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From: carnes@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Military conscription/slavery
Message-ID: <308@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 16-Jan-85 14:16:03 EST
Article-I.D.: gargoyle.308
Posted: Wed Jan 16 14:16:03 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 17-Jan-85 12:55:27 EST
Organization: U. Chicago - Computer Science
Lines: 37

Jeff Sonntag writes:
> You are hereby challenged to provide a definition of slavery which
> excludes conscription. 

Most dictionaries have something like "the condition of being a slave."  Not
good enough?  Here is how the OED defines "slave":

	One who is the property of, and entirely subject to, another person,
	whether by capture, purchase, or birth; a servant completely 
	divested of freedom and personal rights.

Aristotle defines slavery as the ownership of one person by another as his
personal possession.  I doubt that even libertarians believe that a
commanding officer owns his subordinates and can sell them at the local
slave auction.  Also, the authority of officers, and even of the Commander-
in-Chief, is strictly limited by law and military code under a republican
form of government.  Your superior cannot order you to marry his daughter,
shoot yourself, or buy shares of IBM with your salary.  Draftees and other
military personnel have well-defined rights in the US armed services,
although they are not identical with the rights of civilians.  

The 1984 Libertarian Party platform declares that conscription is
"involuntary servitude"; "servitude" as generally used is a synonym for
"slavery."  Libertarians believe that conscription is unjust.  It is also
rhetorically effective to denounce the draft as "slavery"; therefore, by
Libertarian Logic, it IS slavery.  By the same process of reasoning we can
arrive at the conclusion that mandatory seat-belt laws constitute slavery.
There was a story in the NYT a few days ago about a New York woman who
claimed that the lives of her two sons, who had been in an accident, had
been saved by NY's new seat-belt law.  They had not used seat belts before,
but buckled up this time "because it's the law," they said.  In a letter to
Gov. Cuomo their mother expressed gratitude, for some peculiar reason, for
the seat-belt law.  Too bad the lady wasn't a (consistent) libertarian:  she
would have screamed at the governor for taking away her family's freedom and
the story might have made Page One, to the great satisfaction of
libertarians no doubt.  

Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes