Charles Wheelan, Ph.D. The Naked Economist

Suppose you could swagger into a bar, jump the queue for ordering drinks, and hurl insults at the other patrons, all the while relentlessly hitting on the wives and girlfriends of the male customers.

Then, just when some guy with a big Harley-Davidson tattoo on his forehead is about to break a bottle over your head, suppose you could quickly summon a surrogate to come fight on your behalf.

Do you think this arrangement would make you more or less inclined to behave in ways that instigate bar fights?

Consequence-Free Behavior

More, according to most economists -- and common sense. It's not that economists spend a lot of time studying bar fights (or participating in them); rather, there is an important concept in economics related to this scenario.

It's called moral hazard, and the idea is that individuals behave differently -- and sometimes badly, from society's standpoint -- when they don't have to bear the full cost of their actions.

I was guilty of moral hazard as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. I would often drive up to campus late for class, and the only parking I could find was in a dodgy neighborhood several blocks from my building. I parked there anyway, although I distinctly remember shutting the car door and thinking to myself, "Well, the car is insured."

Of course, I wouldn't have parked there if the car hadn't been insured -- which was a potential problem for the folks at Illinois Farmers Insurance. They would've had to write the check if my car disappeared, not me.

The Moral Hazard Capital of the World?

But this isn't really a column about bar fights or car insurance. It's about Iraq -- and Iran and Bosnia and Somalia and Ivory Coast and Darfur, and anywhere else in the world that Americans can vote to send troops to without facing any risk of fighting themselves. We've got the most sophisticated military in the history of human civilization, and most of us aren't in it.

For all the bombast surrounding Iraq, to my mind the most subtle question gets too little attention: Would the same Americans who were originally for the war -- both the politicians and the electorate who strongly supported them -- have made the same decision if they, or their children, actually faced some risk? In other words, has our extraordinary all-volunteer military created a moral hazard problem?

While this may seem like heaping criticism on an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq, the question is equally applicable to humanitarian interventions around the globe, particularly in places where U.S. interests aren't directly threatened.

Do I think we should put troops on the ground to stop the slaughter in Darfur? Yes, I do. But if we did, the extent of my involvement would be reading about it in the New York Times over coffee at Starbucks. Remember what happened to Americans in Somalia? Let's just say I wouldn't be the one whose body was pulled from a burning helicopter and dragged through the streets in western Sudan, and neither would most of you.

Bring Back the Draft -- with a Difference

It really is like the bar fight scenario: We as citizens make decisions, some of them arguably reckless, and surrogates do the fighting for us. I think we should make two modifications to our all-volunteer armed forces to help fix this moral hazard problem:

1. Reinstate a modified version of the draft -- for reasons of fairness and good judgment, not for combat purposes.

Reinstating the draft for military reasons would be folly. Most people have little interest in fighting and even less aptitude. But any one of us -- and I mean any man or woman up to age 65 -- could complement that effort in whatever ways military leaders decide would be most constructive.

We could unload planes at a base in Iraq or do desk duty in South Carolina when the real soldiers ship out. At a minimum, every armchair patriot should face at least the possibility of getting called into service of some sort, at military pay, for a year or 18 months during times of conflict.

If you're going to start a bar fight, you should do so knowing that your nose might get bloody, too. Or, more realistically, that you might at least have to spend some time in the parking lot passing out ice packs and gauze bandages.

2. Create an all-volunteer humanitarian intervention force.

We would have the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines -- and the Peace Corps with Guns. (OK, there's probably a better name for it.) For every region in the world where a bloody civil war is killing thousands or hundreds of thousands of people without presenting an immediate threat to the U.S., this is the American force that would go in to stop it. These soldiers should have the same expertise and commitment as the regular military -- plus special training for peacekeeping, solving humanitarian crises, and the like.

Why not send in the regular armed forces? Because the men and women of the United States military have pledged their lives to protect America and its citizens, not the citizens of Rwanda or Kosovo or Somalia.

But I believe that we have a moral obligation to intervene in those kinds of situations if we can stop the slaughter and suffering. I would have signed up in my younger days. I suspect a lot of other Americans would relish a chance to save the world and carry cool weapons, too.

Remote-Control Humanitarianism

Patriotism is cheap right now. And so, too, is humanitarianism. All it takes for most of us to demand that America "do something" is a comfortable chair and a remote control. But there is nothing cheap about "doing something" for the men and woman who actually have to do it.

I'm reminded of the catchy onetime slogan for the Illinois lottery: "Someone's gonna Lotto, might as well be you."

If we were to reintroduce a modified mandatory military service to ensure that nothing we asked of our armed forces we wouldn't be willing to do ourselves, perhaps we could adapt the slogan for the new draft boards: "Someone's gonna invade Iran, maybe it should be you."