016, or about his first impeachment when they voted in 2020. Nor do they care about his growing stack of criminal indictments now.

Biden’s voters didn’t care about his influence-peddling when they voted in 2020. Nor is their discomfort level visibly increasing at the moment.

Per William James, “a difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.”

We may be headed for the third presidential impeachment (and likely third Senate acquittal) in four years and, as with the first two, this one is less about any alleged “high crimes and misdemeanors” than it is about trying to ride a scandal to victory in the next presidential election.

But in the post-Nixon era, no amount of scandal ever seems to move the needle very much for either party when it comes to election results.

And why should it? Behind their pomp, pageantry, and demagoguery, those who rule us have ALWAYS been the moral equivalents of organized crime bosses and street-gang shot-callers. Acknowledging the banality of their evil strikes me as … progress!

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY