Black Civil Rights Leader Wants to Restore Slavery

According to the Associated Press, civil rights activist and U.S. Congressman Charles Rangel from the 15^th District of New York, will introduce a bill when the 110^th Congress reconvenes to reinstate the draft. Apparently lost on the self-proclaimed civil rights leader is the text of the slavery-banning 13^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which reads, in part: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. It seems that either Congressman Rangel doesn’t equate being conscripted into the military as “involuntary service” or he somehow believes slavery is dandy, so long as it is government that is the slave owner. Neither is tenable.

It is self-evident that forcing citizens to register and be conscripted into the military is both an extreme form of servitude and certainly most involuntary. In these days of ongoing U.S. foreign global interventionism, one would hope that the rounding up of young men by warlords, only to have them shipped off to unfamiliar and dangerous lands against their wills might strike a disharmonious chord -- especially among those forever loudly claiming strong ties to their cultural heritage, their history, and those still seeking reparations.

Or, can it be that in Mr. Rangel’s mind, because it is government rather than private individuals assuming ownership of the enslaved that this “military slavery” is somehow innocuous? From his voting record it is apparent that Mr. Rangel believes generally that collective ownership and control of property is preferable to self ownership and individual liberty. He apparently also fails to understand that, for a good number of reasons, government-owned-and-operated slavery is necessarily and decidedly worse even than that of a system of private or monarchial slavery.

According to Dr. Hans Hermann-Hoppe, UNLV professor of Economics and President of the international Property and Freedom Society:

Slave labor is generally recognized as less productive than free labor, and with the collapse of the Soviet Empire it has become obvious that collective property (socialism) is less productive than private property (capitalism). From these premises several conclusions follow: not only that free labor and private property represent the best of all possible worlds, but that a system combining slavery and socialism must be the worst-that if one had no choice but to be a slave, private slavery as in antebellum America would be preferable to the kind of collective slave ownership that Eastern Europe recently experienced.

According to Dr. Hoppe, without markets for slaves and slave labor, matters must become worse, not better, for the slave. The incentive to care for the private slave is much greater as the private slave owner retains some residual right to any value in the slave in that he can sell or bequeath the slave and generate some personal benefit for doing so.  This helps explain why, according to Dr. Hoppe:

While it rarely happened that a private slave-owner killed his slave-the ultimate "consumption" of human capital--the socialist slavery of Eastern Europe resulted in millions of murdered civilians. Under private slave ownership the health and life expectancy of slaves generally increased. In the Soviet Empire health-care standards steadily deteriorated and life expectancies actually declined in recent decades. The level of practical training and education of private slaves generally rose. That of socialist slaves fell. The rate of reproduction among privately owned slaves was positive. Among the slave populations of Eastern Europe it was generally negative.

Politicians, with their short time horizons retain no benefit from any government-owned “slave” when they leave office and, as such, that slave is sure to be more fully and more dangerously exploited (consumed) during the short run. This is quite obvious when conscripted soldiers are often sent into situations where near certain death awaits them to die for short run political agendas by politicians far-removed from any battle scene. Of late, given congressional dereliction even to declare war as required by the U.S. Constitution, there tends to be even a minimized political accountability for such reprehensible political activity.

Other reasons also demonstrate that a government-run slavery operation should not be tolerated. Slavery, which is abhorrent when performed by an individual, cannot suddenly become righteous when engaged in by the collective, with or without democratic sanction. Nineteenth-century French economic journalist, Frédéric Bastiat, was a pioneer in what has become known as constitutional political economy and wrote:

As each person has the right to defend his liberty and property, all individuals have the right to join together to provide a common defense of their natural rights to life, liberty, and property. But neither the state nor any individual has the right to take the property [or lives] of others or to force others “to be industrious, sober, thrifty, generous, learned, or pious.” Government, or “collective force,” can only “be legitimately employed to further the rule of justice, to defend every man’s rights . . . If a right does not exist for any one of the individuals whom collectively we designate . . . as a nation, how can it exist for that fraction of the nation having merely delegated rights, which is the government? How can individuals delegate rights that they do not possess?”

Similarly, a dominant theme of the Declaration of Independence is that individual rights pre-exist governments and governments are created for the purpose of securing these pre-existing rights. It necessarily follows that, if government receives its power only from those individuals over whom it governs, only pre-existing rights held by those individuals could, in turn, be bestowed upon that government. That is, if the individual has no right to enslave his neighbor to ward off would-be intruders, neither can it be said that government may legitimately acquire such a right to act collectively for those individuals over whom it governs. Yet, this is exactly the role that the Mr. Rangel hopes this legislature will adopt—allowing government to become the very means by which individuals acting collectively do precisely that which government was established to prevent in the first place—the forcible enslavement of free individuals.

Moreover, volunteerism also serves as an effective, prudent, and vital check on imperialism and “private-interest wars.” To the extent a population deems itself legitimately threatened by foreign invaders, the incentive to volunteer to provide mutual protection for oneself and fellow neighbors has proven ample. To the extent those same citizens come to understand that a war is being waged for some bestowal of government benefits on the special interests, they will be loathe to play along with the government’s depraved acts of “war.” A recent example of this can be found by looking south to our country’s border with Mexico. Unsolicited by government, volunteer border guards made their way to Mexico at their own expense and peril to ward off actual, would-be invaders. Ironically, while the federal government cannot pay enough people sufficient money to fight its “official” (although as yet undeclared and, hence unconstitutional) war, genuine volunteers (accepting no pay or compensation) line up to defend what they perceive to be a legitimate (yet government-ignored) threat to our southern border.

Given that Congressman Rangel lists racial disparities in an all-volunteer force as among his reasons for advancing military slavery, one must question his short-term memory given civil rights leaders’ portrayal of the experience in Vietnam, a “war” in which the draft was fully employed. Concerns about racial equity have lingered since the end of the Vietnam War, when political scientists and African American leaders raised the specter of high African American casualties in subsequent conflicts. According to a recent article in the Austin American Statesman, blacks accounted for 21 percent of combat deaths in 1965-66, for instance, even though they made up only about 12 percent of the Army and Marines.

Perhaps Mr. Rangel’s misguided and dangerous notion that slavery should be restored on the military front is just another example of black “leadership” endorsing, for dubious reasons, policies totally antithetical to the general improvement of black citizens’ plight that, instead, further entrench the downtrodden classes over which they claim to preside. To see that black leaders embrace policies that strongly disadvantage their claimed beneficiaries, one need look no further than black leadership’s continued endorsement of minimum wage hikes that disemploy blacks at a much greater rate than non-blacks.

Slavery is morally, philosophically, and economically reprehensible -- even more so when government is the slave owner.

E.K. Hornbeck