Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom by Ron Paul Page A

segregation.
    Martin Luther King, Jr., understood its merit and the obvious risk of imprisonment and becoming the victim of governmentviolence. Civil disobedience is a form of personal nullification of unfair and unconstitutional laws. Even the current left-wing pundits, who condemn all nullification arguments by strict constitutionalists, would hardly fail to see this comparison.
    Civil disobedience is a process whereby the weak and defenseless can resist the violence perpetuated by the state. The great danger is that when government gets too powerful and abusive, a greater number of citizens give up on education, politics, and peaceful resistance to bring about change and drift toward violent resistance to the state. The line between them is always murky, and some people are always overly anxious to resort to combating government violence with citizen violence. Though this type of conflict resulted in our own revolution against Britain, my personal nature compels me to argue for peaceful persuasion to bring about the understanding necessary to advance the cause of liberty.
    People must understand that we can’t use violence to have our own way over others—nor should the agents of our government have that power. Even a majority vote should never be accepted as legitimatizing government’s use of violence against the people.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. 2001.
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King
. New York: Grand Central Publishing.
Rockwell, Llewellyn H., Jr. 2008.
The Left, the Right, and the State
. Auburn, AL: Mises Institute.
Thoreau, Henry David. [1849] 1998.
Civil Disobedience
. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

C ONSCRIPTION
     
    D o we own our bodies and ourselves? We do, and it is based on this belief that we, as a country and society, reject slavery. We are not shy about saying it: Slavery is immoral. In the same way, moral law should be all that is needed to prohibit the state from forcing certain individuals into involuntary servitude in the military for the purpose of waging wars against an enemy, real or imaginary.
    The Constitution provides no authority to draft certain groups of young people to serve in the military. Conscription was not used in the Revolutionary War and it was soundly rejected by the Congress in the midst of the British attack on Washington in the War of 1812.
    Lincoln precipitated draft riots during the Civil War, and the effort to force conscription on the American people hurt the war effort and offered no benefit. It was Woodrow Wilson in his holy war to promote worldwide democracy who established the principle of the draft as a patriotic duty. The Thirteenth Amendment outlawing involuntary servitude has been a narrowly construed amendment, not applying to theeighteen-to-thirty-five-year-olds most susceptible to military slavery.
    Just as an income tax sends the message about who owns us and the fruits of our labor (even when the tax is only 1 percent), the draft and the registration for it remind every eighteen-year-old that ultimately the government controls his fate. The state can kidnap you at any time. This is an outrage that should never be tolerated in any society.
    A free society, valued by the people, would be adequately defended by volunteers, without age, sex, or any other restrictions. It is the unpopular wars, the big ones, that require conscription, and the state wants always to be prepared. It is great that we haven’t had a draft for nearly forty years, but the requirement that all young people register for a possible draft persists. 1 If we are to regain our liberties, one change that should be made is to repeal draft registration. Getting rid of the need for a standing voluntary army or armies backed up by the draft requires, in addition to honoring individual rights, a foreign policy of nonintervention that diminishes the chances of war.
    Military historians have shown that a conscripted army has no economic advantage over a volunteer army. Likewise, thereare no