Thursday, December 02, 2004

Not a Draft, but...

An interesting article from The Village Voice seems to support a possibility that I myself have suggested (although it doesn't say so explicitly): that the administration is cutting financial aid specifically in order to force more students into ROTC and thus increase the size of our military for the wars in the Middle East.

Not that I agree with federal financial aid to begin with; predicating it on military service does, I think, is the only way to make it Contitutional (as it would then fall under the rubric of providing for the common defense because it is a benefit given to people in the military and therefore in essence a salary paid to soldiers).

However, cynically using financial aid to fill up a military used for empire-building abroad and to maintain a large standing army is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind.

I wrote that our Iraqi "security forces" were mostly Kurdish pershmega a few weeeks ago and now this has become conventional wisdom. I think that the pushing of kids into college ROTC as a way to fill the military, which to my knowledge I was the first to predict, will also soon become conventional wisdom.

That is all.

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