The House passed the National Defense Authorization Acton Tuesday evening after stripping the draft amendment from the legislation. It would have required women ages 18 to 25 to register for the Selective Service, as men do under current law.
The amendment to include women in the draft had robust bipartisan support in both the House and Senate, but was stripped out in the final days of closed-door negotiations amid fears it could imperil passage of the underlying legislation, according to an aide familiar with the negotiations who spoke to USA TODAY on the condition of anonymity.
This is a good thing, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Congress should be abolishing the Selective Service altogether, not debating whether or not to expand it. The selective service, of course, only exists to facilitate the US government’s use of forced labor through a draft should the federal government decide that some “emergency” warrants the abolition of the most fundamental basic liberties. As I noted earlier this year:
“Conscription is slavery,” Murray Rothbard wrote in 1973, and while temporary conscription is obviously much less bad—assuming one outlives the term of conscription—than many other forms of slavery, conscription is nevertheless a nearly 100 percent tax on the production of one’s mind and body. If one attempts to escape his confinement in his open-air military jail, he faces imprisonment or even execution in many cases….
Conscription remains popular among states because it is an easy way to directly extract resources from the population. Just as regular taxes partially extract the savings, productivity, and labor of the general population, conscription extracts virtually all of the labor and effort of the conscripts.
For more on this here at mises.org, see
