Bastiat’s Bastions

Here is a comment I recently posted to a blog post by Don Boudreaux on his blog, Café Hayek.

Read Don’s Nov. 4^th post here.

Don,

Could it be that those who argued against the draft in the 1970s, many good economists, such as Bob Tollison and Roger Miller, were wrong in just not being thorough enough in their analysis? While they correctly noted that the draft was a more costly way to raise an army, they somewhat failed to note the public choice results of the change to an all-volunteer force. In Bob’s case, this means not making a point that he was making over and over again about the nature of public interest legislation. That point is that when benefits of some proposal are concentrated while the costs are spread out rather thinly and evenly, the legislation will see little opposition and is more likely to be passed. The opposite is, of course true as well, that when the costs are concentrated but the benefits are spread out thinly and evenly, the opposition will be tough and it will be difficult to carry. In a way, this is part of the problem that Anshu Sharma noted in his Nov. 4th post. When benefits are widespread, but low to most, people do not “feel” or perceive those benefits and do not favor them, so special interest legislation prevails over public interest or public goods legislation.

When we went from the draft, which unfairly concentrated the costs of war onto those who were being drafted, to a so-called volunteer force or more correctly, a professional force, or a mercenary force, we change it from one where the costs are less concentrated on the soldiers and are spread across all taxpayers, thus decreasing opposition to military involvement.

Still, to the extent that military involvement is defensive (and so, one of the few real public goods) and not mere imperialism, then at least the benefits to military activity are spread out as well, and here voters will be mostly unmotivated either for or against the military activity. In which case, national defense, a public good, will not suffer from this special interest bias against public goods.

So here I am having come full circle. Tollison, Miller and other economists in the 70s who fought against the draft made no errors of omission in doing so. Moving from a draft to a professional force removed the public choice bias against proposals that have costs that are concentrated on a few.

One other point should be made against Reinhardt’s characterization of our troops in Iraq mentioned by one of the other commentators. If Reinhardt thinks that troops now are cannon fodder, under a draft it would be worse. When troops are easy to replace by going back to the draft board and telling them to send more, current troops are not as well treated and are more likely to be thought of expendable. In the 25 or so years since the draft was ended, I cannot think of a single “they were expendable” case, as we had with Iwo Jima or D-Day. When we rely upon paid troops and must pay “compensating differentials” to attract troops, minimizing the human risk of war suddenly becomes more important.

Morris Coats

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 5th, 2006 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Blogroll, General, Political Economy, Taxes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.