Reply #3: No one chooses to be cannon fodder

[BurtWorm]

The people who volunteer for the imperialists' military do so for the most part for personal economic reasons, to escape poverty and economic immobility. They are an exploited class. The volunteer military is fundamentally a privatization of what should be a public concern. It enables the Plutocrat Party (formerly known, inaccurately, as the Republican Party) to use taxpayers' money for their private wars. That's just fine with a lot of Democrats and other liberals, apparently, who believe such a situation leaves their hands nice and clean where wars "not in their name" are concerned. But the fact is, such a situation is fundamentally undemocratic, and none of our hands are clean. The ruling class ought not to be able to exploit this divorce of the military class from the people to throw its wars if our democracy is to continue to mean something. The people must give consent to the wars fought in its name, and in order to do be able to do that rationally, they must have a real stake in whatever wars their political leaders ask consent for.