opposition to slave soldiers; think of me as Old Blood-and-Guts willing to use any
means whatever to win.
Reinstating the draft would not get us out of trouble, even with the changes
Dr. Gabriel suggests to make the draft “fair.”
As everyone knows, we were in the frying pan; shifting to AVF, instead of
producing an efficient professional army, put us into the fire. Dr. Gabriel urges
that we climb back into the frying pan-but with improvements: a national lottery
with no deferments whatever for any reason.
I can’t disagree with the even-steven rule. . . but my reason for thinking
that Dr. Gabriel’s solution will not work is this:
A lottery, even meticulously fair, cannot make a man willing to charge a
machine-gun nest in the face of almost certain death. That sort of drive comes from
emotional sources. Esprit de corps and patriotism cannot be drawn in a lottery.
Conscription works (among free men) only when it is not needed. I have seen
two world wars; we used the draft in each.. . but in each case it was a means of
straightening out the manpower situation; it was not needed to make men fight. Both
wars were popular.
Since then we have had two non-Wars-Korea and Nam-in “peacetime” and using
conscript troops.
And each non-War was a scandalous disaster.
I don’t have a neat solution to offer. If the American people have lost
their willingness to fight and die for their country, the defect cannot be cured by
conscription. Unless this emotional condition cnanges (and I do not know how to
change it), we are whipped no matter what weapons we build. It could be overnight,
or it could continue to be a long slow slide downhill over many years-ten, twenty,
thirty. But the outcome is the same. Unless something renews the spirit this
country once had, we are in the terminal stages of decay; history is ending for us.
Our foreign masters might graciously let us keep our flag, even our national
name. But “the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” will be dead.
Page 221
Time Span-Inflation
The Winter of ’23-’24 I paid a street vendor 5~ for a five billion mark
German note and I paid too much; 5,000,000,000 DM was worth a trifle over 1 ç~. A
bit later it was worth nothing.
In 1955 at the foot of the Acropolis I bought a small marble replica of the
Venus of Melos for 10,000 drachma. I wasn’t cheated; that was 35~ USA.
There are the British pound, the Turkish lira, the Italian lira, the Mexican
peso, and several others; all mean one pound of silver. Look up “exchange” and
“commodities” in your newspaper; grab your pocket calculator and see how much each
is inflated.
When I was a child of four or five my brothers and I used great stacks of
hundred-dollar bills as play money. Confederate- After two centuries, “Not worth a
continental,” still means “worthless.” Memory is long for the damage done by
inflation.
Before paper “money” was invented, inflation was accomplished by adding base
metal to silver and/or gold while retaining the name of the coin. By this means the
Roman denarius was devalued to zero during the first three centuries A.D. But
inflation did not start with Caesar Augustus. In the early days of the Republic
before the Punic Wars the cash unit was the libra (libra = lb. – pound = 273 grams,
or about 60% of our pound avoirdupois, 454 grams). That’s too large a unit for daily
retail use; it was divided into 12 unciae (ounces).
A “lb.” of silver was called an “as.” 1/12 of that, struck as coinage, made
efficient currency. Now comes war and inflation-
Eventually the “as”-once a pound of silver-was so debased that it amounted
to a penny, more or less. Augustus, by decree, went back on a silver/gold standard
and created the denanius, 3.87 grams of fine silver. He made 25 denarii equal in
value to one aureus (7.74 grams of gold), or a ratio of 12.5 to one. (“Free and
unlimited coinage of silver at a ratio of sixteen to one!” The Great Commoner and
the august Emperor had similar notions about hard currency.)