Every year around so-called “tax freedom” day, people talk about moving from working for the government to working for themselves. But this is too glib because it conflates paying taxes with compelled physical labor. There is a big difference, one central to the history of Anglo-American liberty.
Under the medieval system in much of Europe, serfs or peasants owed obligations of actual physical labor (beyond military service) to their political overseers. As English liberties grew, this obligation of physical labor was replaced by the right to pay taxes instead, with the chief exception being obligations of military service for males. Free men were increasingly free to choose their line of work and pay their political overseers with money, rather than owing an obligation of service to whatever physical tasks happened to be thought important or profitable to the upper and the political classes.
Service Nation is an organization devoted to stripping away this bulwark of Anglo-American liberty, hoping by the year 2020 to require every young American man and woman to be drafted into either military or community service.
[4th UPDATE: Service Nation has emphatically stated that it does not favor mandatory service, favoring only voluntary service. My characterization of their goal for 2020 was based mostly on their 13th stated goal, which used to be on their website, but has since been scrubbed: "13. Launch a debate about why and how America should become a nation of universal national service by 2020: debating baby bond, lottery draft, new GI Bill, etc." Their email to me did not explain what they did mean by their 13th goal, but I hope to speak with them next week. Their more immediate goals include passing a National Service Act in 2009 (which would probably not require universal service).]
But they do not even discuss the Constitutional Amendment that ought to be required before they can mandate community service and take away the hard-won Anglo-American liberty from involuntary servitude. The Constitution gives the Federal Government the power to raise a military, which in the 18th century contemplated an obligation of male citizens to serve in the military. In my opinion, the Constitution does not give the Federal Government the power to compel community service.
Let’s hope that the Supreme Court would not permit Service Nation's move backwards to a more feudal relationship between ordinary people and the people who govern them. One senses that de Toqueville understood American values of volunteerism and freedom of association much better than the people behind Service Nation, an understanding that was also concerned about the tyranny of the majority.
UPDATE: Service Nation's coordinator, Alan Khazei, argues that doing community service turns on one's "'justice nerve. . . . And once a justice nerve is turned on, it rarely goes off."
It seems to me that, if it really turned on one's justice nerve, one would have a good enough sense of justice to oppose Service Nation's unjust goal of state-mandated public service. I wonder whether instead forced community service would tend to turn on one's "collectivist nerve."
2d UPDATE: Comments below helpfully point to Butler v. Perry (1914), in which the Supreme Court upheld a Florida statute that required EITHER 6 days of labor a year on local roads OR the provision of an able-bodied substitute OR the payment of $3 to the road repair fund.
Although the statute allowed the payment of a tax to avoid service (which made service not mandatory), from reading the case my guess is that the Court would probably have upheld the statute even if it were truly mandatory.
Whether requiring a full year, rather than 6 days a year, would be allowed and whether one could expand services beyond road building duties is unclear.
3d UPDATE:
1. Philip Hamburger points out that the federal government is one of enumerated powers, while the states have more general powers. This wouldn't affect the involuntary servitude argument, but it would affect whether the Constitution gives the Federal Government power to compel participation in an "army" of domestic service workers several times larger than the US military.
2. Ann Althouse comments:
Service Nation. It sounds like the title of a dystopian novel.
You'd think before naming your movement, you'd check the etymology of your key word:
But as Lindgren notes, one man's "justice nerve" is another man's "collectivist nerve." Something might sound so right to you, that you don't even notice how it sounds to others.service...
ETYMOLOGY: Middle English, from Old French, from Latin servitium, slavery, from servus, slave.
3. I came across these quotations from De Toqueville:
a. Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details.
b. Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
I very much doubt that the highest and best use of ALMOST EVERY American for a year of his or her life is to spend it in a government program.
4th UPDATE: See the 4th UPDATE embedded in text above.]
Related Posts (on one page):
- Service Nation States that It Does Not Support Mandatory National Service:
- McCain's Time Magazine Essay on Patriotism Touches on Service.--
- McCain Campaign “studying options for national service.”--
- Why Mandatory National Service is Unconstitutional under the Thirteenth Amendment:
- The Mainstreaming of Forced Labor:
- Service Nation, Part III: Mandatory Community Service is a Basic Assault on Anglo-American Liberty.--
- Service Nation, Part II: The Goals of Its Leader.--
- Service Nation, Part I: Time Magazine Announces Public Service Campaign.—
Justice Kennedy would find a national consensus in favor of it.
Many of these clauses were in place from the very beginning of the nation.
