At the always fascinating Becker-Posner Blog, Richard Posner and Gary Becker each have excellent posts critiquing proposals for mandatory "national service." As Posner points out:
There are perennial calls for drafting all 18 year olds to serve in either the military or some civilian alternative. Congressman Charles Rangel has repeatedly introduced bills in Congress (the "Universal National Service Act") that would do this. The bills have never come close to passage, and are unlikely to in the future even with Democratic control of both houses of Congress. But universal national service is one of those seductive ideas that refuse to die completely.
Rep. Rangel is not the only supporter mandatory national service. Other advocates include prominent Democratic Congressman Rahm Emanuel, the center-left Democratic Leadership Council, Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain, and conservative icon Bill Buckley.
Becker and Posner do an excellent job of marshaling the consequentialist economic arguments against mandatory "national service." I would only add that advocates of this policy implicitly assume that whatever jobs the governments assigns to program participants actually will benefit the nation as a whole. That assumption is unlikely to be true, given what we know about the power of narrow interest groups to divert government resources for their own benefit.
Be that as it may, there is a deeper moral issue here: mandatory national service is not just an inefficient policy proposal, it is forced labor. And forced labor on a massive scale. Most proposals would require millions of young people to do compelled work at the behest of the government for one to two years each. Even in the unlikely event that mandatory national service could be shown to provide benefits that outweigh its costs, it would still be morally repulsive. It would still strike at the heart of the liberal idea that each person owns his or her own body, and cannot justly be compelled to work for others merely because it might be convenient to do so. Short of outright slavery or the murder of innocent people, it is hard to think of anything that violates individual liberty more clearly than forced labor.
The rhetoric of "national service" obscures the true nature of the idea, perhaps intentionally. It suggests that forced labor at the orders of the government ("national service") is somehow morally different from forced labor at the behest of other private individuals. But there is no intrinsic moral difference between the two. Yes, forced labor for the government might benefit the nation (though that result is by no means guaranteed). But so could forced labor for a private enterprise. Indeed, even outright slavery was regularly defended on the grounds that the labor of slaves produced valuable benefits to society as a whole.
As Posner points out, there is little chance that Congress will enact a forced labor program in the near future. In the long-term, however, I fear that constant advocacy of the idea will erode our moral resistance to it, and that some crisis may occur that will enable the proposal to go through. The fact that it continues to attract the support of savvy politicians like Emanuel, Rangel, and McCain, suggests that it has some legs. And once enacted, a forced labor program may be very difficult to repeal. Both government and (possibly) private enterprises will become dependent on these "low cost" (from their perspective) workers, and will lobby hard to avoid having to give them up. Moreover, government forced labor programs tend to target the young (usually 18-21 year olds), a group with very little political power; this factor also makes them difficult to abolish. For these reasons, among others, mandatory "national service" remains in force in France and Germany, despite the disappearance of the security threat from the Soviet Union that originally justified it.
We may not be able to completely eliminate the danger of forced labor. But we should at least recognize that forced labor is not only inefficient, but a great moral evil.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Wall Street Journal Website Reprints My Blog Post on National Service and the Young:
- What if the the Constitution Turns out to be a Suicide Pact? - A Final Post on Forced Labor and the Thirteenth Amendment:
- Mandatory Jury Service and the Thirteenth Amendment:
- Butler v. Perry and the Constitutionality of Forced Labor Under the Thirteenth Amendment:
- The Civil War Draft and the Constitutionality of Mandatory National Service Under the Thirteenth Amendment:
- Does Mandatory "National Service" Violate the Thirteenth Amendment?
- Why Mandatory "National Service" Proposals Target the Young:
- The Threat of Forced Labor Through Mandatory "National Service":
But it should be noted that government conscripted labor is well-established historically. Communities required their residents to pitch in and build a road or a public works project. The international convention that bars slavery and most forms of forced labor contains an exception for this.
Also, of course, the military draft is a form of conscripted labor.
Indeed, in certain situations, the conscription of labor is a way to do public projects without creating a bureaucratic contracting process and empowering public-sector labor unions that many libertarians oppose.
Communities needed people to pitch in to build a road before there were income, sales and gas taxes and ubiquitous construction companies, but that still didn't make it moral. A lot of immoral things were well-established historically.
