For example, if we learned that something large was on a collision course for the earth, we might have years to prepare to deflect it, or to build shelters, or something along those lines, but I can absolutely see a mobilization being necessary.
Of course, there's no legitimate reason why we'd mobilize men and not women.
People aren't your slave. It doesn't matter that there might bad consequences if there is something 'to be done'.
If you don't respect human beings as individuals in the first place, we already lost.
And the path to doing so is quite clear: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/travel-lega...
If you benefit from a society, then you have a certain degree of responsibility to that society. I personally don't think the draft is defensible for anything less than an existential threat to the nation, but the popular notion that the government shouldn't be able to make you do anything you don't want to is silly.
I've seen the same argument used regarding taxation.
I'd argue that people have duties and obligations to their government, just as a government has duties and obligations to it's citizens.
So I absolutely believe that the government has a right draft people to defend the country. Drafting people just to wage war to advance our interests I have a lot more qualms about.
> What is a government except as an entity to ensure people's natural rights are not infringed.
People cannot eat freedom nor warm up in the cold with rights. A government intended purpose is the continuation and stability of a country/culture/society. This does not mean that anything is fine if it is for survival nor that citizens are expendable.
You want to use it in the broadest of senses, including for purposes which the ILO Forced Labour Convention of 1930 excludes, listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfree_labour .
You are of course free to do that, but I believe 1) it downplays the horribleness of, for example, chattel slavery in the US by equating it, among other things, being obligated to jury duty, and 2) you haven't said what isn't slavery.
Most of use are wage slaves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
> The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared "now I am my own master", upon taking a paying job.[31] However, later in life he concluded to the contrary, saying "experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other". ...
> [Marx:] The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence.
Nope! You can voluntarily renounce your citizenship at any point.
If the nation is under existential threat by a tyrannical invader and there aren't enough volunteers for an effective defense, should the government stand by and allow everyone's freedom to be lost permanently?
Why is the existence of a particular political entity more important than the lives of people?
An existential threat to a nation doesn't mean the people that live there are all going to die. It simply means that a political entity will stop existing. Thus a draft is trading human lives for the potential continued existence of a political entity.
I think the draft (and war in general) is a bad thing and we should do our best to avoid it. But sometimes you have to pick the lesser of two evils.
Am I okay with it?
I think that depends on whether it's a defensive war or a real national emergency. China invades, or yellow stone's super volcano erupts, yeah, those are legitimate reasons to force humans to cooperate, because survival is at stake. Vietnam type situations, or the Border Wall thing... I'd be protesting a draft.
U.S. law and supreme court precedent both say that a draft is not slavery, but I understand your opinion, or definition of slavery, may differ.
I also believe quarantine laws for infectious people are valid, that police should be able to arrest violent criminals, etc. Basically, I believe if your actions or failure to act endangers the health and well-being of others, then the government has a legitimate interest in compelling or restricting behavior.
Most people would consider providing for the national defense and preserving the lives of citizens to be part of what a government does.
I like his books, but I don't agree with his ideas.
this is completely false. a war is never about killing citizens but about imposing political will. without a defense, the occupier would simply impose their political system on the occupied. a government, being a political entity, is only forcing people to DIE so they can maintain their political hegemony over some people.