Ayn Rand vs. the Military Draft

In 2019, while campaigning for the Democratic presidential primary, Pete Buttigieg expressed his support for “a year of national service” for all 18-year-olds.¹  Five years later, in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Vice President J.D. Vance was asked about his opinion on compulsory military service. Vance responded that he likes “the idea of national service generally speaking. . . . [I]t’s useful to give people some skin in the game.”²

In part because of comments like these, compulsory service has returned to prominence in the cultural discourse. Although conscription has been controversial since the first national draft in 1863, it arguably became the central issue in American politics during the Vietnam War, in which 2.2 million American men were conscripted into military service over a span of nine years.³

As the debate raged across the country, Ayn Rand made an argument against the draft that differed dramatically from both the defenders and opponents of conscription. Rand argued that forcible service was not only evil, but “Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst.”

In a 1946 letter to novelist and political activist Rose Wilder Lane, Rand expressed her opposition to the draft.⁴ Rand was outraged that Republicans, allegedly the defenders of rights, advocated “the draft bill” as well as “a national serfdom act for compulsory labor.”⁵ '“Military conscription is a violation of a man’s right to his own life and, therefore, an abrogation of all rights,” Rand wrote.' Share on X

Over the next two decades, Rand articulated this perspective on prominent platforms and venues across America. For instance, the March 1964 issue of Playboy magazine featured a nearly 9,000-word interview with Rand, in which she was asked about her view on the draft. She stated, “It is a violation of . . . a man’s right to his own life. . . . A country has no right to force men into involuntary servitude.”⁶

Four years later, McCall’s magazine invited sixteen famous women to offer their program for America, one of whom was Ayn Rand. Point two in Rand’s program argued for the abolition of the draft. “Military conscription is a violation of a man’s right to his own life and, therefore, an abrogation of all rights,” Rand wrote.⁷

Rand’s most extensive attack on the draft came in 1967, during a talk at the Ford Hall Forum:

One of the notions used by all sides to justify the draft, is that “rights impose obligations.” . . . [I]t implies that rights are a gift from the state, and that a man has to buy them by offering something (his life) in return. Logically, that notion is a contradiction: since the only proper function of a government is to protect man’s rights, it cannot claim title to his life in exchange for that protection. ⁸

One of the common objections to an all-volunteer military is the question about what to do if the armed forces don’t have enough volunteers. Rand anticipated this objection, integrating her moral case against conscription with the practical reasons to oppose the draft. According to Rand, a country’s citizens won’t volunteer to defend “a corrupt, authoritarian government” and won’t fight for long if drafted. She argued that a volunteer army would be a safeguard against military adventurism and “a protector of peace,” as citizens would only want to fight a war in self-defense of a free country.

Later in the talk, Rand emphasized the draft’s crippling psychological impact on young men about to embark on their future lives:

The years from about fifteen to twenty-five are the crucial formative years of a man’s life. This is the time when he confirms his impressions of the world, of other men, of the society in which he is to live, when he acquires conscious convictions, defines his moral values, chooses his goals, and plans his future, developing or renouncing ambition. These are the years that mark him for life. And it is these years that an allegedly humanitarian society forces him to spend in terror — the terror of knowing that he can plan nothing and count on nothing, that any road he takes can be blocked at any moment by an unpredictable power, that, barring his vision of the future, there stands the gray shape of the barracks, and, perhaps, beyond it, death for some unknown reason in some alien jungle.

This is part of the real meaning of having “skin in the game” (to borrow J.D. Vance’s dehumanizing phrase).

While outspoken in her principled opposition to the draft, Rand was careful to distinguish her position from the usual arguments made by the anti-war activists of the 1960s. In herfirst of three appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Rand stated before a nationally televised audience that she was “enormously opposed to the whole Vietnam mess,” but for the “opposite reasons” of the anti-war activists. Whereas most cultural commentators cast America as an imperialist power and an aggressor against Vietnam, Rand described the conflict as “a useless and senseless war,” that “does not serve any national interest.”

Rand further articulated the difference between her position and most opponents of the draft when she was asked about amnesty for draft dodgers during a Q&A session:

I do not blame those who refuse to be drafted, if they did so out of general conviction. . . . But when a lot of young bums declare that they don’t want to fight this war because they don’t want to fight against Soviet Russia . . . not only do they not deserve amnesty, but they deserve to be sent to Russia at public expense, or North Vietnam, and stay there.⁹

Moreover, many opponents of the draft justified their opposition on the grounds of pacifism. Rand, however, repudiated pacifism as a principle incompatible with a proper government’s protection of its citizens’ rights.

