End the All-Volunteer Force

[wm]

No -- I clearly stated that while there are differences, neither you or I have established to what extent they are relevant.

You said that the differences "may or may not be relevant," which is a tautology. Using a disjunction with two contradictory terms as its disjuncts provides no real information content. It is, instead, rather obfuscatory, does not really further understanding, and does not advance the search for truth.

I think that the relevance of the differences you described, viz., "increased financialization of the economy, higher concentrations of wealth in the upper echelons of society, and extremely low effective tax rates for the wealthy and corporations" is rather patently obvious. The impacts of dumping a rather large pool of mostly semi-skilled laborers who are more used to breaking things than to building them (which is at bottom what a demobilized military force is with regard to the civilian economy--whether in 1945 or in 2012) will be significantly different in a service-based economy (2012) than in a industrial/product-based economy (1940-1973). Service-based economies require skills that are not those normally connected with "servicing targets," as an euphemism for combat goes. They include people skills and salesmanship skills, the kinds of things currently identified as lacking in the force that needs to "win friends and influence people" to counter an insurgency successfully.

By the way, your exposition to date has not made clear how a large influx of laborers will realign the "effective tax rates for the wealthy and corporations" or draw "wealth from the upper echelons of society." Changing tax rates requires legislation and realigning wealth requires either a willingness on the part of the wealthy to part with their money or legislation to force income redistribution (for example, a simple graduated income tax system with no exemptions whatsoever).

According to your strict interpretation, we might as well discard all of history as a useful tool in discussing policy and it's consequences since history never literally repeats itself. I'm open to a discussion about those economic factors I named (and others if you have them) since I'm not wholly convinced they are irrelevant.

As I trust my second paragraph, supra., demonstrates, I have not applied a strict definition to determine relevance. I also have not played fast and loose with statistics, based on questionable assumptions, that amount to over-generalizations. I have tried to ensure that I use the amount of precision appropriate to the subject matter at hand.

Even though my avatar is of Don Quixote, I have decided to stop tilting at this windmill. This will be my last response to your mutating arguments for what seems to me to be a dogmatic, ill-founded position.