Edward Lotterman

Driving down Cache Road in Lawton, Okla., the other day made me wish for Milton Friedman’s temporary resurrection.

This road is lined with the sad commercial detritus typically found on “the strip” outside any U.S. military installation — vape shops and pawn shops, dollar stores and liquor stores, massage parlors and tattoo parlors, used car lots, payday loan purveyors, blood-plasma buyers and others.

Cache Road lies just outside the main gate of Fort Sill, a major and historic base for field artillery with over 16,000 uniformed troops plus civil service workers. An additional 33,000 military family members live on or off post.

The military has changed much since I went to basic training 56 years ago. Some of the changes are excellent and some regrettable. Some even pose dangers to our nation. Other changes are simply unjust to those who serve the rest of us.

The Vietnam-era Army into which I enlisted was based on a compulsory draft that had been in effect for 25 of the 27 years since Selective Service was instituted as World War II loomed. Some people like me enlisted because we wanted to serve. Many others joined the Navy and Air Force to gain more useful technical training and reduce their chances of seeing ground combat. One way or another, back then, all U.S. military services were predicated on conscription. But the draft always rankled many in the U.S.

As the Vietnam War dragged on and grew more intense, opposition grew to the draft as well as the war itself. But then, quite suddenly, it disappeared in two steps. In 1969, a lottery replaced the subjective decisions by local draft boards in determining who would be conscripted. Then, in 1972, Congress repealed the draft with the last man being inducted in September 1973. Since then we have had an all-volunteer military, for bad as well as good.

So what about Milton Friedman? Because the Nobel laureate communicated well to lay audiences as well as to academics, Friedman was one of our nation’s best-known economists. One of the founders of the libertarian movement, he saw nearly any action by government that limited the autonomy of individuals as both morally unjust and economically inefficient. This was how he saw the draft.

Friedman’s arguments were not why the U.S. draft was abolished, it was politically unpopular in any case. But the Chicago economist did give intellectual support to those seeking its end — arguing both from an efficiency and justice point of view.

To him, government coercing people to serve in the military was unjust on its face. Why should anyone have to spend years in activities they did not want to do that also included the risk of being killed or maimed? That was the justice or fairness side of his views.

Friedman’s efficiency argument was that, as for breakfast cereals or automobiles, human tastes vary. Some people like Cap’n Crunch and some muesli. Some drive Ford F-250 pickups and some Kia Sorrentos. Some people are, for enough pay, willing to engage in combat or at least run the risk of doing so, while others would not do so for any amount.

Friedman argued that society gets the highest overall human satisfaction from a given set of resources available when it lets individuals make choices. Those tolerant of risk, regimentation and discomfort would enlist. Those intolerant of such rigors would not. All government needed to do was set military pay levels high enough so that the quantity of volunteers who supplied themselves equaled the quantity demanded by the armed services for our nation’s defense.

That is basically how we get people to work on oil drilling rigs or lean out of helicopters changing-out fittings on high-tension electrical transmission lines. Oil wells do get drilled and electric lines do get built and maintained because people are paid to do those things. Sense of duty aside, wars get fought for the same reason.

But there are some complications, all related to the litany of conditions memorized by introductory econ students that explain why private markets, free from any intervention by government, can nevertheless “fail” to bring about societal optimums.

First, there is “asymmetric information” between an armed service and an 18- or 19-year-old prospective enlistee. Can men or women not yet emotionally and cognitively mature really make decisions optimal for their longer-term satisfaction in life? Does the promise of attaining rewarding life skills in slick TV ads essentially rip off vulnerable young people into paying the real cost of military service — the prospect of going to war? Is this any better than King George’s recruiting sergeants getting young men drunk so they would “take the king’s shilling,” and wind up in a red coat fighting colonial sharpshooters?

The same question of informed choice does hold for those considering taking dangerous private sector offshore oil rig or transmission-line maintenance jobs. But there is a key difference: Risky civilian jobs don’t require contracts that require signers to stay at a dangerous or unpleasant job for three years or more. If you don’t like a dangerous job, you can quit. Yes, a nation can get people to volunteer for its armed forces, but the process falls far short of some libertarian ideal of equal bargaining power amid parties.

Friedman and other critics of the draft were right in describing it as a very unfair tax, the value of which varied from person to person. A draftee who has to give up two years as an engineer or financial analyst is sacrificing far more income than one plucked from a lawnmowing crew or fast-food job. But the diversity of experience did give the services a set of inductees trainable very quickly for skilled jobs. Today’s volunteer forces lack that because the ones paying the tax disproportionately represent people who give up lower-paying, lower-skilled jobs. The military’s recruiting ad campaigns play into that, touting, “Be all you can be,” for example.

Even during the draft, there always were more outs for young men from high-income families that for lower-income ones. But households from poor to rich did face some possibility that a child might be conscripted and sent into harm’s way. Mark Twain once noted that “nothing so focuses the mind as the prospect of being hanged,” and this prospect made many families, rich and poor, think about U.S. foreign and defense policies.

Now, with a high proportion of U.S. service members coming from the lower end of our nation’s income distribution, college-educated, salary-drawing parents whose kids are on track to the same status have little to worry about.

So, 50 years on, we have good and bad. There is better housing for enlisted families while some still live in rat traps off base. There are day care centers and paddleboats at post reservoirs for kids, fitness centers and splendid on-post clinics. And some soldiers still sell blood on Cache Road to get by. Frequent alerts and deployments are hard on families.

Some enlistees from disadvantaged circumstances gain new values and skills and are catapulted from poverty into the middle class upon discharge. Others fall into a rut of muddling along, a permanent socio-economic underclass the existence of which should cause the rest of us to feel shame. We are not going to reinstitute conscription, but reforming current failings is not a high priority for anyone else either.

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St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.