Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom

by Ron Paul

  Sometimes the domestic and international intersect in ways that remind us of this truth. This is when disobedience is especially necessary. There are many unsung heroes who have stood up against the involuntary servitude of the draft, especially when fighting in undeclared and unconstitutional wars. One of the best known to suffer prosecution for his beliefs and resistance was Muhammad Ali. Though he had joined the Nation of Islam and argued he was a conscientious objector, he was still arrested for refusing to serve and go to Vietnam in 1966. His summation of his beliefs as to why he refused became classic. Simply, he said: “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong.”1 No other American did either!

  Ali was found guilty in a Houston court in 1967, sentenced to five years in prison, and fined $10,000—the jury took twenty-one minutes. He lost his title and was banned from boxing for seven years. After five years, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of Ali. He never served a day in prison but nevertheless paid a high price for his convictions.

  Sports writer Harold Conrad said after the conviction and sentencing: “He threw this life away on one toss of the dice for something he believed in. Not many folks do that.”2 True, “not many folks do that,” but I disagree that he threw his life away. That fight, against the state, he eventually won, though at a cost, and history may show that it was the best of all his fights and the one that should have given him the greatest sense of dignity and pride.

  At the time, Ali’s resistance to war and the military draft was seen by a majority of Americans to be “unpatriotic.” But they did not understand that patriotism is the act of standing up to the government when the government is wrong, and at great risk stand firmly on principles that protect the freedoms of all people. Those who resist the state nonviolently, based on their own principles, deserve our support.

  The opposite approach to protest is the use of violence. Violence is a terrible agent of social change. Individuals advocating or participating in violence, on occasion, will associate with certain groups and falsely give the impression that they are acting as a bona fide member of the group. The media rarely have any desire to sort out the facts, especially if the group that is being wrongly blamed represents anti–big government views. FBI agents will infiltrate certain groups they deem dangerous. Government itself, spying on any private group, is dangerous to our Fourth Amendment rights, which is something people tend to forget. The argument usually is that it’s necessary to keep the American people safe. There have been many examples where the government official not only urges the breaking of the law but participates in it so the suspects can be caught red-handed. It was this abuse of the law that led to the tragedy of Ruby Ridge (where the government killed a man’s wife in a pointless hunt in 19923) and the entrapment of various “militia” groups. It has been used in drug investigations as well. The use of government agents to encourage the breaking of laws in a sting operation represents government violence that can surpass the violence of the suspected criminals.

  I personally don’t know of any organized group that is calling for the violent overthrow of our government. There are many individuals demanding a more just system that doesn’t reward the well connected with bailouts, nor punish those who ask only to be totally self-reliant and not be forced to be a ward or victim of the state.

  The vast majority of Americans detest the mere thought of violence as a legitimate tool for bringing about political changes. Nearly everyone still believes that changes are available through the political process. Many who feel helpless working in the very messy political system still see the benefits of working to change attitudes through education and understanding. Others endorse the principle of peaceful civil disobedience as a means for bringing about political changes. This is a legitimate tool that was practiced by many in the civil rights movement in order to eliminate arcane laws that forced segregation.

  Martin Luther King, Jr., understood its merit and the obvious risk of imprisonment and becoming the victim of government violence. Civil disobedience is a form of personal nullification of unfair and unconstitutional laws. Even the current left-wing pundits, who condemn all nullification arguments by strict constitutionalists, would hardly fail to see this comparison.

  Civil disobedience is a process whereby the weak and defenseless can resist the violence perpetuated by the state. The great danger is that when government gets too powerful and abusive, a greater number of citizens give up on education, politics, and peaceful resistance to bring about change and drift toward violent resistance to the state. The line between them is always murky, and some people are always overly anxious to resort to combating government violence with citizen violence. Though this type of conflict resulted in our own revolution against Britain, my personal nature compels me to argue for peaceful persuasion to bring about the understanding necessary to advance the cause of liberty.

  People must understand that we can’t use violence to have our own way over others—nor should the agents of our government have that power. Even a majority vote should never be accepted as legitimatizing government’s use of violence against the people.

  King, Martin Luther, Jr. 2001. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King. New York: Grand Central Publishing.

  Rockwell, Llewellyn H., Jr. 2008. The Left, the Right, and the State. Auburn, AL: Mises Institute.

  Thoreau, Henry David. [1849] 1998. Civil Disobedience. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

  CONSCRIPTION

  Do we own our bodies and ourselves? We do, and it is based on this belief that we, as a country and society, reject slavery. We are not shy about saying it: Slavery is immoral. In the same way, moral law should be all that is needed to prohibit the state from forcing certain individuals into involuntary servitude in the military for the purpose of waging wars against an enemy, real or imaginary.

