Should Libertarians Support Conscription? They Both Disagreed.

Nations may legitimately compel military or civic service from its citizens. We both had disagree on this one. Whose turn is it to go first? Go ahead. So I I'm I'm I'm close on this one because I think if you accept taxation or some form of it for national defense, you know, taxation already is conscription. It's conscription of labor. These are very adjacent kinds of concepts. I think we do want to go in a voluntary direction when possible. But if it's a given that you need service, I you know, I like directions that potentially segregate things, you know, sort of the the starship troopers model of your service guarantees uh citizenship. Uh to me it's like uh, you know, I think uh I I wouldn't I because I I talked earlier about that right to exit. I think it would be wrong to say that someone born in America absolutely must serve as a soldier and defend their nation simply because they were born here.

No, but if I say to that person, you have the right to leave, you have the right to be a non voting resident, or you have the right to be a citizen, at which point you have some commitments to your nation, this is a framework to me that is is is pretty morally acceptable and probably good. Yeah, well, Vivek Romoswame actually said that himself and he got jumped on because he says he thinks there might there should potentially be some kind of a national service. And if that means that you're picking up garbage in a park or something like that, then you know, so be it. And you But is it optional or not? That's the to me, that's a lot of times when people say this, they don't mean optional. To me, it's like I I it's all about it. I think it's all about i the question is like is it an existential question?

I think if if you're fighting for your actual existence, probably it's it's good. And if you're not, if you're like us and you don't you're not every war there what that you're fighting is pretty much a war of choice to a large extent, then no, you don't need compulsory military. And this is also that's you know that's a very good point because with a lot of these, I also think it's important, and this is a David Friedman criticism that he likes to make that is applicable to a lot of these, which is we have to compare the government and the results that we get, you know, not to some you know, theoretical situation. And so if the reality is every time we've actually needed to conscript people, you know, it didn't seem to be it was for a war that ended up being not necessary, and anytime that we needed to fight a war, there were plenty of whaling people, that should be a pretty strong hint that you know we're not doing this, you know, the right kind of way.

And so we have to compare, like, well, what happens, what's our track record of actually using conscription? I I like theoreticals, uh, because I think they're useful. And we're gonna have to be faced with a question soon of whether or not we're gonna colonize other planets, which is why I'm looking forward to talking about um expansion of our of our country. But if you are uh when humans eventually go to Mars, or say we go to Betelgeuse and we want to start to colonize other planets, um, what will be the form of government on the ship that goes from Earth to Beetlejuice? Okay, will it be a military dictatorship? Will it be a democracy? What if everybody votes to blow up the ship? Right? So so in underneath that that theoretical scenario, will there be a compulsory service? Yeah. What about the people who didn't sign up to be on the ship because after fifty to seventy five years, you've lost the entire population of everyone who initially took off on the journey, and now you have all the children of those people, but you have to have a you have to have a military attache at the top who can actually run the ship, the people who are the experts who are going to run the ship, and then you have a civilian base of people that you're going to use to seed the population.

This is what Silicon Valley is actually talking about right now. So under that scenario, would you compel service? Probably. You have to. I think we are we we our governance models are just so bad. We haven't governance is just so underexplored because nations have been this sort of oligarchy that don't allow competition. There's been no innovation in the design of how human groups govern themselves in such a long time. Now, would what you just described be better than a pure democracy on that ship? I'd I'd say probably. Does that system have a whole bunch of flaws and risks and downsides? I think it does. And I I suspect, and I'm not saying I have a specific uh design that solves all these problems, but I suspect there's better designs out there than any of these things. Um that, you know, like America did as as well as it did, you know, with ideas that people came up with 300 years ago, and we're still riding along on those.

And it's like if we had the ability to rewrite things or adjust things, like think about all the mistakes that have been made, think about all the things you could do better. And so I I think that we um and we're now talking about it. Does the right does the red folks clue I mean if somebody wants to try and blow up the ship and they're a terrorist and they're going insane, do you have the right to blow them out of the airlock? I mean, you know, that's the death penalty. So at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself, you know, are aren't we just a a ship floating in space? I mean, it's the same kind of situation. But uh, but a ship does have to be run as a military dictatorship. I think you need a strong executive. I don't know that you literally need, and that strong executive does need to have military authority, but I don't think that you necessarily need a military dictatorship.

I think there might be improvements that are possible beyond that. Yeah. You know, and we and I think that we should one of the forms that I think we haven't learned enough from uh is like libertarians understand that markets work. We've seen joint stock corporations uh as one of the best governing vehicles to be created, where incredible amounts of people are coordinating and working together in market-like ways without without coercion. And so it's like the movie Alien, they hated us, they hated the capitalists, so they created this Wayland Utain corporation where it was this evil billionaire, and and space was corporatized, and the whole reason that the alien bursts from everyone's chest is because these evil corporations wanted to use it for military defense. Now, it's obvious that these socialists hate and communists hate us, but I mean, if I were a private military contractor, I would absolutely want that biological weapon, and I absolutely would do anything to get it because if you're whether you're Palantir or whether you're And Earl, you're going to want a copy of that alien.

And so you have to ask yourself, you know, in a pure free market system, would we get Wayland Utani or would we get Elon Musk and his you know his libertarian space station approach? Quite likely that we might deal with more of the you know corporate asshole types. You know, pick the topic. Yeah, nuke it. Yeah. Only way to be sure. Nuke the planet from orbit, yeah.