Hopefully if it eve gets passed the Supreme Court will have the guts to call it involuntary servitude.
Whether the work itself would be performed most efficiently is another, lesser matter. The point of it would be the deterrence of free-riders.
And a draft in time of existential threat is different in both nature and practicially than national service.
1) National service is different from the peculiar institution in the same way that a law is different from a bill of attainder - it is a generalized on society agnostic to who it is it takes under its purview, whereas slavery effects an individual or class of individuals that is not otherwise legally distinct from the general people.
2) The reductio absurdum of the logic that compelled state service is immorral is that taxes are also immorral. Clearly the collective must be able to extract something from the individual. It is unclear where the dividing line lies here, but I suspect that it all comes back to the morality being the lesser of two evils.
This is not to say American kids wouldn't benefit from a "growing up" experience of having to change their surroundings, fend for themselves, and meet people from different walks of life. College partly fulfills this function, but at a cost to the academic goals. Perhaps admissions should favour those with post-highschool work experience?
As an intermediate example, we should consider a "national service" in the form of a fixed capitation on all 18-year olds (call it "majority tax" or "citizenship tax").
I agree that government conscription of labor is "well-established historically." But so what? Slavery itself was "well-established historically" until the 19th century. So was dictatorship, laws against blasphemy, laws against criticizing the government, and so on. If infringements on liberty are OK so long as they have historical roots, we wouldn't have any rights left.
in certain situations, the conscription of labor is a way to do public projects without creating a bureaucratic contracting process and empowering public-sector labor unions that many libertarians oppose.
I'm no fan of public employees unions. But I would take them over forced labor programs any day. So, I think, would most other libertarians.
Whether the work itself would be performed most efficiently is another, lesser matter. The point of it would be the deterrence of free-riders.
Taxation (as long as it funds programs that really do benefit the country) can prevent free-riding just as effectively, and without violating individual liberty to anything like as great an extent.
I should note that I am in principle against mandatory national service, but I do in fact have an 18 year old son at home. so I've reluctantly become a proponent, at least for the next year. Faster please.
That's something I disagree with. Or at least, it's very easy for me to think of things that violate individual liberty just as clearly but do more harm to the victim: rape, involuntary sterilization, medical experimentation without informed consent, etc.
Not saying I think national service is a good idea, or even a just but impractical one. Just saying I think it's easy to think of clearer violations of liberty.
As stated above, one can fulfill a tax obligation in any manner one pleases. In many situations, he may be able to extract the same value for his labour if he works in an efficient manner. Furthermore, a person is also able to ask for whatever value for his labour that he desires; in a national service system, the government will determine both the manner, value, and time of labour.
Efficiency or the attainment of laudable goals are not moral sanctions. It is certainly more efficient to execute criminals without appeals, to search without warrants, to try without a jury, or the like; however, we recognise that the government, without any checks (i.e. friction-like inefficiencies), quickly turns to tyranny.
Forced service? Even if the government hasn't a clue of how to employ several million unskilled teenagers, it will find a way to do that - with the effect of creating a ridiculous amount of bureaucracy in the process.
I think the answer is clearly 3. If the national service plan can indoctrinate the kids to believe in pervasive welfare state socialism, then that would be a added bonus.
I don't know if the numbers add up, that is, whether there are roughly as many young persons of the right age as there are illegal immigrants in the U.S. Then again, it's not like hard numbers are needed to promote an idea when podium-pounding emotional pleas do just as well, anyway. Moreover, there's not a 1:1 correspondence between the value of the two parties (see below).
Forced labor by America's youth could be a dark solution to America's current wolf-by-the-ears, illegal immigrants, who, for all they are reviled by certain parties, comprise a significant percentage of the population and have become key to the American economy. I have heard anecdotally that Germany's policy of universal service, which permits the conscripted young person to choose civil rather than military service, is a boon to that country's economy. (It doesn't seem to solve Germany's problems of high unemployment rates and the subsequent xenophobia towards Turkish guest-workers, though...)
Of course, there would be costs if (chas vechalilah) such a plan were ever to be adopted here. Employers who now employ undocumented immigrants in unsafe working conditions would have to shape up and toe the OSHA line, as well as provide health care plans (though at least a healthy young person's probably cheap to cover), see the kids unionize and demand more benefits whereas the illegal immigrant workers would never dare talk balk to the employer, etc. Free (as in beer, at least) legal labor could prove false economy compared to low-paid illegal labor.
