Do they have to be? Perhaps they can serve as examples for the rest of the world. Hopefully they can even "trickle down" as it were, the way the wealthy often get access to new technologies and things before they become more widespread.
What's an example?
I found it interesting that you didn't hear about this until *after* the 2016 election. But if Trump was aware of this, he could have publicized it.
The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1684515580?tag=lrc18-20&linkCode=ogi&th=1&psc=1
This might be a good read. Libertarian writer Jeffrey Tucker gives it a great review even though he ends up agin it!
Particularly intriguing to me is where Tucker writes: "MacIntyre... believes that the liberal project of the 17th and 18th centuries were the product of rationalistic arrogance, the belief that whole societies and cultures could be cajoled into a single model of organization by virtue of pieces of parchment, governmental architectures, slogans about human rights, and strict models of what defines the very notion of freedom and progress.
"He attempts to map out how the freedom of past centuries gradually mutated into the total state of today, a political order in which the entrenched and global bureaucratic elite face no limits to their power and ambition. He is not even slightly shocked that the center of the empire is the US simply because the US was the most successful deployment of the liberal democracy in history, and hence the one most vulnerable to the trajectory of arrogance, corruption, decadence, bloat, and hegemonic imposition without limit." 👀
Added to my reading list...
I would just make the correction that Egypt's 25th Dynasty of Black/Nubian pharaohs goes back as far as 754 B.C., not merely 500 B.C.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-fifth_Dynasty_of_Egypt
"What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood."
–Aldous Huxley
Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40754229
Centralization enables this.
It's why the Founders didn't put it in the Constitution or even use it during the American Revolutionary War. It first came into play during the War Between the States, as I learned from this article.
They also didn't include an income tax when the U.S.A. was created, which is another form of slavery. The War Between the States brought about the end of slavery for Black Americans, but the income taxes that were first introduced then, as well as conscription, just extended slavery to all Americans...
"But the coming war is going to be fought increasingly cybernetically. The battlefield itself won’t need much cannon fodder; it will use drones and robots, supplemented by highly trained and motivated spec ops guys. If things get really out of control, bioweapons and nuclear weapons will join the party; the coming war won’t require masses of draftees."
–Doug Casey
Thank you my sister in Christ 💜
(I wouldn't call the list "exhaustive", though. I hope there are WAY more than 254 Christians on Nostr!)
"If it hadn’t been for conscription, the US couldn’t and wouldn’t have fought the First World War, either. WW1 was the camel putting its nose under the tent in the destruction of Western civilization itself. It was a completely pointless war, made possible only through conscription—abetted by the income tax and the Federal Reserve."
–Doug Casey
#endthefed
"Only a volunteer army, essentially a militia, suits a free country. Conscription has no place in a free society."
–Doug Casey
"Remember that the government doesn’t really represent the country. The government is a separate entity that has its own interests, much as a church, a corporation, or any other organization does. The problem is that the government is the only institution in society that doesn’t survive by voluntary trade and production. It survives by force, confiscating assets from the people that it rules. People have an entirely backwards view of what the government is. It’s not your friend."
–Doug Casey
"“Right now, by paying all their taxes, the government uses you as a milk cow. But they may decide to turn you into a beef cow.”"
–Doug Casey
"The draft, or any kind of mandatory service or conscription, should be called what it is: Involuntary servitude. Or, as shocking as it may sound, slavery."
–Doug Casey
"But when you’re in the military, you’re not necessarily fighting for the country or “freedom.” You’re fighting for the government and the people who control it."
–Doug Casey