Robert A. Heinlein In Dialogue with His Century

13. “My Own Stuff, My Own Way”

17. RAH, letter to Theodore Cogswell, 12/04/59. A few years later, shortly before conscription ramped up for the Vietnam War, Heinlein expressed just the same revulsion for conscription in a letter to Theodore Sturgeon, 03/05/62:

I hate conscription. I regard it as human slavery of the vilest sort and do not think it can be justified under any circumstances whatever. To those who say: “Yes, but without the draft we could not defend the United States” I answer violently, “Then let the bloody United States go down the drain! Any nation whose citizens will not voluntarily fight and die for her does not deserve to live.”

I despise jails and prisons almost as much, and for the same reason, and I am contemptuous of punishment by fining because it is basically unjust, being necessarily uneven and discriminatory in application—e.g., there is a reckless driver in this neighborhood who is quite wealthy. A $500 fine to him is nothing at all, less than nothing. To me it is an annoyance and one which might well cut into my luxuries and spoil my plans. But to my neighbor across the street, a cook with two children, a $500 fine would be a major disaster.

Yet $500 is what our local courts would charge any of the three of us for drunken driving.

I suggest that ten lashes would be equally rough on each of us—and would do far more to deter homicide-by-automobile.

Both of these ideas, opposition on moral grounds to conscription and to imprisonment, are essential parts of Starship Troopers. So far as I know, no reviewer noticed either idea.