Driving down Cache Road in Lawton, Okla., the opposite day made me wish for Milton Friedman’s temporary resurrection.

This road is lined with the sad industrial detritus typically found on “the strip” outside any U.S. military installation — vape shops and pawn shops, dollar stores and liquor stores, massage parlors and tattoo parlors, used automotive lots, payday loan purveyors, blood-plasma buyers and others.

Cache Road lies just outside the essential gate of Fort Sill, a significant and historic base for field artillery with over 16,000 uniformed troops plus civil service staff. An extra 33,000 military members of the family survive or off post.

The military has modified much since I went to basic training 56 years ago. Among the changes are excellent and a few regrettable. Some even pose dangers to our nation. Other changes are simply unjust to those that serve the remaining of us.

The Vietnam-era Army into which I enlisted was based on a compulsory draft that had been in effect for 25 of the 27 years since Selective Service was instituted as World War II loomed. Some people like me enlisted because we desired to serve. Many others joined the Navy and Air Force to achieve more useful technical training and reduce their possibilities of seeing ground combat. A method or one other, back then, all U.S. military services were predicated on conscription. However the draft at all times rankled many within the U.S.

Because the Vietnam War dragged on and grew more intense, opposition grew to the draft in addition to the war itself. But then, quite suddenly, it disappeared in two steps. In 1969, a lottery replaced the subjective decisions by local draft boards in determining who can be conscripted. Then, in 1972, Congress repealed the draft with the last man being inducted in September 1973. Since then we have now had an all-volunteer military, for bad as well nearly as good.

So what about Milton Friedman? Since the Nobel laureate communicated well to put audiences in addition to to academics, Friedman was one in all our nation’s best-known economists. One among the founders of the libertarian movement, he saw nearly any motion by government that limited the autonomy of people as each morally unjust and economically inefficient. This was how he saw the draft.

Friedman’s arguments weren’t why the U.S. draft was abolished, it was politically unpopular in any case. However the Chicago economist did give mental support to those in search of its end — arguing each from an efficiency and justice perspective.

To him, government coercing people to serve within the military was unjust on its face. Why should anyone need to spend years in activities they didn’t want to do this also included the danger of being killed or maimed? That was the justice or fairness side of his views.

Friedman’s efficiency argument was that, as for breakfast cereals or automobiles, human tastes vary. Some people like Cap’n Crunch and a few muesli. Some drive Ford F-250 pickups and a few Kia Sorrentos. Some persons are, for enough pay, willing to have interaction in combat or at the very least run the danger of doing so, while others wouldn’t accomplish that for any amount.

Friedman argued that society gets the best overall human satisfaction from a given set of resources available when it lets individuals make decisions. Those tolerant of risk, regimentation and discomfort would enlist. Those intolerant of such rigors wouldn’t. All government needed to do was set military pay levels high enough in order that the amount of volunteers who supplied themselves equaled the amount demanded by the armed services for our nation’s defense.

That is largely how we get people to work on oil drilling rigs or lean out of helicopters changing-out fittings on high-tension electrical transmission lines. Oil wells do get drilled and electric lines do get built and maintained because persons are paid to do those things. Sense of duty aside, wars get fought for a similar reason.

But there are some complications, all related to the litany of conditions memorized by introductory econ students that specify why private markets, free from any intervention by government, can nevertheless “fail” to bring about societal optimums.

First, there’s “asymmetric information” between an armed service and an 18- or 19-year-old prospective enlistee. Can men or women not yet emotionally and cognitively mature really make decisions optimal for his or her longer-term satisfaction in life? Does the promise of achieving rewarding life skills in slick TV ads essentially rip off vulnerable young people into paying the true cost of military service — the prospect of going to war? Is that this any higher than King George’s recruiting sergeants getting young men drunk so that they would “take the king’s shilling,” and wind up in a red coat fighting colonial sharpshooters?

The identical query of informed alternative does hold for those considering taking dangerous private sector offshore oil rig or transmission-line maintenance jobs. But there’s a key difference: Dangerous civilian jobs don’t require contracts that require signers to remain at a dangerous or unpleasant job for 3 years or more. In case you don’t like a dangerous job, you’ll be able to quit. Yes, a nation can get people to volunteer for its armed forces, but the method falls far wanting some libertarian ideal of equal bargaining power amid parties.

Friedman and other critics of the draft were right in describing it as a really unfair tax, the worth of which varied from individual to individual. A draftee who has to provide up two years as an engineer or financial analyst is sacrificing way more income than one plucked from a lawnmowing crew or fast-food job. But the range of experience did give the services a set of inductees trainable in a short time for expert jobs. Today’s volunteer forces lack that since the ones paying the tax disproportionately represent individuals who quit lower-paying, lower-skilled jobs. The military’s recruiting ad campaigns play into that, touting, “Be all you’ll be able to be,” for instance.

Even in the course of the draft, there at all times were more outs for young men from high-income families that for lower-income ones. But households from poor to wealthy did face some possibility that a baby could be conscripted and sent into harm’s way. Mark Twain once noted that “nothing so focuses the mind because the prospect of being hanged,” and this prospect made many families, wealthy and poor, take into consideration U.S. foreign and defense policies.

Now, with a high proportion of U.S. service members coming from the lower end of our nation’s income distribution, college-educated, salary-drawing parents whose kids are on the right track to the identical status have little to fret about.

So, 50 years on, we have now good and bad. There is best housing for enlisted families while some still live in rat traps off base. There are day care centers and paddleboats at post reservoirs for youths, fitness centers and splendid on-post clinics. And a few soldiers still sell blood on Cache Road to get by. Frequent alerts and deployments are hard on families.

Some enlistees from disadvantaged circumstances gain latest values and skills and are catapulted from poverty into the center class upon discharge. Others fall right into a rut of muddling along, a everlasting socio-economic underclass the existence of which should cause the remaining of us to feel shame. We usually are not going to reinstitute conscription, but reforming current failings just isn’t a high priority for anyone else either.

St. Paul economist and author Edward Lotterman will be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.