Whether it would prove pragmatically advantageous or not, the idea is repellent to the core. May it never come to pass.
That being said, I don't recommend national military service now or in any forseeable future. If we can't convince Americans to defend our country, then it may not be worth defending. We have had no problem filling the ranks of our military, and even if we were to return to the size of our 1980's military or larger there is no indication that conscription is necessary or desirable.
As for civilian service, it is immoral for many reasons, slavery being wrong is just the most obvious. The other is that civilian national service takes away jobs from people who would otherwise be paid for that job. If I were in the business of construction houses and other buildings and the government put a bunch of slave wage civilians in my market area, I'd be out of work. This is immoral as much as the slavery of the poor individuals.
Just like with other big government oppressive ideas, the first thing is to ask why those in favor of it feel a need to wait for the government to start? If they think that slavery is such an uplifting and character building experience, they should all start immediately to work that way. They need not wait for the rest of us. If it's such a good idea, they should get enough people to volunteer for it. Just keep them from doing anything economically beneficial, because others should not pay for their immorality.
I may be dating myself, but a proposal for universal national service was the high school debate topic back in 1968, if I recall correctly.
It was the 2006-07 topic as well.
What I find particularly galling is the justification for it. Most leftists justify the draft on the basis that the "poor" or "minorities" are fighting our wars and that the "elite" is not bearing the burden. Of course, these leftists have spent the last several decades driving ROTC off of most Ivy League and other "elite" campuses and generally creating an anti-military sentiment amongst the elite (not merely a "let's not go to way too hastily" sentiment but a true "the military is evil" sentiment). After doing all of this, they are surpised that the children of the "elite" are not entering the military? I know a number of well-educated members of the "elite" who have in fact served in Iraq (and not always as officers), BUT most people I know have not seriously considered the military option. If the left truly believes that it is important that all levels of society participate in the military, then maybe they should stop doing everything in the power to drive the "elite" away from the military.
SFD
"IF" being the operative word here. I think many of the proposals are either ironic, or stem from frustration with what often appears to be a lack of seriousness coming from the other side.
Of course, this is very light compared to the proposals Ilya is condemning, in that it's only required to obtain a diploma, and that it requires a relative handful of hours compared to a full year or two. But it stems from the same basic impulses. And in some ways it's even more morally repugnant, because it's often Orwellianly labelled as "volunteering," (when it isn't bureaucratically labelled as "service learning") and it's insidiously designed to get parents to sign on by telling them it will help their kids get into college.
Right?
...anyone?
That's exactly right. Below is a letter to the editor of mine that was published in my local paper. The governor of Michigan had announced a public-service requirement for recipients of certain state scholarships, and our local paper (the Ann Arbor News) editorialized in favor of imposing the requirement as a condition of graduation.
September 2, 2004
Forcing Students to Give Service Is not Justified
To the editor:
“Community Service Order Should Expand” (Aug. 24, 2004) provides two inadequate justifications for requiring all high school students to provide 40 hours of community service as a condition of graduation.
The first justification is that “shrinking revenue streams” make the state “unable to support not-for-profit groups at previous levels.” In other words, the state government lacks the political will to raise taxes to what some apparently think are needed levels, presumably because of fear of voters. The suggested response is to conscript the labor of a nonvoting subgroup of the population. However, if the state wants to subsidize these nonprofit groups, it should do so out of general revenues rather than imposing the burden on a subgroup of the population simply because it has the power to do so.
The second justification is that the service requirement will, in Governor Granholm’s words, result in “young people who embrace service to others as a way of life.” It’s an empirical question whether forcing people to do something now will make them more likely to do it voluntarily later, but it seems doubtful. The reasoning amounts to “let’s tax the heck out of them now so that they will voluntarily give to charity later.” Don’t hold your breath.
Kingsley Browne
A one or two year term of 'forced labor' in the presumed benefit to a country is an extremely efficient way of deterring the free-rider who seeks to benefit from his/her nationality but would otherwise never return anything to it.
