Now For Another Failed UK Policy: Conscription

Authored by Terence Greene via The Mises Institute,

On the 11th of June, Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party stunned the United Kingdom by officially declaring in their 2024 election manifesto that, if reelected on July 4th, it would pass legislation to reintroduce “mandatory national service” to Britain. Despite the Orwellian nomenclature, the plan called for conscription, plain and simple. More specifically, it called for all British people — both male and female — upon turning 18 to either serve for one year in the armed forces or complete 25 days of “community service” for an unstated number of years.

The reaction to this announcement was swift and sharp, with pundits voicing equal parts horror and confusion at the announcement. Why on earth would the Conservative Party — a party already set to lose the election — adopt such a policy? Firstly, it is peacetime. Secondly, only two days prior to the announcement, the Conservatives’ own defense minister asserted that the U.K.’s modern military needs demanded a volunteer force, and that conscription would undermine the morale of the armed forces. Yet, these objections presume that the Conservatives’ decision to reintroduce conscription was made for defense purposes. This, however, is a naïve and overgenerous presumption. In fact, this seemingly incomprehensible policy position was a strictly economic exigency.

It is no secret that the British economy has seen better days. Once the most prosperous country in the world, the United Kingdom today is but a shadow of its former self. A nation which surged to riches untold upon the mighty wings of liberalism, limited government, and laissez-faire capitalism now plummets toward bankruptcy, weighed down by an inefficient welfare state that has grown almost nonstop for 80 years in absolute terms, and has never been more economically burdensome. Said welfare state was implemented by the British Labor Party from 1945-51 and has been assented to by the British Conservative Party ever since, which — in the venerable tradition of its ideological leading light, Benjamin Disraeli — has time and again declined to challenge the key assumptions underpinning the welfare state, preferring instead to concede its fundamental virtue in the name of electoral expedience. While the Labor Party employs the rhetoric of egalitarianism to justify the expansion of the welfare state (always its expansion), the Conservative Party employs the language of paternalism, noblesse oblige and so-called one-nation Toryism to justify their refusal to ever seriously wrestle with the yawning black void nestled in the very heart of the British government’s finances.

As the ill-fated Prime Minister Liz Truss and Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng were to discover in 2022, there is no “growing” out of this disaster. Cutting taxes and pausing new additions to the welfare state is not enough, as this still requires massive loans to fill the fiscal breach. The U.K. has been relying on debt to kick the welfare-crisis can down the road for decades now, and following the enormous deficits of the covid years, British promises to pay no longer ring true (as evinced by the run on the pound following the September 2022 minibudget). Only two credible options remain to the British government: hike taxes and aggravate the brain drain, flat growth, and low rates of private investment already afflicting the country, or cut benefits and face certain death at the polls.

As this goes on, the local governments of the United Kingdom are folding like cheap suits, having been comically ill-managed for decades and now no longer having access to bailout funds from the central government as there are no longer any funds to be had, bailout or otherwise. For instance, the city of Birmingham, after having spent untold sums on causes as deserving as a giant mechanical bull statue (meant as an attraction for the 2022 Commonwealth Games they hosted, despite being warned they couldn’t afford to do so) and “inspirational” street names has, in its desperate need to plug a £600,000,000 financial hole, resorted to turning off streetlights and collecting rubbish only once per fortnight.

In the face of all this, what is a Conservative, one-nation Tory to do? Why, implement conscription, of course! Why is that the natural policy choice, then? Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises makes it clear, writing on pages 197-98 of “Nation, State, and Economy”:

“The first way [of covering war’s cost] was confiscating the material goods needed for waging war and drafting the personal services needed for waging war without compensation or for inadequate compensation. This method seemed the simplest. ... That the soldier received only a trifling compensation for his services in relation to the wages of free labor ... has rightly been called a striking fact.”

While Mises was writing in the context of conscription employed for the purposes of armed struggle, Mises nonetheless clearly explains why conscription is an attractive policy tool — owing to its simplicity — for governments in need of labor but without the capacity to pay. By way of conscription, governments can compel the provision of labor at rates of its choosing; rates which will, for obvious reasons, be well below the rate at which a noncoerced individual would provide said service of their own free will. To the self-satisfied and socialist minds of the British Conservative Party, then, conscription is in fact the natural solution to the real-time breakdown of British finances and service-provision. By employing conscription, the fact that it cannot find the money needed to pay garbagemen is a nonissue, as the youth can be coerced into doing the same job for far less than a garbageman. Or, if they’d prefer, they can always just join the military and pay what Mises insightfully called the “blood tax.” Thank goodness for options!

Of course, like all socialist measures, conscription necessarily wreaks complete economic havoc. Wages and salaries in a free market are the reflection of the value placed on certain services, those values being themselves reflective of the intensity of the satisfaction the provision of those services produces in the minds of those who demand them. Cities like Birmingham can’t afford to pay garbagemen because it does not enjoy a free market. Rather, it suffers under a hugely inefficient socialist economy which confiscates the money which would otherwise go to paying people to collect garbage at a rate commensurate with the value placed on such services and the hesitancy of people to take up that work. The fundamental problem is this: Birmingham’s politicians value boondoggles like the Commonwealth Games more than garbage collection, and while the people of Birmingham take the inverse view, they send their money to Birmingham’s politicians. Thus, Birmingham’s politicians get to buy what brings them satisfaction, and the people of Birmingham increasingly do not. Conscription, rather than ameliorating this state of affairs, can, in the long run, only aggravate it as Britain’s politicians — now commanding legions of unpaid youth — will (either due to corruption or incompetence) divert those young people’s efforts to activity which brings them satisfaction, not the British public. The result of this will be an even more broken economy, now not only poor but maddened, as millions of people are torn from their own lives, and the pursuit of their own dreams, to go trim the hedges of key Tory donors’ country estates.

The British people — having rejected Sunak’s conscription plan by sweeping Labor to a landslide victory this July — perhaps believe that they have wisely spared themselves from the draconian policy of a truly insane party. Not so. Rather, the Conservative Party is undoubtedly the saner of the two major parties. Labor thinks that by doubling down on the welfare state, Britain may be saved. However, the Conservatives know better. They know that there is no saving Britain, at least not in its current socialist form. Thus, after Labor has done its dash, injecting yet another virulent strain of deficit spending into the ailing veins of the British economy, and it’s the Conservatives’ turn once more to win a meaningless landslide victory, they will likely return to the policy of conscription. Yet this time, against a backdrop of crisis-level welfare dependency, budget-busting interest payments, recession, and piles upon piles of rubbish accumulating uncollected across each and every British city and township, ripening horridly in the hot summer sun, the country shall not look and see an out-of-touch party, oh no. They shall look and behold a party which was merely ahead of its time.

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once remarked, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” Well, it seems that “eventually” has finally come around, and all that is left to the party of Thatcher, of Winston Churchill, of Disraeli, and of Robert Peele, is the enslavement of its own people to serve as rubbish collectors and street sweepers. It seems inconceivable that 264 years after the Industrial Revolution first began in Britain, it today looks to the corvée system as the cutting edge of public policy. Yet, such is the measure of Britain’s fiscal woe. Such is the peril of socialism.