By Austin Anderholt | USA

If you want to fight a war, you need soldiers. If you don’t have enough people wanting to fight in your war, you have to draft them. A draft is when a government takes men that don’t consent to fight in, nor necessarily agree with the causes of, a war. The statist in you might say “But we need drafts for when very few people want to fight in a war!” I used to think just like that, but I was wrong. Here’s why:

People, both for and against the draft can agree on one main concept: Wars shouldn’t be decided by how many people with guns want a war. For “pro-drafters”, those “people with guns” are potential soldiers. For “anti-drafters” like myself, those “people with guns” are members of the government. Think about this: We are living in a system where your life and death are decided by a group of people, called a congress, that can vote you off to war. In my book, that’s slavery. You own yourself. You’ve never signed any contract that allowed the “government” to do this to you. You’ve never stated you would risk your life for oil or “freedom” or the safety of the group of people that happen to live in an invisible grouping of lines on a map known as a “country”. You own yourself.

You might be thinking “I get the point, but we have to have a draft when there’s a viable cause! We need to have Congress and democracy to decide when we should be in a war!” As I’ve written about before, democracy IS slavery in the sense that other people are voting on what you should personally do, and society would be better off without it. You don’t owe anyone any service. You are an individual, and it is your duty to protect yourself, your children, and no other body of people. In a free society, one might voluntarily donate to a theoretical cause to “keep your neighborhood safe”, but NO ONE should be able to FORCE you to pay for the protection of people that happen to be in the aforementioned lines known as a “country”. When people get things handed to them for free, this creates a dependency. When people are being forced to give up their salary to a warmongering nation, it makes those poor taxpayers less likely to want to live there.

“But what about the European front of World War Two? Should we have just let Jews and other innocent groups be massacred relentlessly because they couldn’t defend themselves?” I’ll remind you that the Nazi GOVERNMENT deemed the holocaust perfectly legal. In an ideal (government free) world, we are ruled by voluntary and consensual agreement. You wouldn’t be massacred just because the people in charge say so. In a truly free society, you own yourself, and no government can rule you. The free market would most likely create private security firms to protect individuals. That means that if Nazis tried to attack you, they’d be going against some major corporations and the corporations paid for by any other private individuals they might have tried to attack. No government would ever be able to torture and murder millions of it’s own citizens anymore.

In conclusion, drafts are not only unnecessary but enslaving, not only to those drafted but those who are unwillingly paying for that draft. A truly free society would never allow for such a monstrosity to exist. Someone forcing you to risk your life for their personal cause is not okay, and would never exist in a free society.