What do citizens owe to the country besides their taxes? (Assuming legitimate taxes, not discriminatory, racist, confiscatory, or illegal ones.) If someone pays their taxes but doesn't do anything else are they a "free rider"? If so, by what raionale?
Of course they are. Due to circumstances, almost every citizen in this country gets more than he or she gives. In part, the fees were paid by earlier generations. In part, by a minority who work at national improvement in a million ways, large or small, organized or individual, and the free-loader enjoys the incremental improvement in circumstances without paying additional costs.
The other problem with free-loaders is that they think themselves superior--and they'll tell you how superior they are--for having figured out how to free-load. That's annoying as hell. So if a free-loader were to suffer some misfortune on account of having been a free-loader, I'd instantly go out and mow my lawn. Or something.
With a draft in place, I would have to be more personally invested in my ideals for or against the war. Me being against the war would have a very real outcome if I worry about being blown to bits, and would encourage me to protest in a more direct manner if I opposed it.
I call bulls*** on this one. I tracked down the quote from the Freedman article that Illya linked to and it was taken from a piece written by Senator McCain in which he was clearly calling for voluntary national service by expanding AmeriCorps program and encouraging the military to try to recruit more volunteers to fulfill some of the non-military roles that our servicemen and women are fulfilling.
Typically it looks like this has all evolved into the various things that govt does today, infrastructure and the various social programs that the govt administers and pays for.
Going back to national service: The whole thing has to go back to first principles.
What does and individual owe society? Anything?
And more specifically: What do Americans owe our respective levels of government, from the local to the national? Is there an obligation there? Is there an obligation even implied?
It ain't slavery if you owe it.
Rather than seeing it as akin to slavery, I see it as part of the cost of being a citizen of a given country.
This assumes, as you do for taxes, that it be equitably distributed, with extremely few waivers. ADA, for instance, would not excuse most of the physically handicapped from national service, though it would delimit exactly which kind of services might be performed.
Investing in the idea of one's country--even if forced to do so--really does not offend my sense of propriety.
School kids get way too much homework. It starts way too young as well. Most is just busy work.
So, yes, I oppose homework.
Not a Reductio ad absurdum at all. Taxes are immoral - and so is the idea of "national service" or "community service" or whatever they call the compulsory voluntarism flavor of the month. Calling national service and taxation an "investment in the country" doesn't make them any less immoral.
Taxes are not good, but no one has come up with a better way to provide for a common defense and maintenance of courts and other requirements of civilization. That tax money is used for ignoble purposes is common and hardly avoidalbe.
Compulsory service does more, though. Money has no ideology and taking a cut of one's money is injurious and perhaps painful depending on the tax rate, but taking one's time is an entirely different animal.
I can pay taxes and still pursue my own planned life goals (absent some money), but with compulsory service I would have to stop all my plans and conform my life to the whims of the government. This is far more intrusive on freedom than just providing money.
This is nonsense.
If my parents pay for something of mine, I don't owe a debt for it. That's the whole point of them paying; it needs to be treated as if I paid myself.
I don't know about you, but I have to work for my money. I spend over 100 days a year working for the government rather than myself. In short, money and time are identical.
But the Kid who are failed by the system and have wasted 12 years in schools. That didn't teach them what they needed to know . Get put into slave labor. Well i mean at least the one who don't end up in jail .
That as bad as making it illegal to hire anyone. Who doesn't already have health insurance .
So when do change the counties name to the "American socialist republic ? "
The same thing that makes them favor authoritarian solutions to real problems?
So the moral thing would have been to go roadless? Or to allow freeloaders to enjoy roads they hadn't contributed to. (Please don't suggest that the alternative was to make the road a toll road. Any society so underdeveloped that it had to rely on corvee to build a road is unlikely to have had the resources to pay toll collectors to stand at a tollboth all day and turn away anyone who didn't throw a couple of clamshells into the basket.)
Isn't that what totalitarians do?
Imagine those same "do-it-because-I-say-so" supporters having to convince these young but quite rational adults that their service is important and worth the time we ask of them? We would have to actually engage them like free people, rather than dehumanize them as soft, stupid and coddled heirs to a great fortune, which many seem to want to do.
So far, the arguments in support seem to be (1) because kids today need that toughening experience and (2) the kids owe it to the older people who currently manage the inherited asset called civilization.
