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Milton Friedman on The draft and the volunteer army

Clearly, it is a good thing not a bad thing to offer better alternatives to the currently disadvantaged. The argument to the contrary rests on a political judgment: that a high ratio of Negroes in the armed services would exacerbate racial tensions at home and provide in the form of ex-soldiers a militarily trained group to foment violence. Perhaps there is something to this. My own inclination is to regard it as the reddest of red herrings. Our Government should discriminate neither in the civil nor in the military services. We must handle our domestic problems as best we can and not use them as an excuse for denying Negroes opportunities in the military service.

Context. From a May 1967 New York Times Magazine article, written as Congress weighed renewing the draft, arguing that the United States should end conscription and man its armed forces with volunteers. He is answering the objection that a volunteer force would be manned predominantly by Black Americans, because military pay and careers would be more attractive than the other jobs open to them. Just before, he notes that Black soldiers were a larger share of the men in combat in Vietnam than of the population, and that most of them were there by choice, having enlisted or re-enlisted.

The Case for Abolishing the Draft—and Substituting for It an All-Volunteer Army
Column, 1967, The New York Times Magazine, May 14, 1967; reprinted in full in the Congressional Record, Senate, May 15, 1967, pp. 12546 to 12548, inserted by Senator Gaylord Nelson., Congressional Record, May 15, 1967, p. 12547
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Milton Friedman, “The Case for Abolishing the Draft—and Substituting for It an All-Volunteer Army” (The New York Times Magazine, May 14, 1967; reprinted in full in the Congressional Record, Senate, May 15, 1967, pp. 12546 to 12548, inserted by Senator Gaylord Nelson., 1967), Congressional Record, May 15, 1967, p. 12547. https://miltonfriedman.org/quotes/government-should-discriminate-neither-civil-nor-military-1967

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  1. This concept of equality of opportunity offers no conflict at all with the concept of freedom. On the contrary, they reinforce one another, and it is no doubt the concept that even today is most widely held. But in the 20th century, beginning especially abroad and at a later date in this country, a very different concept, a very different ideal, has begun to emerge. That is the ideal that everyone should be equal in income, in level of living, in what he has. The idea that the economic race should be so arranged that everybody ends at the finish line at the same time, rather than that everyone starts at the beginning line at the same time. This concept raises a very serious problem for freedom. It is clearly in conflict with it, since it requires that the freedom of some be restricted in order to provide greater benefits to others.

    Context. Narrating the episode’s close. “This concept” is equality of opportunity, which he has just described as everyone having the same opportunity to make what he could of his capacities, with careers open on the basis of talent.

    Created Equal
    Television, 1980, PBS, Free to Choose (1980), vol. 5, at 27:04
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  2. The implicit tax in kind is not a light one. If it were proposed that we impose a special income tax of 50 per cent on enlisted men in the armed services, there would be cries of outrage. Yet that is what we are now doing in concealed form. Abolishing conscription would have the great merit of imposing those taxes on the rest of us, where they belong, not on the young men in uniform.

    Context. From a May 1967 New York Times Magazine article, written as Congress weighed renewing the draft, arguing that the United States should end conscription and man its armed forces with volunteers. Just before, he explains the “tax in kind”: the real cost of conscripting a man who would not serve on present terms is what it would take to attract him, and the gap between that and his military pay is a tax he pays in service.

    The Case for Abolishing the Draft—and Substituting for It an All-Volunteer Army
    Column, 1967, The New York Times Magazine, May 14, 1967; reprinted in full in the Congressional Record, Senate, May 15, 1967, pp. 12546 to 12548, inserted by Senator Gaylord Nelson., Congressional Record, May 15, 1967, p. 12547
    Checked against the sourceRead the original
  3. What we send abroad we can’t eat, we can’t wear, we can’t use for our houses. The goods and services we send abroad are goods and services not available to us. On the other hand, the goods and services we import, they provide us with TV sets we can watch, with automobiles we can drive, with all sorts of nice things for us to use. The gain from foreign trade is what we import. What we export is the cost of getting those imports, and the proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible for as small a volume of exports as possible.

    Context. From a lecture on free trade, just after he says that public talk of trade treats exports as good and imports as bad, which he calls “just upside down.”

    Milton Friedman Speaks: Free Trade: Producer vs. Consumer
    Lecture, 1978, Lecture 8, at 21:30
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