  The Constitution provides no authority to draft certain groups of young people to serve in the military. Conscription was not used in the Revolutionary War and it was soundly rejected by the Congress in the midst of the British attack on Washington in the War of 1812.

  Lincoln precipitated draft riots during the Civil War, and the effort to force conscription on the American people hurt the war effort and offered no benefit. It was Woodrow Wilson in his holy war to promote worldwide democracy who established the principle of the draft as a patriotic duty. The Thirteenth Amendment outlawing involuntary servitude has been a narrowly construed amendment, not applying to the eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-olds most susceptible to military slavery.

  Just as an income tax sends the message about who owns us and the fruits of our labor (even when the tax is only 1 percent), the draft and the registration for it remind every eighteen-year-old that ultimately the government controls his fate. The state can kidnap you at any time. This is an outrage that should never be tolerated in any society.

  A free society, valued by the people, would be adequately defended by volunteers, without age, sex, or any other restrictions. It is the unpopular wars, the big ones, that require conscription, and the state wants always to be prepared. It is great that we haven’t had a draft for nearly forty years, but the requirement that all young people register for a possible draft persists.1 If we are to regain our liberties, one change that should be made is to repeal draft registration. Getting rid of the need for a standing voluntary army or armies backed up by the draft requires, in addition to honoring individual rights, a foreign policy of nonintervention that diminishes the chances of war.

  Military historians have shown that a conscripted army has no economic advantage over a volunteer army. Likewise, there are no military advantages for using conscripted soldiers for conflict.2

  A draft can never be fair; it can’t be universal since there’s never a need for everyone to be put on active duty. Discrimination by age is the first tool used to pick and choose those who must go. In our times, someone over thirty-five is just as capable of serving in the military as someone eighteen. Yet rarely are those over thirty-five, forty-
five, or fifty-five ever forced into the military. And there are also many other reasons for deferrals or exemptions: health, student status, religious beliefs, needs in a family business, needs in industry, etc.

  There are always plans to make the next draft fair and without exemptions, but it has never worked that way in the past. The rich were allowed to pay a substitute to fight in their place in the Civil War, and ever since then there have always been exceptions, many of them political. The wars since World War II were never declared, and Korea and Vietnam were fought with draftees. The example set by some famous “chicken-hawks” not only should draw severe criticism from all Americans but show how a draft can be manipulated by privileged individuals.

  Chicken-hawks are individuals who dodged the draft when their numbers came up but who later became champions of senseless and undeclared wars when they were influencing foreign policy. Former Vice President Cheney is the best example of this disgraceful behavior. When it became known that Cheney got five student deferrals and never served in the 1960s, he was quizzed about it and blew it off by saying that he had “other priorities.” At the time he said this he was the chief architect of the war in Iraq, and he has remained dedicated to our omnipresence in the Middle East for the purpose of remaking it in our and Israel’s interest.

  In Congress, at this time, there is essentially no interest in reinstating the draft, but neither is there any interest in my legislation to repeal the Selective Service Act. The strongest current support for the draft comes from the Congressional Black Caucus, which is a bit ironic since minorities were discriminated against in the 1960s in implementing the draft. Minorities served in greater numbers during the Vietnam and the Korean wars and suffered a greater percentage of fatalities and casualties than whites. At times there were justified outcries from minority groups because the Dick Cheneys of the world were able to evade the draft while minorities suffered disproportionately.

  Now the argument against this position is that, though it’s a voluntary army, blacks disproportionately serve and suffer casualties compared to whites. And this is true. But today no one serves who doesn’t volunteer. It hardly makes sense that the draft is the salvation to this dilemma since it was and always has been arbitrary. But the proponents argue that the next time there’s a draft it will be different. It never is.

  One thing that has helped recent recruitment has been the weak economy; people join for economic reasons, possibly explaining why minorities volunteer in greater proportion than whites. But even before the recent downturn, a weaker economy than the government admits to over the past decade pushed a lot of people into augmenting their pay by joining the Reserves and the Guard units, never expecting that Bush and Obama would be so dependent on the reservists for multiple tours of duty to the Middle East.

  Prohibiting members of the military to leave when their tours are up is essentially a de facto draft—this stop-loss program has been severely criticized by the personnel and the families who suffer from it.

  With the current military exhausted and the increasing odds of armed conflict, the specter of the draft is once again raised. For now, though, the disastrously weak economy will serve the interest of the state by prompting many individuals to volunteer, despite the risks involved.

  Conscription should never be part of a free society. It’s not permitted in the United States since our Constitution does not provide the authority to force someone into involuntary duty to fight a war. Slavery is precisely forbidden, and that’s what involuntary service is.

  Countries that conscript or have the capacity to conscript are more likely to get involved in unnecessary political wars. Much more important than having a military made up of massive standing armies, navies, air forces, marines, military contractors, and the CIA to make us “safe” would be to have a foreign policy that makes sense. It would be a lot cheaper, and we would never have to resort to the draft to defend the country and keep us safe.

