CHARACTER ISSUES The Role of Economists in Ending the Draft

military ended, and on June 30, 1973 the law authorizing conscription expired. Conscription, henceforth referred to as the draft, had been in existence since 1940, except for a period from March 1947 to June 1948. Richard Nixon had made ending the draft an issue during his presidential campaign against Hubert Humphrey, a strong proponent of the draft. Nixon even went so far as to devote a whole radio address to his proposal to end the draft on CBS on October 17, 1968. It was around that time that I started following the issue closely, reading extensively in the popular and academic literature about the politics, economics, and history of the draft. Despite President Nixon’s apparent commitment to volunteerism, as it was then called, almost no one I talked to between 1968 and 1970 believed that the draft would end soon. A powerful coalition of southern Democrats, in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, along with some Republicans and northern Democrats, strongly supported the draft. Political opposition to the draft seemed scattered, consisting mainly of various statist and conservative Republicans and some statist Democrats. Yet, less than five years after Nixon’s radio address, the draft was over. * Graduate School of Business and Public Policy, Naval Postgraduate School