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<p>It’s not my country anymore. Why should I be forced to be a slave to it against my will? Because I hold their passport that they won’t let me give up? When you pay someone $100 a month to risk their lives and safety, you’re engaging in slavery. History’s proven that draft systems do not work. And if they do, they don’t work as effectively as an all-volunteer system. Evidently your bonehead politicians are too stupid to look at history or completely incapable of rational thought, or both.</p>
<p>I don’t trust someone who was conscripted against their will to protect a country, just as I don’t trust a regional airline pilot who’s paid $20k a year to hurl me through the air in a screaming pressurized metal tube at 500mph in one piece. You get what you pay for and if you pay $100 a month, in a capitalist country (of which Korea is one, unless something changed in my absense) you will get exactly that amount of added value. I know some do it out of nationalist pride, but I’m not that gullible. Why do you think despite having one of the largest militaries in the world in terms of body count, the Korean military isn’t one of the most powerful in the world? And for the record, the most powerful military in the world is all-voluntary and vehemently opposed to any kind of conscription. It didn’t work during Vietnam and it ain’t going to work now.</p>
<p>“Poor” is relative. When someone makes $15k a year starting and can’t live on their own because the cost of living is so expensive, they are poor. When the cost of food is so expensive a lot of people can’t put food on the table despite earning a “decent” income, they’re poor. When the public education system is so **** poor that parents spend a good half of their salaries on tutors or boarding school in the US, Canada, England and Australia, they are poor. Sorry, but Korea is a third world country with a borderline first world GDP. GDP doesn’t make the country a first world country. There are some fundamental social changes that need to happen before it becomes a country on par with the ones anyone with money and a modicum of linguistic skill is emigrating to.</p>