In 1966, Defense Secretary Robert MacNamara, amid pacifist opposition to the draft, proposed “that every young person in the United States be required to give two years of service to his country, either in the military or some voluntary service like the Peace Corps.”¹⁰ The following year, Pope Paul VI expressed his support for “national service” alternatives in a 1967 encyclical: “We are delighted to learn that in some nations their requirement of military duty can be fulfilled . . .  by social service.”¹¹

But Rand denounced such alternatives as “a vicious notion, more evil than the draft, a singularly un-American notion in that it contradicts every fundamental principle of the United States.”¹² '… a country’s citizens won’t volunteer to defend “a corrupt, authoritarian government” and won’t fight for long if drafted. [Rand] argued that a volunteer army would be a safeguard against military adventurism and “a protector of peace" …' Share on X

The opponents of the draft would eventually win out. During the 1968 presidential election, one of Richard Nixon’s campaign promises was to end the draft. Upon becoming president, Nixon authorized the Gates Commission to submit a report on the practicality of a volunteer military. The commission included Alan Greenspan, then an associate of Ayn Rand. The draft officially came to an end on January 27, 1973, when the U.S. Selective Service program officially transitioned to an all-volunteer force.

Yet calls to bring back the draft or some form of mandatory national service continued for years, all the way up to the present.

Vance and Buttigieg are not alone, as national service has received renewed bipartisan support in the United States as well as across the Western world.¹³ If the rights of millions of individuals are to be protected, if they are to be spared “the terror of knowing that [they] can plan nothing and count on nothing,” then Ayn Rand’s uniquely powerful moral argument against the draft is needed more than ever.

1. Interview with Pete Buttigieg. Transcript. The Rachel Maddow Show. MSNBC, April 15, 2019, https://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/rachel-maddow-show/2019-04-15-msna1219976.
2. Julian Andreone (@JulianAndreone). “My conversation with Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), now Trump’s running mate, about a national service requirement in May.” X, July 15, 2024, https://x.com/JulianAndreone/status/1812956098070257729.
3. “The Military Draft During the Vietnam War,” University of Michigan Department of History, https://michiganintheworld.history.lsa.umich.edu/antivietnamwar/exhibits/show/exhibit/draft_protests/the-military-draft-during-the-#.
4. Rand to Rose Wilder Lane, “Letter 248,” Letters of Ayn Rand, August 21, 1946, https://aynrand.org/archives/letters/letter-248/.
5. The “draft bill” that Rand referred to was likely the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, introduced by Republican representative James W. Wadsworth Jr. and Democratic senator Edward R. Burke. The act was the first peacetime conscription in American history and required all men between the ages of 21 and 45 to register for the draft. Immediately after the war, prominent military and political leaders (including future President Dwight Eisenhower) advocated universal military training, which would have forced all able-bodied American men to undergo six months to one year of compulsory service. Amy J. Rutenberg, “Military Service and the Draft Post–World War II,” The National WWII Museum, September 15, 2021, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/military-service-and-draft-post-world-war-ii.
6. Ayn Rand, “A Candid Conversation with the Fountainhead of ‘Objectivism,’” Playboy, March 1964.
7. “‘If I Were President’: Sixteen famous women give their program for America,” McCall’s, January 1968.
8. Ayn Rand, “The Wreckage of the Consensus,” Ford Hall Forum (April 16, 1967).
9. Ayn Rand, “A Nation’s Unity,” Ford Hall Forum (October 22, 1972). Rand further articulated her position on amnesty for draft dodgers in a 1973 fan letter to Doris Gordon.
10. “McNamara Proposes Universal Draft With ‘National Service’ Alternative,” Harvard Crimson, May 19, 1966.
11. Pope Paul VI, Populorum Progressio, March 25, 1967, https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_26031967_populorum.html.
12. Ayn Rand, “Requiem for Man,” The Objectivist (July, August, September 1967).
13. Dafydd Townley, “US Kicks Off Debate on Conscription as Other NATO Members Introduce Drafts,” The Conversation, June 20, 2024, https://theconversation.com/us-kicks-off-debate-on-conscription-as-other-nato-members-introduce-drafts-232458.