I detest required community service. I had to do it in high school and I nearly had to do it in law school. (My graduating year was the last year exempt from Harvard's mandatory 40 hour per year pro bono requirement). I found that required community service was more about enhancing the reputation of the entity or person forcing you to do the community service than it was a genuine effort to teach you the value in helping others. In the law school context, I found it was also a way to advance political agendas through conscripted labor. It's shameful and offensive and I really wish it would stop -- both at the private and public levels.
This country tried slavery before and it didn't work so great. This time the potential slaves have guns and the ability to vote. I just don't see how this will work.
The distinction between military service and civilian civil service is that the defense of the country is seen as a duty that runs with the rights and privileges of living in a free country -- much like the duty to pay taxes or the duty to obey laws. But in the Anglo-American tradition, you can not find any such tradition of compelled do-gooder activities, because those are seen as the delegated duty of the state. It's a weak distinction, but it is what it is.
That said, I support a system of national service that is completely voluntary, but in which signficant government benefits are linked to signing up to voluntary national service.
In particular, I would support a law that said that drivers licenses are linked to national service. That is, anyone over the age of 25 who has not performed a year of national service is not eligible for a drivers license. A drivers license is a privilege provided by the government, not a right. If you want the government to extend that privilege to you, you should return something to your country (in the form of national service).
Other government benefits should also be linked to providing national service - perhaps the personal exemption on taxes, or even social security.
This completely alleviate's Prof. Lindgren's concerns about compelled labor, involuntary servitude, and the like. It is a strict quid pro quo. You can choose what you want to do - if you want the government to provide you with the copious benefits the government currently provides to you, you must in return provide back to your country national service. On the other hand, you are perfectly free to decline to provide national service - but in that case, don't expect the government to continue to provide all the benefits it currently provides to you. Again, completely voluntary - your choice. The choice has consequences, of course, but all choices have consequences. And I see no constitutional hurdles whatsoever.
Your post is also a perfect example of why regulating should be kept to a bare minimum. Driver's licensing should be about whether someone is a competent driver, period. Not whether their child support is up to date or they are otherwise a decent human being.
.
Involuntary servitude is one of those places where the law has a interesting challenge drawing distinctions. Obvious, some amount of "involuntary" participation/contribution is in effect. The challenge is where to draw the boundaries.
.
Ahhh ... Butler v. Perry, 240 U.S. 328 (1916)
There's a way to achieve very nearly the same end at no
cost to the government.
You see, the Federal government, through its power to
withhold funding, has nearly complete control over the
educational institutions. It could simply issue the
edict that one year of full-time community service -
in addition to all of today's requirements - is required
for graduation from high school, on pain of the State's
losing all Federal support for its schools. It can
also decree that a second year of community service
is a requirement for any college degree, on pain of
the school's losing all Federal support - including
the school's being required to repay any Pell grants
or guaranteed student loans of students in attendance.
These rules would bankrupt any institution that fails
to comply. Moreover, the administrations would love
it. Not only might they get to direct some portion of
the no-longer-"conscripted" labor, but the "students",
no longer "conscripts", would have to pay for the
privilege of laboring under such a regime in the form
of "tuition."
All perfectly Constitutional, since it offers "only"
financial incentives for the participants in such
a scheme. I can hardly imagine a Court holding that
the Thirteenth Amendment would touch it. It instead
plays into a long line of jurisprudence that says
that the Government can do whatever it pleases with
its power of the purse. Remember that national speed
limits, drinking ages, and such were enacted, and
passed Constitutional muster, under much the same
rationale.
Add to this, if you like, a prerequisite ("for the
protection of the public") that no
license to practice any profession or trade shall be
granted unless all principals have achieved at least
a certain minimal level of basic education, and you
add the community service requirement as a requirement
for employment, and shut those who would shirk it
out of legitimate participation in the economy.
Add a grace period for businesses to upgrade their
existing workforce and bring it into compliance, and
a sufficiently juicy subsidy for doing so, and what
capitalist can resist the bait?
Really, the proposal as I've seen it stated has
no imagination at all!
I'm not aware of anything preventing private persons from building roads on their property. If private persons want to purchase property and build roads on them, and then allow people to drive on those private roads without a government-provided drivers license (which is linked to national service), I don't think there should be any law stopping that from occurring.
OTOH, where the public acquires property, builds roads, and allows persons to drive on those public roads, I don't see any reason we shouldn't condition providing the use of those signficant public benefits on the user providing, in return, national service.
What are you going to do with a guy who "accidentally" forgets to put the oil filter on a government vehicle after changing the oil?
Or who, being seconded to a democratic representative's campaign, goes door to door telling lies about the guy? Bad lies, I mean. Or the truth, come to think of it.
If he's going to tutor the poor kids, then we are putting the poor kids' future in the hands of somebody who doesn't want to be doing what he's sent to do.
