Influential economists helped end the draft 30 years ago: Volunteers both cheaper and fairer

If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion. So goes the joke.

Most of that reputation for wishy-washiness comes from economists trying to predict things like next year's interest rate. You might as well toss a coin.

The volunteer force is a great feedback mechanism to overzealous politicians. If active duty and reservist military people have to spend too much time deployed on non military missions they will probably not re enlist and recruiting will become more difficult. The numbers in the military will decrease and therefore less deployments can occur. The only way to break out of this feedback cycle is to start up conscription.
It will be interesting to see if we have conscription re enacted by the end of this decade.

Economists had nothing to do with ending the draft. This article is total fabrication

The desire of most middle class Americans not to allow their sons to be sent to war ended the draft. It was the issue George McGovern was going to use to Defeat Nixon in 1972. That is why Nixon proposed it, and why the congress approved it. It was a way to remove the draft from the Nixon re-election effort in 1972, and do a very popular thing with voters. It took away the draft as a Democratic issue for George McGovern. The Democrats in congress has to pass it or Nixon would have used their refusal as a very effective wedge issue in the 1972 election.

The draft was the only real issue George McGovern had. Nixon took it away from him and won a huge landslide.

Economists have an exaggerated impression of their own importance.

If we killed all the economists how would anyone ever know it had been done!

And they should be paid, too!

I'm still out of pocket more than $60,000. Contemporaries who did not get drafted paid off their mortgages decades ago and their kids went to the finest schools.

On the other hand, I know for certain that I am morally superior in all respects who did not serve.

In the decade that followed, Friedman and others - Walter Oi, William Meckling, Martin Anderson and Alan Greenspan among them - carried the intellectual day by showing how the draft was "more costly than the market alternative."

It's worked so far, but there's no guarantee it would work forever. If anything like WW-II should ever happen again, the volunteer military would not be adequate.

Moreover, there's a lesson from VietNam which nobody seems to have ever learned. The draft was always a form of slavery which we tolerated in times of dire emergency since, if we ever lost something like WW-II, we'd ALL be slaves, i.e. it wouldn't matter.

There was absolutely no rational basis, however, for drafting the boy next door and telling him it was somehow or other his patriotic duty to risk being killed or maimed in some sort of a game like VietNam which was not being prosecuted in a serious manner, and which nobody even had the decency to declare as a war.

If an American president has to be able to play games at times, then you play games with petty cash and a few dozen professional soldiers of fortune the way Reagan did in central America, and not with major sums of treasure and hundreds of thousands of draftees as LBJ and Nixon did.

To my thinking, since the draft will probably be back again at some point, there needs to be a law or an ammendment to the constitution stating a minimal circumstance under which draftees could ever be used in combat, and the absolute minimum as I see it would be a declaration of war and a full commitment to destroy some adversary.

It will be interesting to see if we have conscription re enacted by the end of this decade.

Conscription is so unpalatable that it will never return unless we are in a deperate fight for our survival. By that, I mean armies are assembling and preparing to invade us. Our war with islam cannot be fought with a large standing army. I see us exploiting technology in the future, not sending in cannon fodder. Conscription is dead.

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