“Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents, & parents from their children, & compel them to fight the battles of any war, in which the folly or the wickedness of Government may engage it? Under what concealment has this power lain hidden, which now for the first time comes forth, with a tremendous & baleful aspect, to trample down & destroy the dearest rights of personal liberty?” — Daniel Webster, address to the House of Representatives, December 9, 1814, arguing against a proposed military draft
Ask a young person whether he personally consented to everything the federal government has the legal authority to require of him. If he answers no, the conventional reply is that direct consent isn’t necessary: he is represented by elected officials. But representation is not agency in the ordinary sense. He has signed no contract with his representative, cannot direct his votes, and cannot terminate the relationship even if the representative breaks all his campaign promises.
Furthermore, he is still subject to their legislation even if he didn’t vote or if the legislation was passed before he was eligible to vote. How many people alive today voted for legislation establishing a legal counterfeiting racket known as the federal reserve or the income tax and its associated hit squad, the IRS?
Or the Selective Service Act of 1918?
Has government offered today’s constituents to vote on these and other laws passed before they were born?
The same is true for the president and his cabinet. People vote for Dr. Jekyll hoping he doesn’t turn out to be Mr. Hyde, but if he does, or worse, it is not easy to undo the damage.
In Rights of Man, Part the First, Thomas Paine critiqued Member of Parliament Edmund Burke’s defense of the English government in his pamphlet Reflections on the Revolution in France. Paine cites Richard Price’s sermon of November 4, 1789 as upsetting to Burke. Price—a Welsh-born Presbyterian minister and author of Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776)—argued that England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 had established three fundamental rights of the people: “To chuse our own governors; to cashier them for misconduct; and to frame a government for ourselves.”
Burke denied all three. He said previous generations had constitutionally settled Britain’s government and thereby bound their descendants. As I wrote previously, Paine argued that,
Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generation which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. . . .
It has been thought a considerable advance toward establishing the principles of freedom, to say, that government is a compact between those who govern and those who are governed: but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for as a man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governors to form such a compact with.
The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government; and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.
Military Conscription
Paine was saying no generation possesses the right to contract away the freedom of succeeding generations. Yet this is what government has done.
As war broke out in Europe in 1914, the Wilson administration was eager to join it officially while a peace-loving public reelected Wilson in 1916 on the slogan that “he kept us out of war.” As historian Ralph Raico wrote,
. . .the United States became the arsenal of the Entente. Bound now by financial as well as sentimental ties to England, much of American big business worked in one way or another for the Allied cause. . . . The Wall Street Journal and other organs of the business elite were noisily pro-British at every turn.
In January 1917, German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann instructed Germany’s minister in Mexico that, if unrestricted submarine warfare brought the United States into the war, Germany should propose an alliance with Mexico. Germany would provide financial assistance and support Mexico in recovering Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. British intelligence intercepted and decoded it and gave it to the Wilson administration. American newspapers published it on March 1.
Unrestricted submarine warfare did what the earlier Lusitania sinking alone couldn’t. Germany was destroying Allied shipping at the rate of 300,000 tons per week. On April 2, 1917, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany, based mostly on the latter’s policy of no-holds submarine attacks. On April 4, the Senate voted approval 82-6, and on April 6 the House voted 373-50 for war.
Public opinion was “inflamed.” But there was a problem. As I wrote in a previous article,
The US president was calling for American boys to risk their lives to make the world “safe for democracy,” but very few hands shot up. Perhaps they were more in tune with progressive Wisconsin Senator Robert M. La Follette, who told Congress that the poor would be “the ones called upon to rot in the trenches.”. . .
With the country’s youth showing no interest in dying or killing for corrupt politicians, Wilson decided to bring out the bayonets. On May 18, 1917, he signed the Selective Service Act to register over 10 million men, from which over 2.8 million were drafted. In an apparent bid to make himself and his administration the inspiration for Big Brother, Wilson added that the draft was “in no sense a conscription of the unwilling; it is, rather, selection from a nation which has volunteered in mass.”
That, you will immediately recognize, was a bald-faced lie. Who bore the consequences? Not the politicians who voted for war. As always, it was young men—ages 21-30 originally, updated to 18-45 later—who had no influence on the decision to go to war, who if they resisted were subject to fine and imprisonment. “Volunteers” who didn’t register got a year in prison, and anyone found obstructing the conscripting process was subject to a $10,000 fine and 20 years in prison. According to encyclopedia.com,
The World War I draft law of 1917 provided exemptions from combat only for “well recognized” religious groups. Payment for substitutes was not permitted. Exempt individuals were required to report for noncombatant service in military camps, where conditions were harsh and pacifists were often treated poorly.
Resisters who refused such service were sent to federal prisons, where many were chained to prison walls, sprayed with cold water from fire hoses, made to stand naked outside at night, and beaten. Some prisoners died.
The war cost over 117,000 American lives, and left another 205,000 wounded.
Much had changed legally since Webster’s speech and Wilson’s declaration. Albert Einstein—a pacifist until Hitler came along—in 1930 said, “even if only two percent of those assigned to perform military service should announce their refusal to fight, governments would be powerless” because they lacked the prison space to house them. But there’s always the firing squad.
When millions can be annihilated from a keyboard, warmongers might not need conscripts. A society based on free market principles, meaning one without a state, would not eliminate warmongers but it would make their mania far less attractive.