This is why the military has corporals and sergeants. One to five or one to four is the general rule of supervisors (NCO) to the troops.
So, for every four or five involuntarily serving folks, we need one government employee to supervise them.
If the interest in volunteering were as great as the proponents suggest, we wouldn't need the proponents propounding this nutty scheme.
Thus, the great bulk of the corvee laborers would be pissed off.
So, my question is how many people are we going to have to hire and pay in order to keep an eye on these kids who are NOT in uniform, but who are neverthess getting free food and digs at our expense?
Isn't this the sort of system those stalwarts defenders of liberty, the Nazi....er I mean the Germans use?
This whole thing is a supremely bad idea concocted by people who simply want to tell others what to do and congratulate themselves on it.
People may think this is constitutional--maybe it is, and maybe it isn't, although you could tie this in knots with litigation over many things. I'll tell you something else that is constitutional, namely, my power as a juror to acquit anyone that resists this tyranny by force.
I'll point out that this ties in with Prof. Chafetz's posts on the inability to decline service in the House of Commons. The upper classes faced the issue of compelled service as well. Noblesse oblige and all that.
Well that didn't take long.
A.S. simply does not get it. The government reports to the citizens, and not the other way around. A.S. is making it sound like roads come from the government instead of from the pockets of the taxpayers.
So now I'm supposed to pay taxes to build the road AND ALSO do public service for the privilege of driving on it? I don't think so.
The government may not condition the receipt of benefits on the forfeiture of constitutional rights unless there is a relation between the right and the benefit. That's why the government can make forced speech a condition of getting a driver's license if the forced speech is answering test questions and filling out forms, but may not make forced speech a condition of getting a driver's license if the forced speech is, for example, swearing that you are not a member of the communist party. So maybe if the service you had to sign up for to get your driver's license was cleaning the side of the road, or even helping to build the road, it nmight pass general muster...
But otherwise, the conditioning of mundane and near-universally held government privileges on an unrelated quid pro quo with the government is unconstitutional for the very obvious reason that allowing it would be the end of any and all of our liberties. Because why stop at driver's licenses? What about professional licenses? — after all, working a trained job is a privilege, not a right. Forming a corporation is a privilege, receiving social services is a privilege, traveling on airplanes is a privilege. Potentially everything one has to do to live a normal life can be called a privilege and conditioned on government approval, and most people are going to accept undue restrictions on their liberty before they choose to starve.
and
The distinction between military service and civilian civil service is that the defense of the country is seen as a duty that runs with the rights and privileges of living in a free country
Likewise, if military service is truly seen as a duty by the people, we wouldn't ever need mandatory military service.
That is much less onerous than requiring a full year or two of national service.
The ultimate vision of ServiceNation is an America in which, by 2020, 100 million citizens will volunteer time in schools, workplaces, and faith-based and community institutions each and every year (up from 61 million today), and that increasing numbers of Americans annually will commit a year of their lives to national service.
(my bolding)
How is volunteer work "involuntary?"
And aren't you trying a bit of sleight-of-hand in reading "a national service act" to mean Rangel's specific "National Service Act?" Lots of people talk about "tax reform," for example, but that doesn't mean they are for some particular proposal that a legislator has introduced as the Tax Reform Act of 20xx.
To my knowledge, the Supreme Court's "rulings" on the matter of the constitutionality of a military draft or other compulsory service have never been particularly reasoned or persuasive, just ipse dixit in the vein of, of course it's constitutional! Moreover, I think the last time the issue was examined was during WWI, an era not notable for the Court's robust protection of civil liberties (viz. Holmes's preposterous "falsely shouting fire" analogy to draft resisters distributing flyers in Schenck). It would be interesting to see what the contemporary Court would do. I think there is both a lack of affirmative Congressional power to conscript (if "raise and support armies" implies that power, than there are no limits at all) AND a prohibition in the 13th Amendment.
Incidentally, I haven't followed this issue--(de)merits of a service corps aside, is there any reason to think Obama's proposal is for compulsory service, or is it simply rewarded with college funds or something like that?
The perverse beauty of the "make it part of edducation" scheme is that it makes this argument hard to frame. It instead builds a tower of reasoning: "community service is an essential preparation for life, therefore should be required as part of a basic education", followed by "the requirement for a basic education is necessary to protect the public from unqualified practitioners of any trade or profession", both much less inflammatory in themselves, and
twists them into a requirement to satisfy a community service requirement as a condition of employment.
The first argument is an argument of a sort that we've already delegated to the professional educators. The second is uncontroversial if you accept the premise of professional licensing at all. The combination is what it is.
