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Just Say No to Draft Registration for Women — and Men

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Congressman Alexander Pirnie (R-NY) drawing th...
Congressman Alexander Pirnie (R-NY) drawing the first capsule for the Selective Service draft, Dec 1, 1969 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Testifying before the US Senate’s Armed Services Committee in early February, Generals Mark A. Milley (the US Army’s chief of staff) and Robert B. Neller (commandant of the US Marine Corps) endorsed extending mandatory Selective Service registration to women. Because, you know, equality.

I have a better idea. It’s time to end draft registration for everyone. Because, you know, freedom.

The US hasn’t involuntarily inducted men into military service since 1973, but reinstated mandatory registration in 1980. Ever since, the shadow of legal slavery has loomed over the lives of American males aged 18 through 26.

Yes, slavery. There’s no other way to describe requiring someone to work for you whether he (or she) wants to or not. Conscription is an indefensible moral abomination, and would be even if it didn’t come with the risk of violent death attached.

The draft, and mandatory registration for it, are also just flat stupid.

Who am I to say this? I’m a former Marine infantry NCO (1984-1995, honorable discharge) who served in Desert Storm. I’m also a former Selective Service System board member (appointed by president George W. Bush in 2004 to a 20-year term; I resigned after eight years when I moved out of my local board’s area).

Since the 1970s, US military doctrine has successfully transitioned. Instead of losing wars by throwing large numbers of minimally trained warm bodies into ground combat (e.g. Korea and Vietnam), today’s military wins wars with superior technology (yes, it loses post-war occupation/insurgency scenarios, but the draft wouldn’t fix that). Returning to the draft would be like trading in a Tesla for a Model T.

Furthermore, wars that don’t enjoy broad support from the people who have to fight them — support involving walks down to the recruitment office to enlist — are wars that shouldn’t be fought and are already lost.

The Selective Service System isn’t really a budget buster. It runs on $25 million a year or so, chump change by comparison to most government programs, with a few hundred paid employees and a few thousand volunteer board appointees.

But once again, the draft is stupid and evil, as is maintaining mandatory registration. Why spend $25 million a year on something that’s stupid and evil? And why double the idiocy and the immorality by expanding its reach to women?

Let’s end this draft nonsense, immediately and permanently.

Thomas L. Knapp 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.

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The Race is On: Uber versus the Real Sharing Economy

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A new kind of ride has arrived just in time.

Early in February, hundreds of Uber drivers converged on the company’s office in Long Island City, Queens to object to sweeping fare reductions.  Drivers must charge 15 percent less — while still paying Uber the same percentage, plus the ongoing vehicular expenses.  All with no tips allowed.

Uber justifies the fare cuts as a response to a slow season, and asserts that drivers make up the difference from shortened waiting times between gigs.  It remains unclear why there should be a better view of such conditions from the boardroom than from the street.

For that matter, why can’t such a service be street level through and through?  Mere weeks after the Uber strike, Christopher David is launching the Arcade City platform, which he describes to CoinTelegraph as “a decentralized Uber” whose earnings “won’t go to line the pockets of investors or sustain a corporate hierarchy” but “will be reinvested in our drivers, and in improving the customer experience. … Arcade City will decentralize [fare pricing] decisions to the level of the driver and their customers.”

Worker ownership models don’t depend on unproven technology.  Creator-owned comics publishers have been viable since the brick-and-mortar early 1990s.  An era of apps and Internet ubiquity enables similar enterprises in a variety of fields that will only increase.

So why is the ridesharing field dominated by a handful of big for-profit companies like Uber and Lyft?

Maybe it’s because, for all their clashes with the existing municipal regulatory infrastructure, they’re not all that different from it.  As David notes, “Uber’s approach is to push governments to regulate ridesharing in a manner favorable to their particular business model, stacking the deck against smaller competitors.”

Thus, while the number of traditional cab drivers is strictly limited, the Uber model merely shifts such restrictions to more subtle forms.  If repealing such regulations altogether seems too drastic — the medallion system was seen as a way to prevent a race to the bottom in fares — the ones that most directly suppress worker organizing and wages would be a good start.  And with drivers taking advantage of local knowledge of demand of what riders are willing to pay, it might be the intermediaries who see their earnings race to the bottom.

Only time will tell if Arcade City will succeed.  But the smart money’s on something more like it than Uber — if given the chance.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org).

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Election 2016: The Banality of Evil on Steroids

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English: Chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner (stan...
English: Chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner (standing, right) questions witness Henryk Ross (seated, at microphone) during the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As World War Two ground to an end in Europe, the Third Reich’s killer bureaucrats finally started displaying some good old common sense. They began emptying out the death camps and destroying as many records as possible pertaining to their “Final Solution,” like cats diligently covering up their dirty deeds in the litter box.

It didn’t save them in the end. As Hannah Arendt pointed out in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, their work was just too openly conducted and too accepted by themselves and everyone around them as, well, normal, to be successfully hidden after the fact. But at least they tried.

This year’s crop of Republican presidential candidates could learn a lesson or two from the final gestures of Eichmann and company.  If they had their wits about them, they’d hide their sick light under a bushel and at least pretend to give a hoot about quaint concepts like human rights, international law and the US Constitution.

Instead, the GOP’s presidential nomination race has become a rhetorical arms race to see who can position himself as most boisterously supportive of reprising all the crimes we’ve doggedly and piously pursued and hanged the Nazis for over the last 70 years.

Ted Cruz wants to know if sand can be made to glow in the dark.

Donald Trump chortles at a supporter’s condemnation of Cruz as a “pu**y” for his insufficiency of fervor in support of torture.

The whole  Republican pack (now that Rand Paul is out) foams from the jowls at the prospect of using, rather than curbing, the executive powers Barack Obama has expanded and abused over the course of his two terms, including but not limited to waging war without Congress’s permission and assassinating US citizens without charge or trial (John Kasich wants to “punch Russia in the nose,” but at least Vladimir Putin bothers to deny murdering Alexander Litvinenko; the US brags about murdering Anwar al-Awlaki).

True, they’re all veritable George McGoverns next to Hillary Clinton, the most bloodthirsty woman in politics since Elizabeth Bathory, but that seems to be more a matter of means and opportunity than of motive.

And true, Bernie Sanders comes off as ever so slightly less insane on all of these issues, but his actual record reminds me of  Barack Obama’s whole hope-y change-y schtick and how that panned out.

Unfortunately, 90%+ of American voters will likely pull the lever for one of these murderous sociopaths come November instead of supporting an anti-torture, anti-war, limited government, pro-freedom candidate (they’re called “Libertarians”).

And just like the “good Germans” who supported their leaders’  crimes until doing so became embarrassing, those voters will bear responsibility for what follows.

Thomas L. Knapp 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.

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