Month: May 2019

Is forced labor on behalf of the federal government slavery? Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg obviously doesn’t think so. Fretting to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow about what he sees as the country’s lack of “social cohesion,” he called for one year of national service as a solution. No doubt he would take offense at any comparison of his scheme to chattel slavery—a comparison such as that offered by former slave Frederick Douglass.

“What is freedom? It is the right to choose one’s own employment. Certainly it means that, if it means anything,” Douglass thundered in response to Union General Nathaniel P. Banks’s policy as military commander of Louisiana of extracting one year of forced agricultural labor from freedmen on behalf of the federal government. “[A]nd when any individual or combination of individuals, undertakes to decide for any man when he shall work, where he shall work, at what he shall work, and for what he shall work, he or they practically reduce him to slavery.”

Frederick Douglass, who had personal experience of the horrors of slavery, knew how the institution differs from temporary forced national service—and yet he directly compared them and objected to both.

Strictly speaking, the 37-year-old Buttigieg didn’t explicitly call for conscription to build “social cohesion.” He allowed himself a little deniability by telling Maddow, “One thing we could do that would change that would be to make it, if not legally obligatory, but certainly a social norm that anybody after they’re 18 spends a year in national service.”

Does that mean Buttigieg wants a draft or not? It sounds like he wants 18 year-olds to just load themselves on the buses without the muss and fuss of an enforcement mechanism—but he’ll consider some arm-twisting if focus groups voice enthusiasm for the idea.

That enthusiasm may not be forthcoming. A 2017 survey by Gallup found 49 percent of Americans favoring the idea and 45 percent opposed. Unsurprisingly, support for mandatory national service rises among older cohorts who are highly unlikely to ever receive a draft notice, winning the nod from a solid two-thirds of those over 65. By contrast, the 18-29 year-olds actually targeted by forced labor schemes despise the idea by 57 percent to 39 percent.

Buttigieg seems to think that allowing a choice of civilian or military tasks to fulfill the whims of politicians addresses concerns about mandatory national service. But for many people it’s the “mandatory” part that poses the problem.

After General William Westmoreland objected that he did not want to command “an army of mercenaries” as he characterized paid volunteers when he and Milton Friedman famously sparred (PDF) over ending the draft during the Vietnam War, Friedman riposted, “would you rather command an army of slaves?”

Friedman’s effort to end the military draft was supported by economist Walter Oi, who argued on dollars-and cents grounds, but had personal experience with the evils of compulsion. At the age of 13, he’d been scooped up by the United States government and forced into an internment camp with roughly 120,000 other Japanese-Americans. “He had some pretty strong feelings about his imprisonment,” David R. Henderson, who knew Oi, wrote after the man’s death in 2013.

The roughly four million former slaves freed, as Frederick Douglass had already freed himself, from forced labor by the Civil War undoubtedly had “pretty strong feelings” about their former status (even as the freedom they gained remained incomplete). Describing slavery as “robbing the laborer of the hard earned results of his patient industry,” Frederick Douglass went on to tell his former master, in an 1855 letter, “In leaving you, I took nothing but what belonged to me, and in no way lessened your means for obtaining an honest living. Your faculties remained yours, and mine became useful to their rightful owner.”

While their bondage was nominally limited in duration, such sentiments would have been recognized by American sailors snatched by British press gangs leading to and triggering the War of 1812. While 9,991 Americans formally protested their conscription by British ships, perhaps 20,000 Americans were forced into service overall, making the practice the first-cited grievance by President Madison when calling for war against Britain. Impressment was no more popular with Britons—Admiral Horatio Nelson estimated that 40,000 sailors deserted the conscription-dependent Royal Navy between 1793 and 1801.

Later, the U.S. military had its own problems with unwilling conscripts (as well as regretful enlistees). Over 420,000 soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen deserted between 1966 and 1972, during the Vietnam War.

Forcibly extracting labor from the unwilling has a long history in this country, as does resistance to the same.

If forcing people to do labor that they wouldn’t do of their own accord is nothing new, neither is Buttigieg’s social-engineering grandiosity in pronouncing national service a boon to “social cohesion.” Such force-’em-for-their-own-good sentiments echo a 1967 Selective Service document that pronounced even the mere requirement of draft registration as a goad to “more effective human beings.”

But if history is any example, the only cohesion to be found will be that of shared resentment. And if the conscripts become more effective at anything, it will likely be defiance and escape.

It’s odd how a country with a miserable history of forced labor and two wars fought over the issue keeps revisiting the idea as if it’s a newly minted work of genius. But here we are, with Pete Buttigieg joining a long and disreputable list of pundits and public officials in polishing off this ancient policy turd and passing it off as a solution to what supposedly ails America.