Given the success of the all-volunteer military, the necessity argument would fail. Just like the notion that Americans won't pick lettuce or clean motel rooms or study computers, raise the compensation enough and you'll have people lined up around the block.
How would a single-sex draft square with current notions of equal rights? (I know women-in-combat was batted around here, but if you're going with the defense of the country is seen as a duty that runs with the rights and privileges of living in a free country you've got to add a "but some are more equal than others" clause somewhere.)
By the way, Rand's works are parables, not cookbooks.
Benefitting society is a good thing, personally. An engineer-turned-lawyer of my acquaintance said it was important to find work that doesn't cause you to lose your soul, and you had to figure out what that means to you by yourself. I figure if I'm creating stuff that I think helps people (best when it's direct, sometimes when it's just part of a system), and the people show me they agree by paying for it, it's good enough for me. (That's the fundamental difference between the two camps: Whether you think it's good because people will pay for it, or you think it's only good if you do it without being paid.)
http://www.nationalserviceact.org/17.html
NI, I think the answer to your question is in this post. Prof. Lindgren wrote: The Constitution gives the Federal Government the power to raise a military, which in the 18th century contemplated an obligation of male citizens to serve in the military.
It is "addressed" by asserting without evidence that Service Nation suppoerts Charles Rangel's National Service Act.
The fact is that compulsory national service is not being proposed.
Incidentally, if the ages for which service is mandatory is 18 - 42, I suspect that this would exempt most of the authors of this scheme. How convenient!
Look at some of the cases relied on in Butler v. Perry. Such well regarded cases as Plessy v. Ferguson and Slaughterhouse Cases.
From Harvard Crimson:
From Frequently Asked Questions
This whole program just sounds like a group of frustrated statists hoping to grab government power and use it to obtain slave labor for their progressive ideals.
Says the "Dog"
We need a national consensus that forced labor is evil.
If this ever comes to pass I'd love to start a web site to teach conscriptees how to sabotage their jobs!
Yeah, see, anyone who can make that statement to me has abdicated being taken seriously.
More along the lines of, "when they said what they said, they probably meant the same as when they said it last time." The thirteenth amendment's language is lifted from well-known language that controlled the northwest territories.
It was well-established that certain kinds of compulsory service associated with political rights — jury service, militia service, and a poll tax to be paid in limited communal labor — were both permissible and widely practiced under the constraints of that language.
The hypothetical ordinary citizen envisioned by Original Public Meaning could have easily been aware of the prior meaning of the language that became the thirteenth amendment and could be expected to assume the meaning was not changed.
This should be easy to stop merely by swaying public opinion, given the obvious imagery we'd have to draw upon. If somebody doesn't get out ahead of this thing and attack it hard and fast, I'm afraid it could get some traction. No doubt the advocates of this collectivist nightmare will be blathering on about patriotism with flags waving behind them, so the counter-propaganda needs to focus on how this is truly un-American.
If one were going to amend the Constitution so as to take away that particular means of raising an army, now or in the late 19th century, how would the amendment be worded?
(The Constitution allows Congress "To raise and support armies" but "To provide and maintain a navy", and IIUC, until WWII conscription was only into the army -- does that distinction and that fact bear on constitutionalty of conscription into other branches of the military, or [on-topic] into non-military service?)
Thanks. I've updated accordingly.
If meals on wheels is "community service", why isn't delivering for Domino's?
If cleaning up a park is "community service", why isn't working on my yard?
And, unless someone is planning to go into one of those fields, how is the education relevant?
Yeah, lets pass the 13th amendment again until the government notices.
The universal service goal by 2020 is number 13 in my first post on Service Nation.
I don't know about you, but I have to work for my money. If the government makes me pay them money, I have to work to obtain that money. In short, paying taxes is compulsory labor.
Because no one else has said it: "Service guarantees citizenship"
Wow, who knew - slavery is freedom!!!
So now I'm supposed to pay taxes to build the road AND ALSO do public service for the privilege of driving on it? I don't think so.
Exactly right!
Why don't we go the whole Heinlein Starship Trooper route and tie voting rights to successful completion of the term of service.
Not Serious, I think this whole forced servitude thing is inane. I spent 12 years in the military and think it was some of the best years of my life, but I was surrounded by people who wanted to be there.
LMAO!
A.S. simply does not get it. The government reports to the citizens, and not the other way around. A.S. is making it sound like roads come from the government instead of from the pockets of the taxpayers.
So now I'm supposed to pay taxes to build the road AND ALSO do public service for the privilege of driving on it? I don't think so."
THAT WAS EPIC PWNAGE!!!
And this law would EPICALLY FAILS LOL!!!! Sorry dooders, this is so obviously barred by the 13th Amendment that if you don't see that you must be...special. Nice try at creative arguments to get around it - the military is obviously special since Congress has enumerated powers in that area, and that's not "servitude" anyway its military.