Query how exactly does service make you better? This is a situation aptly mocked by South Park's gnomes whose plan was "Step 1--steal boys' underpants, step 2--?, step 3-profit." The presumption is forced service is some soul-enriching experience. Hmm... I see step 1 and 3 in that plan. Looking for step 2 explanation here, you slavers, er, service supporters.
As for argument (2), every generation inherits benefits from the prior generations, and hopefully passes those along to the next. If we now say young people owe living members of prior generations service in return for passing civilization along, young people get to question whether the living generations are actually "value add" generation or not. Right?
I mean, I only owe the boomers service if the boomers added to what the Greatest Generation gave them to give to me. And if the boomers messed things up, and I'm going to get less in terms of civilization than was left to them, don't they owe me service? (Oh, and we apparently cannot measure the bequest between generations using GNP, since such economic measures are dismissed by mandatory service supporters as not capturing the full benefits of mandatory service. So only moral arguments need apply for this going-nowhere debate, it seems.)
This leftist claim is wrong as a matter of fact. (The article is from 2003, but as far as I can tell, the only thing that's changed is that the number of casualties has gotten bigger.)
You only quoted the predicate in the 2nd Amendment. Why did you omit the conclusion?
If the liberals really need to have a draft so they can push people around, how about drafting young people to work in schools as teachers aides. Fify percent of draftees would probably have better skills than the teachers and one on one attention to the students would probably do wonders.
Homework appears to be steadily increasing, with some elementary school kids doing two hours per night. However, I don't see a corresponding increase in test scores. Nor do I see any corresponding increase in the quality of the folks the schools are sending into the workforce.
A small subset of the population can write a coherent sentence. An even smaller number can weave them into a paragraph. And even those numbers appear to be shrinking.
If we all lived in a small medieval city-state and there was an army on the horizon threatening to kill us all, "national" service in the form of drafting some citizens into a militia and making others do service like fortifying walls, etc. might be required over mere taxation.
My point is that Illya seemed to be making a categorical distinction against forced service, apart from consequentialist concerns, and in my mind the consequentialist concerns are paramount in the immorallity of forced service.
That right there should put a stake in the heart of the argument for "national service", and even the draft.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court is AWOL on this, as well as the War on Drugs, but that's a rant for another day.....
I omitted the main clause as a jest. Normally pro-gun types (of which I am one) try to emphasize the main clause and gloss over the predicate explanatory clause. The gun-grabbers seize on the predicate explanatory clause, misdefine 'well-regulated', and try to use it to destroy the nature of the right to keep and bear arms as listed.
I wanted to emphasize how the predicate explanatory clause could and should be used to guarantee a pro-gun desired effect - requiring that everyone physically capable receive basic firearms training.
In some ways that was the American experience, too, but what makes a draft less divisive isn't just that it's universal, but that there is near universal agreement about what young people are being drafted for.
In WWII, when the draft took virtually every young man who wasn't disabled or uniquely qualified for a job more important to the war than serving in uniform, it wasn't controversial - but Pearl Harbor left no reasonable grounds to argue against fighting the war in the first place, and this was the peak of the era of huge mass armies, so we needed one, too. In the Civil War, I'm not sure what percentage of young men entered the army through the draft or as volunteers, but in the parts of the North where the war itself was most controversial before the draft started, draft resistance turned into some of the worst riots this country has ever seen (NYC, for instance).
The Vietnam War was, AFAIK, the first war fought with a draft but with only a small portion of our young men in the military (including volunteers as well as draftees). As it went on and on it became very divisive - but I don't think that drafting everyone would have made the potential draftees any happier. The basic problem was that this was not a war that we had to fight, it was fought in a way most Americans didn't understand, and it certainly gave the appearance of - and IMO, really was - lacking a strategy with a realistic chance of winning. It might have been good policy to oppose Communism there (either with a better strategy or with the intent of bleeding the Soviet economy in a war of attrition), and it certainly was a way to keep our officer corps in practice, but doing this on the bodies of draftees was simply unacceptable.
And that's the biggest problem with a draft, absent a WWII-like situation: it erodes the morale and skill of the military, and encourages politicians and politically-oriented generals to mis-use our forces.