Maybe Buttigieg and his ilk will decide that he never meant the idea of national service to be mandatory at all—or, at least, that it’s a good idea to distance themselves from the idea of extracting forced labor from the unwilling. Younger Americans will be able to relax again, at least for a while. And the rest of us will rejoice that decency has prevailed a little longer. The spirit of Frederick Douglass would likely join the celebration.

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Rose Wilder Lane was born on December 5, 1886, in the territory of South Dakota. Her early years were a hardscrabble settler’s life similar to that of her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose Little House novels defined the American frontier for many generations of young readers.

After an early career writing for newspapers and penning popular biographies of figures such as Jack London, Charlie Chaplin, Herbert Hoover, and Henry Ford, Lane worked with the Red Cross in Europe in the 1920s. She adventured through Albania and parts of the Middle East, usually with close female companions, then moved to the Ozarks in Missouri to care for her parents.

Throughout the 1930s, Lane assisted her mother with her fabulously successful series of children’s books. Her role was an unusual one—part agent, part collaborator—and her level of involvement remains a topic of bitter controversy among Little House fans, many of whom are ferociously protective of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s legend.

During that same period, under her own byline, Lane was a successful novelist and one of the most popular fiction writers for the Saturday Evening Post, a leading bastion of anti-Roosevelt, anti-New Deal sentiment. Lane worked with proto-libertarian editor Garet Garrett until he was no longer welcome at the publication, which reversed its stance after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

As war approached and the state grew, Lane saw her vision of old-fashioned American liberty on the ropes. In response, she produced one of the ur-texts of the modern American libertarian movement, 1943’s The Discovery of Freedom, a song of praise to human growth and political liberty’s role in furthering it.

Lane was a revolutionary; while believing America’s experiment in liberty arose organically from its frontier experience, she thought the American model could and should spread beyond the nation’s borders. America “is a totally new world,” she wrote. “This new world is an intricate interplaying of dynamic energies, a living network enclosing the whole earth and linking all human beings in one common effort, one common fate.”

In addition to The Discovery of Freedom, 1943 saw the publication of Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine, a nonfiction treatise on the nature and effects of liberty similar to Lane’s, and Ayn Rand’s breakthrough novel of individualism, The Fountainhead. As the journalist John Chamberlain put it, the three friends, “with scornful side glances at the male business community, had decided to rekindle a faith in an older American philosophy. There wasn’t an economist among them. And none of them was a Ph.D.”

The Little House books remain part of the American canon, with the Wilder family still standing as the template of the self-sufficient pioneer spirit. Lane herself was childless, but she had a habit of quasi-adopting young people, one of whom went on to change the political history of libertarianism: her “grandson,” the eventual Libertarian Party presidential nominee Roger MacBride. Though her own writing is now less well-known, Lane undeniably served as an intellectual foremother to a foundational generation of mid-century libertarian educators and activists.

—BRIAN DOHERTY

The following pages are excerpted from Peter Bagge’s graphic novel Credo: The Rose Wilder Lane Story by permission from Drawn & Quarterly. © 2019 Peter Bagge

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Climate change has come to the granddaddy of world-domination computer games in Gathering Storm, the latest expansion for Sid Meier’s Civilization VI.

The good news is that the expansion’s emphasis on the environment is not crafted with an eye toward lecturing or berating the players for having the nerve to grow, expand, and succeed as nations. The series has always had a strong emphasis on not just world conquest but also scientific progress, and that’s how the game approaches global warming.

Players will, as they always have, build their way up through the industrial era, developing coal and oil as energy sources. In Gathering Storm, this results in the slow melting of the polar ice caps that can eventually result in parts of the coast flooding, destroying any developments in those areas. But it’s not a hopeless scenario: By pushing scientific research, players can develop technologies to reduce their carbon emissions and protect the coastlines. (Unlike real-world politicians’ Green New Deal, Gathering Storm grasps the role of nuclear power in fighting climate change.)

Even if players aren’t able to completely stop the warming, the world doesn’t come to an end. Players research tools that allow people to adapt, including speculative innovations such as seasteading. Work hard enough, and you can build offshore communities that grow and thrive.

Less successful is the game’s introduction of “corporate libertarianism.” While the description of this government type notes that its purpose is to maximize individual liberty and to use peaceful private contracts rather than state coercion, its implementation in the game has an odd emphasis on boosting your military. Worst of all, selecting this form of government incurs a penalty on scientific research, as though innovation can’t happen without government control.

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