> How would people get buying power if they are "drafted"? Obviously, you get paid for your service - really, there is a long history in America of favoring

> How would people get buying power if they are "drafted"? Obviously, you get paid for your service - really, there is a long history in America of favoring 'payment for service' over social programs. Reagan gutted the civilian welfare state, while extending benefits for those who had served the military. To be clear, I'm not saying I oppose a generous pension for those who have served in the military, really, for a lot of reasons, or even that it's unfair, because most government jobs pay pretty poorly, at least the government jobs I could get pay terribly compared to the private sector jobs I could get, at least if you don't count the pensions. I'm just pointing out that the military does function an awful lot like some sort of socialist state. Yes, yes, there are still hierarchies, with privilege accorded to rank, but the difference between the top and the bottom, at least if you count in money and not power, and believe there to be a difference between the two, is nothing compared to what you see in the private sector. But, the main idea here is that in the USA, there is massive resistance to the idea of redistributing money to the "undeserving" - some people argue that it's mostly a race thing that defines 'undeserving' and I don't know if that's true or not, but I can say that I observe a lot more hatred for the "welfare queen" than of the banker, and that this resistance is quite often overcome by making it so that our social safety net is a reward for your service. During the great depression, we really had the problem you all are talking about here.. there really were simply not enough jobs to go around. Something had to be done; even fairly conservative folks recognized that something must be done. What was done? well, world war two, but before that, the WPA. To be clear, that wasn't involuntary, like a draft but the point being that the government can and did create jobs for people. There's a lot of complaints about the WPA just digging holes and filling them back up again, and there's some truth in that, but there is also a lot of infrastructure still standing today that was built by the WPA. Personally, I don't really have a horse in this race, but my observation of Americans is that there's going to be a lot of resistance to "healthy young bucks" as Reagan put it, collecting the dole.