Re: Compulsory service

Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@calweb.com)
Sun, 20 Apr 1997 16:18:33 -0700 (PDT)


> You are speaking from theory. In reality, I don't think anyone has yet
> shown that a society without compulsion can compete with other societies
> in the real world. I am aware that there are some good ideas floating
> around about how to provide for common defense without military
> conscription, create an educated electorate and a healthy
> information-service-based economy without compulsory schooling, provide a
> stable money supply without a government monopoly on coinage, etc. But
> until they have been proven to work, it's silly to get indignant about it.

First you might prove to me that your idea of society works. What's
your chosen example, the US? Where hundreds of thousands of innocent
men and women are jailed every year, whole cities are impoverished by
inflation of fiat currency and barriers to business entry, twice as much
money is stolen from working families as is necessary for education, and
yet fails miserably to educate them, tens of thousands are killed by
overregulation of medicine, thousands have been sent to kill and die on
foreign soil for political reasons, thousands more have died in secret
medical experiments and state-sactioned murders? Is their blood just a
theory to you?

If it seems silly to you to be indignant about such things, I suggest
that you are simply lucky enough never to have felt the shackles on
your own hands or to have buried good friends. Utopia might not be
possible, but since I can't run simulations of whole societies to find
out, I must rely on principle and reason. Reason tells me that a free
society would work, and would be less likely to commit the atrocities
that every govenment in human history has committed. It would be
inhuman not to work toward that goal.