If, by some miracle such a law passd, any judge who hears the first challenge should summarily rule for the challengers, and the lawyers who defend the law should lose their license for defending an obviously illegal law and wasting the court's time with a frivolous legal theory. Thank you!!!!
It simply does not follow that because compulsory service is legal in a few very historically very well-defined incarnations, that any form of compulsory service, regardless of its purpose, is legal.
I would argue that a regime of extended civilian compulsory national service is distinctly different from the traditional obligations of citizenship in quality, character and premise, in a way that has great bearing on its legality.
I think the YouTube shots of hundreds of thousands of brownshirts marching to national service would help disabuse people of the idea.
I agree.
Imagine, a volunteer army of Wal-Mart greeters. Of course, that would flip the American Association of Retarded Pensioners' position on the proposal, but you can't make an omelet without breaking a few old eggs.
WORK MAKES YOU FREE!
Maybe Obama can mention it in Germany tomorrow. ARBEIT MACHT FREI!
It wouldn't bring down wages because the involuntary servitude wouldn't be going towards anything people would be willing to pay for. It would just be a larger example of the community service we all did in high school. You have a bunch of untrained, poorly compensated (or not compensated at all), poorly motivated people ambling about and counting the minutes on the clock until quiting time. Far from engendering any sense of community, community service just made people mad.
What people don't understand that the labor isn't free. Not only are you pissing on the poor saps that have to do the labor, but you're taking people who would be performing productive service in the economy (or training towards that being able to provide that productive service) and making them perform labor that is almost by definition inefficient.
If cleaning up a park is "community service", why isn't working on my yard?
And, unless someone is planning to go into one of those fields, how is the education relevant?
Noted similarly, especially in the comment funnel. I think the local high school has a "community service" requirement, and if my kids want, I'll support them in this argument, especially if they donate the wages to some worthy cause like the Institute for Justice. (But they're young and still communitarian, maybe because they've never had to earn their keep. They haven't taken me up on my offer to support them in their Tinker rights or those protected by our state's Student Free Expression Act.)
That's one of the "education" benefits, learning that work is hard work, a lot harder than studying, and the kind of work you can get without a degree is harder and pays less than the kind you can get with a degree.
At any rate, there are many excellent points set forth in this thread as to why such a program would fail, and fail in a big way.
I find it particularly amusing that any of the "USA USA" class would desire such a program, given their anti-immigration fervor. If a bunch of dirt farmers can "steal jobs" at 5 bucks an hour, what will a national service program do?
I also find it amusing to visualize myself and my friends in one of these programs against our will. If any economist wanted a movie illustrating the concept of "negative utility" we would provide it for them.
It sickens me that there is even one person on this thread that thinks they have some moral right to compel service of another person, merely based on the fact that they each live within the same political unit, often not by choice.
Forget the Constitutional issue. The Constitution is a weak document that has almost no meaning and someday soon will have absolutely no meaning. The anti-federalists predicted as much and the good little statists have done a pretty good job undermining the restraints on government that the federalists thought would work. I guarantee that if a National Service Act is passed that the Supreme Court would uphold it. Particularly if religious institutions could benefit from the free labor.
To be clear, I’m a long way from convinced that this is a good idea, but the idea that there is no constitutional way of implementing such a program strikes me as rather silly.
Wow, the poster that said the drama queens were out in force on this one nailed it. Community service is the moral equivalent of "slavery," this is an idea rooted in Nazism, and now anyone who volunteers for anything has "self-esteem issue[s]" (whatever that means). I never considered that I would volunteer for my son's boy scout troop because I had "self esteem issues."
You folks need to get a grip, there are plenty of good reasons to oppose this type of program, no reason to degrade into histrionics and start insulting everyone who donates their time. That type of garbage is just going to undermine your position.
I'm a Navy vet and regard it as some of the best years of my life too, and here's an important point: Service, either military or civilian, is a good thing. Eating your vegetables is a good thing. Physical education is a good thing. The nation probably would be better off if everyone were compelled to do a stint in the military -- the 9/11 hijackers wouldn't have stood a chance against a planeload of ex-Marines. But just because something is a good thing doesn't mean it should be mandated. Freedom is a good thing too.
You were in the Navy voluntarily, right? And you were paid to serve, right? That's a little different from being compelled to provide free labor!
I'll raise my own kids, thank you very much.
Down with societal coercion! If the people don't wanna pay for roads, they shouldn't have to! Anything less is slavery!
And don’t' get me started on Jury duty! It's the moral equivalent of the Holocaust!
