<you and Hawk holding hands on killing and imprisonment and slavery>
Um. Did I misspeak myself, like Nixon?
1. You are right, you couldn't pay me enough to kill Hawk. Or anyone else. In a war, if I was drafted, I'd do what Quakers did in WW2: work as ambulance drivers, medics, doctors. Or take care of the mentally ill. Or proudly go to jail, if no acceptable task was offered.
2. And, I think, you couldn't pay Hawk enough to kill me, either. Money won't do it. You'd have to motivate him, by convincing him I was a terrorist sympathizer, or a traitor to his tribe. Or convince him that, in my garage, I was building a plywood drone to deliver homemade WMD to his hometown. Shouldn't be too hard, he's already half convinced himself.
3. That's the problem with making soldiering a straight economic transaction: few people will do it just for money.
4. And the kind of people who would kill just for money......do you really want to put all the big guns in their hands? The correct labels for such people are: murderer, assassin, psychopath. I'd rather have the guns in the hands of regular folks, randomly chozen, than the self-selected killers-for-hire.
<Apart from the idea of everybody defending their own freedom being silly, specialization is the name of the game.>
1000 years ago, reading and writing were considered specialized tasks, that only a few people did. Now, we consider them to be skills that everyone must have. Same thing with medical knowledge. It isn't good enough, if only doctors know the risk factors for common diseases, and how to live a healthy life. Everyone needs to know that, and it should be a part of our school curriculum. Defending your rights and freedoms is a job for every citizen.
If you create a specialized class of people to defend your freedom, they will decide they know better than anyone else (that's the universal way humans think), and they will feel justified in using force to make you see things their way. They will also appropriate all the goodies for themselves, at gunpoint if necessary. They'll do all this, and define it as "defending Maurice's freedom." Isn't that exactly what the neocons are doing today?
"If once [the people] become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions." --Thomas Jefferson, 1787 |
