Given the state of our society, there is certainly a lot of competition for the title of Most Immoral Practice, from the forty million people without health insurance today to the mass acceptance of torture as a means of interrogation (where is the outrage?). But in my mind, the most revolting of our persistent hypocrisies is the unavoidable fact that, forty years after Vietnam, the people fighting and dying for our country are still coming from the lower half of the socioeconomic scale. This is a problem that has been pointed out for so long now that it reveals something very ugly lurking at the core of our market-driven society. And that is the use of free market theory to justify an immoral practice. “Well, no one is forcing them to join the army—it’s their choice,” says the upper class American on the way to the country club, thereby absolving himself of all sin. As if military service were akin, say, to choosing a product on a shelf, a choice commonly made based on one’s ability to pay. The result is that the men and women serving in our armed forces have now become like the doormen guarding a Manhattan penthouse: mercenaries for the privileged class.
Rather than vent my spleen about the naked greed and selfishness that is really behind this canard, let me use my allotted space to propose a very simple solution: a class-based draft. Cleary, if military service was approached from a standpoint of social justice, then all classes would be proportionally represented in the military. A class-based draft would ensure that this was the case. If the top of American society were underrepresented in our armed forces, for example, we would simply draft from that class, based on tax returns, until the imbalance was righted. This would ensure that Marine recruiters would not have to cruise the streets of Flint Michigan looking for high school dropouts, but would now be ringing the doorbells in Alpine, New Jersey and Atherton, California, with an empty suitcase in hand, seeking those new prep school graduates. Oh, what a positive impact this would have on U.S. foreign policy, were the children of our elected representatives to be so vulnerable! As far as practicalities go, I don’t think that the vast majority of Americans would have any problem with this idea, either. Like the Death Tax, all we need is to clothe the Class Draft in the right language to ensure public acceptance. That language is as follows: “Do you think your son or daughter should have a higher risk of dying in Iraq than someone richer than you?”