  Ronald Reagan, among other conservatives, opposed the draft. Robert Taft (“Mr. Republican”) was a strong opponent. Hanging in my congressional office is the following quote from Taft: “A compulsory draft is… far more typical of a totalitarian nation than of a democratic nation. The theory behind it leads directly to totalitarianism. It is absolutely opposed to the principle of individual liberty which has always been considered a part of American democracy” (August 14, 1940).

  Henderson, David R. 2010. “From ‘Porous’ to ‘Ruthless’ Conscription, 1776–1917.” Independent Review. http://www.independent.org.

  Higgs, Robert. 2005. Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society. Independent Institute. http://www.independent.org.

  Webster, Daniel. 1814. “On Conscription,” reprinted in Left and Right, Volume 1, Number 2, Spring 1965.

  DEMAGOGUES

  Politics breeds demagogues—politicians and media pundits alike. The word “demagogue” itself dates to the ancient world because the phenomenon is that old. Demagogues seek influence and political power by appealing to the prejudices, emotions, fears, and expectations of the public. They do not enlighten; they browbeat and play rhetorical games.

  Demagoguery is the enemy of liberty and serves the interest of power seekers across the political spectrum. Government attracts all those who enjoy using power over others and those who convince themselves that average people need “smart” people to take care of them. And only the demagogues can provide the “wisdom” to appoint those who should rule over us. When the goal of political action is no longer the defense of liberty, no word other than demagoguery can describe the despicable nature of politics.

  Demagogues manipulate a political issue in a manner to obscure or distort truth with emotionalism and prejudice. The goal of all demagogues is to achieve power at all costs.

  Dictators accomplish this by brute force; in democracies, demagogues do it the same way but camouflage the brute force with idealistic declarations of being humanitarian saviors. Even brutal dictators must convince a gullible public that the violence is required to do good for the people. This is true whether it’s Soviet-style communism, French Jacobinism, the environmental alarmists, the current neoconservatives, or the cradle-to-grave welfarists.

  Though the demagogues on the right and left are true competitors for power, they share a belief in state power and the techniques and tools of the demagogue. The purpose is to take a principled stand by the proponents of liberty and reason and turn it into support for something ugly and mean by gross distortion of the truth.

  The right is vocal in condemning opposition to the Bush-Obama doctrine of preventive war as being unpatriotic, un-American, and against the troops. If one opposes a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning, it’s considered unpatriotic and un-American. If one lacks enthusiasm for the war on drugs, it’s charged that that person doesn’t care about kids and would promote drug use for them. Opposing foreign aid draws charges, from right and left, of nefarious motivations. Also, among this crowd, if you have doubts about using the federal government as an instrument for imposing a particular cultural or religious agenda, you are regarded with suspicion and called an opponent of uprightness and morality.

  The left is every bit as aggressive in impugning their opponents’ character when criticizing a principled stand for private property. Defending states’ rights and the Tenth Amendment, according to the left, is to flirt with racism and even support slavery. But they get tongue-tied when challenged on the issue by a state like California legalizing medicinal marijuana, whether or not they endorse the heavy hand of the Federal Drug Administration’s overriding of all state laws on the drug issue.

  The great heinous thought crime related to race relations is to argue that private property owners have a right to use that property as they please, as long as they do not commit violence against another person. Strict private property control is now seen as the most evil position anyone can take. To argue for the freedom to choose, which necessarily means the freedom to include or e
xclude others, is seen as evidence of malice. Evidently, property can only be used by permission from the state. International, national, state, and local governments along with various courts “own” the land and all businesses, and we must answer to the bureaucrats to get legal permits to use it.

  To suggest that, in a free society where property is owned by the people, the owners of a business establishment have a right to pick and choose customers and workers and to make only mutually agreed-to economic transactions is seen as the worst possible gaffe. In fact, this right is at the core of the libertarian position. It is the essence of the freedom of association. There is no getting around it: Freedom of association also implies the freedom not to associate. To restrict this association based on some subjective evaluation of a person’s motivations is necessarily to impose on the freedom and rights of others.

  A serious-minded liberal or progressive, not the demagogue, should consider the analogy of the First Amendment. It is a well-known and accepted tenet of the left that the First Amendment is designed to protect controversial and disagreeable speech. Benign conversation needs no protection. All religions and political beliefs are protected, even those considered bizarre, as long as they are nonviolent in nature.

  Use of property should be viewed the same way. In fact, free speech is protected by a clear right of private property. The properties that house magazines, newspapers, electronic media, the Internet, and churches are (supposed to be) immune from government surveillance and control. Prior restraint in the propagation of information is prohibited. If property is protected for these purposes, it shouldn’t be such a giant leap to understand why all property should be equally protected.