A coming-of-age story about duty, citizenship, and the role of the military in a free society, Starship Troopers resonates with modern concerns. The book proposes that suffrage be given only to those who have earned it through military or other devoted social service, with no conscription. The choice for the form of the devoted service was up to the government, with military service being a strong possibility. The point was that you placed your wellbeing at the hands of the government in return for a voice in that government. Psychosocially, you were invested in the government, just as one invests in a business. Further, as long as you were actively in whatever service you found yourself in (career military, for example) your suffrage did not apply -- only after you were out of the service did you gain the franchise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein
Or whether they can prove legal status in this country (as required by the REAL ID Act).
Yeah, but watching rabid libertarians work themselves into a lather over the idea that they would actually have to do something to serve the community, that is automatically funny.
I don't know about insightful.
I must say, I have very much enjoyed this thread.
Yeah. The idea that the government would do anything to enforce a court order is absolutely ridiculous. And besides, I am sure that people who owe money for child support have better ideas of how to spend the money anyway.
Child support is involuntary servitude!
Why is it acceptable to be drafted into the military but not into the national service? Especially nowaday when "military missions" include transporting food to folks in Africa, doing nation building and policing in Iraq and such things.
Yeah. The idea that the government would do anything to enforce a court order is absolutely ridiculous. And besides, I am sure that people who owe money for child support have better ideas of how to spend the money anyway.
Child support is involuntary servitude!
Take away driver licenses of people who don't pay child support? So they lose their jobs and need to go on welfare, or what? How does no license help them pay?
You'll note that the services you mention are being done by the military, or by hired firms, nany of them involved in the scarier places having high numbers of ex-military. And the NGOs who actually pay their people. Drafting guys to offload bags of wheat in Upper Revolta is a waste of time, money, and effort.
America currently does not have the draft. Presumably, this is in part because Americans are only willing to support this sort of mandatory service in times of dire need. As well, the miliatary has repeatedly indicated that they prefer an all-volunteer force because they perform significantlty better than draftees. In other words, the reason there is no draft is not because there can't be, but because it's a bad idea in all but the most desperate of circumstances.
1. I made no claim that Service Nation was supporting Rangel's proposal. Read the post again. I was discussing several overlapping strands in the movement for compulsory national service. Rangel's bill also illustrates the conflation of mandatory with voluntary and the conflation of community service with national security.
2. Read Service Nation's own goals in my first post. Number 13 is universal national service by 2020. So they do favor a Rangel-type solution, but apparently not in the 2009 Service Act.
There is a difference between ability to pay and willingness to pay. A social service can provide a great amount of utility, even if a person is unable to pay for it. However, that does not change the fact that people are undervaluing the cost and overvaluing the supposed benefit.
Apart from the constitutionality of the issue, it's just a dumb idea and a huge waste of time and effort. If big government liberals really want a source of free labor, why don't they make this kind of compulsory service a prerequisite to receiving unemployment benefits or other types of welfare (not relating to disability). In that case, there's actually a relationship between the privilege at issue (unemployment benefits) and the requirement. You could even set up a career services office that aided the people get jobs when they weren't digging ditches or working in the community.
A German movie “Am Ende Kommen Touristen” is right on this topic. A young German is sent on Civildienst. He does not give a damn and ends up in … Auschwitz (yes, that one, but as a peon social worker – simply because the German government has an office there). He happens to learn something there in a year and is having fun to boot, but his actual output is close to zero. Meanwhile the government takes his upkeep from Mommy’s and Daddy’s budget. Now, it’s probably not a bad idea for young Germans to go to Auschwitz (and many do, as those Touristen of the title), but support people for a year?
He would have had to – in the Soviet Union.
Or ten Einsteins. Many on this thread mentioned the Nazis, but it’s the good old Eastern Block where this tradition got started. Physicists digging potatoes, engineers canvassing habitual felons on the police list, students sorting rotten apples, everybody showing up at “voluntary” sabbathniks usually just to show up. Yes, even fun sometimes, but a big cause/symptom of the eventual fall of the empire.
Uh, you do realize that we do not have draftees anymore?
The main reason why a draft is accetable to most people is that it has been necessary for the nation's survival. People found the draft more acceptable in earlier times was because the alternative was losing the war. There is no similar compelling reason for the other type of national service.
And as someone who spent a year in Americorps VISTA I am opposed to forcing anyone to do it and would be reluctant to encourage anyone to join even voluntarily. The training I got was near useless to the actual job I did and I was not put to good use. My main probalem with it while I was a part is that Americorps just sticks warm bodies into positions and hopes everything works out. A lot of times it does if the person is qualified or the job is simple enough, but I saw a lot of people put in jobs they were not able to do or who quit because they were being wasted. And these were all people who were there voluntarily.
