There are a number of standard arguments for military conscription. But Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry’s recent essay for Cato Unbound is unusual for claiming that conscription can be justified on libertarian grounds. With the possible exception of strict pacifism, it’s difficult to imagine an ideology more antithetical to conscription than libertarianism. As it turns out, most of […]
Archive | Conscription
Rep. Charles Rangel Cites Possible Intervention in Syria as a Justification for his Call for Reinstating the Draft
Democratic Representative Charles Rangel cites the possibility of intervention in Syria as a justification for reinstating the draft, a cause he has long advocated: America seems increasingly inclined to engage in a new military conflict every few years, faced with a new populace to defend, a new democracy to design, and a new dictator to […]
Women in Combat and the Constitutionality of Male-Only Draft Registration
By Ilya Somin on January 31, 2013 10:50 am in Conscription, Sex Discrimination, War and Armed Conflict
The Pentagon’s recent decision to open up combat roles to women has led legal scholar Gerard Magliocca wonder whether our current system of male-only draft registration is still constitutional. Conservative commentator Dave Carter predicts that the courts will rule that it is not, and women will be made subject to the draft. In the 1981 […]
Charles Rangel’s Case for Conscription
If the Pentagon’s recent decision to open up combat positions to women leads conservative Dave Carter to worry that women will be drafted, liberal Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel embraces the idea and calls for the establishment of a draft that applies to both men and women: Since January 2003, at the height of the debate […]
Women and the Draft
By Ilya Somin on January 26, 2013 4:45 pm in Conscription, Sex Discrimination, War and Armed Conflict
The Pentagon’s recent decision to abolish most restrictions on women serving in combat leads conservative commentator Dave Carter to worry that women will now be subject to the military draft: It was 22 or 23 years ago, I think, that I wrote in the Air Force Times a cautionary article on the combat exclusion that […]
The Decline of Conscription
Economist Joshua Hall has an interesting article describing an oft-ignored, but very important expansion of freedom over the last several decades: the declining use of military conscription. He notes that, as of 1970, some 80% of the world’s governments used conscription, including the US and many of the democratic nations of Western Europe. By 2009, […]