One of the most important things we can do as citizens to ensure that our God-given rights are protected and the Constitution upheld is to study the life and writings of the Founding Fathers who established this great nation and created a new form of government from the ground up.

There’s a lot of false information and revisionist history floating around in the world out there, so it’s become critical now more than ever to go back to first-hand sources and interpret our Constitution according to the original intent of its authors.

One of the many subjects our Founding Fathers were far from silent on was the idea of America not having a standing army. Given how our country has come to build an entire culture around the military we currently have, it’s hard to imagine not having the branches of the armed services in existence to help protect our nation and take care of threats to our way of life around the world.

So why were the Founding Fathers afraid of having a standing army? A piece by DC Dirty Laundry has the answer:

Once established, a government’s military, its bureaucrats and leaders, as well as laymen all face a different set of incentives. Those with a job related to the military have an incentive to keep their job. In most cases, they probably also desire to see the scope of their power expanded and their pay increased. The support for war, then, is the ideal policy for achieving those goals. These incentives may not transform a champion of peace into a war-loving bureaucrat, but they can have effects on the margins. It’s much easier to rationalize a war if your job depends on it.

More interestingly, the average citizen’s incentives change. To see what I mean, let’s take a look at the introduction of the permanent standing army in 19th century America.

Prior to the rise of the U.S. standing army, relations between natives and white settlers were relatively peaceful. It’s not that white settlers always felt warm feelings toward native Americans (or vice versa). Many did not. The reality of fighting one’s own battles, however, entailed significant costs.

In an essay entitled “Exchange, Sovereignty, and Indian-Anglo Relations,” Jennifer Roback remarks:

Europeans generally acknowledged that the Indians retained possessory rights to their lands. More important, the English recognized the advantage of being on friendly terms with the Indians. Trade with the Indians, especially the fur trade, was profitable. War was costly. More than is generally appreciated, the contact (between Indians and whites) was even friendly, or at least peaceful.

After the U.S. maintained a permanent army, however, things changed. Most of the disincentives for war disappeared. The monetary costs that maintained the army were spread out over the entire populace and those who demanded the army’s services paid no additional price. Nor did they now need to risk their own life. Frontiersmen could now call upon subsidized troops to do their fighting for them. This had the effect of lowering the threshold for when settlers could justify resorting to violence against their Indian neighbors.

In “Raid or Trade? An Economic Model of Indian-White Relations,” the authors accounted for a number of possible contributing factors, such as population change and newly settled land, and concluded the establishment of a standing army during the Mexican War had an independent effect of an increase of almost 12 battles a year. They estimated the buildup of the standing army before and during the Civil War caused an increase of around 25 battles a year.

The author of the piece above notes that while the ideal of having a standing army is to help bring and maintain peace, that’s rarely the actual outcome of having one. It would be nice if we lived in a world where ideals were put into practice, but the truth is, that’s not the reality we inhabit.

Kern claims the whole purpose of having a standing army is to help lower the cost of war and to create special interest groups and bureaucrats who have a deeply held interest in seeing that the war machine continues to grind on.

Whether or not this is true will largely depend on whether or not you lean more traditionally conservative or libertarian, but no no matter how you cut it, the Founding Fathers believed it was a bad idea to have standing armies, and given how right they’ve been about everything happening in our country today, it’s probably a good idea to listen to them.