You tried to, without explicitly saying so.
I can't get the PowerPoint to download, so can't confirm what it says. Given that elsewhere they talk strictly about voluntary service I'd say their objective is, at most, unclear. Perhaps you could have tried to clear up the ambiguity with them before addressing the issue.
Let me say that I oppose mandatory national service, and creating an academy for the purpose strikes me as a bad idea. But I think you ought to have a clearer understanding of the whole thing before attacking it.
Uh...dood wtf does "service" mean? I assume it means "benefit." People benefit society more by doing what they choose to do, not by what bureacrats dictate they do. As the comments on this thread have made clear over and over, this would be by definition inefficient.
You mean, "serve the community" beyond paying my taxes? If "the community" wants me to work, why shouldn't they pay me?
"serve the community" = "serve those in power" (but the correct formulation doesn't sound nearly as good, does it?)
Why is it acceptable to be drafted into the military but not into the national service?
If the government tried to draft people right now, I bet they'd find out that this would be very unacceptable - even more so than "mandatory voluntarism". You're not sending my son to get shot at in some Third World hellhole at the behest of corrupt, incompetent politicians who don't even really intend to win.
In time of dire need, Congress raises armies by activating and enrolling the militia. You start with the regular army, move on to the national guard (the "organized militia") and work your way down to the unorganized militia in the end.
Mass conscription of free men for other purposes simply has no historical basis as of the time of the founding. The best that fans of this proposal can point to are conscription for very limited periods of time to work on local roads. Even assuming that the conscription at issue here isn't so different from the Florida statute as to be violative of the 13th amendment, there is the additional wrinkle that state constitutions don't operate on the principle of enumerated powers. The federal government needs explicit constitutional permission to engage in these shenanigans and there simply isn't anything in the constitution that lets congress do this.
I've always wondered the same thing (see my proposal above). I did a "voluntary" service project when I was a summer associate at a large Chicago firm. It involved trekking down to the South Side and fixing up the local elementary school (painting, landscaping, etc.). I didn't understand then, nor do I now, why the work we were doing couldn't have been done by the people in the community who were sending their kids to the school.
You're kidding, right? If the commerce clause allows the regulation of what I grow in my own garden for my own consumption, then it certainly applies to sending kids across the country to build houses or whatnot.
The commerce clause is broad (today), but it doesn't say "Congress can do whatever it wants as long as it crosses a state line."
For instance in the UK they have government regulators monitoring pay-per-view porn channels to make sure that they don't re-run "live" sex shows which can't of course allow viewer interaction as advertised:
Were we to institute a mandatory required compelled forced voluntary service this would be the kind of additional benefit that government could offer us, for the good of all.
According to our current jurisprudence, it says that, minus the part about crossing a state line.
The draft, though repugnant, is arguably authorized by under Congress' explicit Article I power to "Raise ... and support armies".
Based on the timing of the 13th amendment, the original public understanding of it could not have been to prohibit the draft, as the draft had just happened in the Civil War. So while there's a tension between the explicit text and the historical context and practice (like the 14th and Segregation), it's at least arguable in good faith that the 13th allows a draft. I disagree with that, both morally and constitutionally -- I think that the text trumps even the practice at the time honored in the breach, like Brown v. Bd. of Ed.
But there are no similar arguments on the side of non-military service. Congress doesn't have the power to raise and support civilian service.
Huh?
Most of the commenters here who are opposing mandatory service are not "lefties."
Do you have pointless random insult generator software installed on your computer?
Slavery had also just happened, and is contemplated in the Constitution even more explicitly than conscription.
Um, because they don't give a crap?
Actually, it's the lefties who proposed this, which is one plan in a long list of them to enact the opposite of voluntary exchange ("Progress").
Commenters who oppose it would more likely "get their panties in the knot" than wet them in the excitement.
I think we may be meant to infer wetting the pants with a bodily fluid that is not urine.
1. Accept free housing, food, criminal prosecution, imprisonment, and so forth.
2. Would have been adjudicated "hooligans" under the old system in the former Soviet Union.
3. Work as street entertainers, including break dancers, pick-pockets, drug dealers, pimps, three car monte dealers, harmonica and banjo players, etc.
Can you please update your contact info on the sidebar? It may be available somewhere, but I haven't been able to find it. If you don't just want to post it, I wish you could email me at teaforthetillerman@gmail.com.
Thanks!
