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Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

We've seen a similar "buy your way our of military conscription" policy in America's past.

> Many healthy men who were eligible to serve in the military during the Civil War never ended up enlisting. The Enrollment Act of 1863 provided that a draftee could pay a “substitute” enrollee the sum of $300 (about $5,000 in today’s terms) in order to enlist in his place. Such famous Americans as Grover Cleveland and John D. Rockefeller took advantage of this provision, in effect buying their way out of service.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/01/abraham-lincoln-the...

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I was going to post the same thing! But I'm glad I didn't because now I get to post on the remarkable coincidence that the price is almost exactly the same - $5000 in today's dollars. It's an interesting sum, from the perspective of say, American minimum wage (which is approx $30k/year). It's painful, but doable. It's probably the amount most ordinary lower-middle and middle-class people pay for a (used) car. I wonder how the USG came up with the figure, and if their thinking was the same as Egypt's?

This reminds me of a sitcom line from some years ago where a business exec comes in an offers (Drew Carrey maybe?) $10,461 or something like that and he asks "Why that amount?" and she says, "Oh, we spent $10M figuring out how much money poor people would think is a lot."

It's about 11K: https://www.in2013dollars.com/1860-dollars-in-2017?amount=1

not quite the same, but the police used to work the same way. https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Policing.jsp#constabl...

   Traditionally, householders served in the office of constable by appointment 
   or rotation. During their year of office they performed their duties part-time
   alongside their normal employment. Similarly, householders were expected to 
   serve by rotation on the nightly watch. From the late seventeenth century,
   however, many householders avoided these obligations by hiring deputies to 
   serve in their place.

Essentially being a police man was sort of like jury duty.

We would probably benefit from going back to that model.

You could argue that colleges served the same purpose in the 1960s.

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