Conscription and Consistency

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Or is it? Rand didn’t think so. Libertarians in general insist on consistency to principles.

Now, Chris makes an observation about Melvyn Tan, the draft-dodging pianist who comes back a national hero:

Our entire legal system is based not on mercy, but on a strict conception of justice. But, when a Singaporean judge allows a person like Mr Tan to slip through the cracks because you want to show mercy, a most un-Singaporean virtue, you break that strict conception of justice. By failing to punish this law-breaker, you will encourage many more.

Mr Tan’s case will set a legal precedent: Future draft-dodgers may return to Singapore unscathed, provided they become rich and famous. And if you happen to be able to play a musical instrument as well as Mr Tan, then you need not do NS, because you’ve already “done your duty”.

At first, I wondered if Chris had turned into one of those people I swore I would never become – someone who would defend conscription, having served through it and not wanting to devalue his legitimate-or-otherwise sacrifice (and there are quite a few around, just read some of the Young Republic posts on conscription). A fallacy of sunk costs undermining personal integrity. The same way that some officers and specialists rationalize punishing their subordinates in a perverse sense of ‘tradition’ – buying into the very system they suffered under.

After all, if you read the rest of Chris’ posts and mine, you would know that he and I generally concur that conscription in Singapore is unjust. One would expect us to celebrate the flexibility of the government in considering his service to the nation, in welcoming the market principles of specialization that let Melvyn Tan contribute where he can contribute best. One would expect us to respect a man who could stick to his principles and exercise labor mobility, paying the costs of draft dodging – exile to a foreign land. One would expect us to see this as an incremental step towards the dissolving of a system we hate. One would expect us to be happy. All these would be consistent.

Yet his response is also consistent with our position (at least my position) that conscription is just in principle, but often lacking in its practice. We accept conscription as a necessary evil, a civic responsibility that pays for our civil rights, and we look back to Athenian democracy and citizen soldiering as a model. At the same time, we look at the practice of the modern draft, and the nature of military organizations and the state, and see plenty of injustice. We want our conscription to meet the ideals of universality, minimality, transparency etc – in this perspective, it is not inconsistent for us to demand system integrity in universal conscription, that Melvyn Tan must be punished the same way any draft dodger would – that we make equal sacrifices for equal rights.

So I wonder which is more consistent as a libertarian.