Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Rangel's Draft

Bad bad bad

Ok then well here it is. A politician willing to reinstate the compulsory draft for the military even in this day when the party in power lost power due to a bad military-foreign policy (pre-emptive strikes) shows 1) how out of it too much time in Washington can leave you and 2) how messed-up the nature of government power can be.

The resolution of the nature between man and state was supposed to have been resolved long ago (1690 to be exact) in Hobbes-Locke dialectic over human nature. The state is supposed to serve man, man is not supposed to serve the state. In fact this Lockean view is what the country was founded on (the first to be such).

Yet what 320 years later a modern politician (and unfortunately his is not alone - not just in the draft but in the concept of man serving state manifests itself in the increasing role of the state in society) has the idiocy to raise the draft question. Wow. Where indeed is human progress. Luckily the idea was dismissed out-of-hand. Radical ideas are supposed to be ahead of their time, not retrogressive.