Comment on Belmont Club "The fatal hour"

The virtue of Democracy is that The People get the government they deserve. The vice of democracy is that each person, that is You bud, gets what The People deserve. Who believes that they deserve no better than The People do?

Universal military service does not guarantee against vanity or the Treason of the Clerics. Kerry served of a sort in Vietnam (did you know?) and he still turned out to be a fathead. Still, on the margin, it would probably be good for both the masses and the future intelligentsia or their political allies if they all spent at least a few months together solving very practical problems. This has nothing to do directly with military efficiency and almost all professional officers oppose any kind of a draft. It has everything to do with national security in the larger sense.