"In his testimony before the commission, Mr. Westmoreland said he did not want to command an army of mercenaries. Mr. Friedman interrupted, 'General, would you rather command an army of slaves?' Mr. Westmoreland replied, 'I don't like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves.' Mr. Friedman then retorted, 'I don't like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries. If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general; we are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher.'"
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Uncle Milty On The Draft
From Greg Mankiw's blog, this is MILTON FRIEDMAN ON THE DRAFT:
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Perhaps if the military offered better pay, the representation of minorities (I would say lower income folk in general) wouldn't be so skewed. You have to pay people an awful lot to go die, it seems. Some of us have quite better things to do. Then again, some of us really don't (monetarily speaking) and it's this that the draft proponents decry. "It's unfair," they will say. But is that a problem to be solved by what Friedman essentially calls involuntary enslavement? I thought we were past that...
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