Theoretically because the VISTA is better educated/smarter and the VISTA positions are supposed to be professional in nature. But they do not train you in any depth and you only have a year to do anything so by the time you know what you are doing it is time to move on. On paper I was a pretty good candidate since I had experience in working with non-profit groups in inner city Phildelphia other places, had lived in the city for four years while in college, and had a college degree. But I had never had a "real" job before and had to learn everything from scratch with no real guidance after the first few weeks. This included everything from selling the program I was involved to recruit volunteers to putting together a board and developing bylaws for the non-profit I was helping to start up. I did about as good as could have been expected for me and really did help some people and they even suggested I stay on a second year, but I needed to make more money and wanted to do something else. The person before me who was a professional in midlife transistion also did pretty well. One person they recruited soon after me had potential, but quit in frustration pretty quickly and the second person they got was totally unqualified and did not even realize it. The one who was totally unqualified was one of the "local person with the same training" and had somehow managed to graduate from college.
My wife was also a VISTA and she was put into a perfect position for her skills, but VISTA's are supposed to set up systems that continue to work after they leave and the people she was working with had no intention of setting up any systemic effort so after she left the program she started basically fell apart. I have other friends who did regular AmeriCorps and while they felt they helped they were really talented and had skills that could have been put to much better use in other positions.
I still think Americorps is useful and does good work a lot of time, but for the top students and future professionals they are private better off getting a regular job in a private non-profit that is willing to take them on for a couple of years. Forcing people to do national service will probably result in a lot more wasted man hours.
If we can declare, (or the Chief Executive?Commander in Chief) can proclaim) and apply the Constitutionally raised and financed army to a thing called a "War on Terrorism", why can't the CE/CIC proclaim the need for a "War on Embarassingly Crappy Infrastructure" as necessary for the national defense and security?
Then, we draft whole big ol' swaths of people into, say, a completely reconstituted Army Corps of Engineers to build bridges, fix potholes, restore libraries, clean up schools, etc etc.?
We could allow, heck, REQUIRE that that everyone get firearms training and carry weapons (this 'd get the 2nd Amendment absolutists board...) though, to hew closely to the framers' intent, it'd need to be limited to ball ammo (which they'd learn to cast themselves) and black powder.
Please amend #3 to include quotation marks around "work" and to clarify that hippies and other long-hairs, mimes and bucket boys are covered by this proposal, otherwise I agree 100%.
How about Mandatory National Service as a requirement to vote in a Democrat Caucus?
As a result of increasing wealth, growth in the human population is peaking and will soon turn down decisively. China already has a one child policy. [The real demographic time bomb is the lopsided male/female ratio in China and India, where they routinely abort/kill females.]
Let's look at the "overpopulation" facts:
We'll assume 6ft x 2ft x 1.5ft per person [there are bigger people, but there are a lot more smaller ones, so go with it. This is 18 cubic feet. Multiplying by 6.5 billion = 117 billion cubic feet of Soylent Green potential.
A cubic mile = 5280' cubed. This is 5280 x 5280 x 5280 cubic feet, or 147.2 billion cubic feet. Therefore, humanity occupies less than one cubic mile. For comparison, ants and termites alone are estimated to occupy about ten cubic miles.
The entire human race could be put in downtown Reno, with plenty of room to spare.
Naturally, this college kid knows that obama's national "force" is the answer.
My counter-proposal: raise the voting age to 45.
> There is a difference between ability to pay and willingness to pay. A social service can provide a great amount of utility, even if a person is unable to pay for it.
However, the argument is that the volunteers will benefit, a benefit that doesn't depend on pay. If it's good for them, why shouldn't they be allowed to make a buck doing it?
And, my front yard provides more "public good" than an abandoned park that no one even drives by, so there's public benefit as well.
Which reminds me - cheaper delivery (unpaid delivery folk) is a public benefit to the pizza-eaters. Just as the park is available to all who choose to visit, pizza delivery is available to all who choose to buy. Why shouldn't the public coerce folks into making delivered pizza cheaper just as it coerces folks into making parks nicer?
Well you've hit on a couple good points. Basically, the reason for these types of programs is little more than a massive redistribution scheme. While the program is ridiculously inefficient, it still produces benefits to certain individuals. But since the labor is forced, the person providing the labor receives less of the benefit than they otherwise would (not unlike slavery). The main difference between this program and slavery is that the government compels that a larger portion of the benefits accrue to a specific interest group. I agree though, there's no functional difference between forcing a person to dig an irrigation canel in a poor country and forcing them to deliver pizzas. It's just a matter of who the people are receiving the benefit.
No, they've clearly stated that they want to turn on the "justice nerve" of those serving. The purpose is clearly (and opening) moral formation. As a libertarian, I don't think this is the proper role of Government (to put it mildly).
I (as a non-lawyer) wonder if there might be cause for an Establishment Clause action here?
When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide,
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait."
- Milton, On His Blindness