Slavery is Wrong! Conscription IS WRONG!

[Hijiri Byakuren]

Using conscripts is problematic no matter how you look at it, anyway. Conscripts will never be as motivated as professional soldiers, and this will be reflected in their performance. You can't really use them as officers or even as non-coms for this reason, because having an unmotivated officer is just begging for something bad to happen.

It's also problematic from the standpoint of how warfare is evolving. The way wars are fought now, pretty much everyone has to have some technical know-how; not a whole lot of room for "dumb grunts" if you get my gist. With conscripts, you still have to drill this technical know-how into them, and you have to do it against their will. That, my friends, is a disaster waiting to happen.

[Thumpalumpacus]

You're compelled to pay taxes too.  Is that theft? No, it isn't, because you're gaining benefit from those taxes, presumably.

Being compelled to take part in defending the land whose hospitality you're enjoying makes sense to me, within reason.  Of course, the obvious objection has already been raised, that military service and defending one's homeland are often two different things. In the absence of a threat from outside, conscription is an encroachment upon liberty, not only the personal liberty of the draftee, but also, upon every citizen, even those who don't and haven't served; because it establishes the principle that the government has the right to compel you to die even in the absence of a capital offense.

In short, I think that sometimes conscription is justified, and at other times, it isn't.

[Jason Harvestdancer]

Taxes are the paycheck of the government, the government is the employee of the people.

Where does the people doing mandatory service to the government fit into that equation at all?