You will volunteer!
National service has the ring of a call to higher duty that, on its face, many Americans will rush to embrace. However, in all of its various forms this is a bad idea that Americans should resist if they value freedom and a genuine sense of community. Citizens should pause and take a deeper look at true service, true patriotism and the implications of mandatory service.
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Expanded AmeriCorps Proposal Raises Questions of Compulsory Service
WASHINGTON — Lawmakers trying to maximize the spirit of civil service
in the post-9/11 era are seeking to expand the Clinton-era AmeriCorps
program, a six-year-old domestic Peace Corps that critics ridicule as a
taxpayer boondoggle and supporters praise as a new font of civic pride
among young people.When Congress returns later this month, Sens. John
McCain, R-Ariz., and Evan Bayh, D-Ind., will be pushing their "Call to
Service Act," a multi-pronged measure that seeks to expand volunteer
service in America.
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Liberty and Involuntary Servitude Cannot Coexist
A law placing all young adults in a year or more of involuntary servitude - whether civilian or military - would blatantly violate those basic American principles of individual liberty. What business does the government have in deciding the best way for millions of adults to spend so much of their lives? Our country was founded on the belief that individuals can best decide such matters for themselves. | |
Don’t Bring Slavery Back to America
Some liberals oppose military conscription but believe that mandatory civil service is a wholesome policy for a "social democracy." While it is true that being forced to clean up highways and work in recycling centers is probably preferable to being forced into enemy territory, such mandatory service is still a form of slavery, and has no place at all in a free society, or even in the partly free society into which the United States has degenerated. That "social democracies" in Europe demand impose forced labor on their youth speaks of their failure to embrace liberty, and should not be seen as a good reason to bring such oppression to America. |
You Gotta Serve Somebody
Touting his national service plan before a group of college students recently, John Kerry intoned: "this election is not just about what we're going to do, it's about what you're going to do." That formulation's a little less eloquent and a little more threatening than Kerry's idol, the other JFK's "...ask what you can do for your country," but such are the times.
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Making Americans: New push for national service
Washington -- Maybe it's just a burst of post-Sept. 11 patriotism, but leading members of Congress and some intellectuals who say young Americans need a common experience are calling for vastly expanded national service. Now some leading Republicans are behind the effort to widen the scope of national service. |
NATIONAL SERVICE
Most Americans accepted the military draft as a specific necessity: they thought that in emergencies young men should be required to fight for their country against foreign threats. But a growing number of liberals
think men and women alike should be required to undertake "tasks assigned by their country -- either military of civilian" -- even in peacetime. "Their country," of course, means the government.
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Mandatory volunteerism
Proponents of mandatory service are right on one count, forcing America's youth to perform community service could probably check some items off the national to-do list. Their ultimate goal, however, as Litan pointed out in his essay, is to address the moral fiber of today's youth. He and people like him believe that compulsory service would instill morality, but morality – by its very nature – is a voluntary code of conduct. Forced community service is not voluntary, it is the imposition of the non-voluntary.
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What's wrong with forcing people into "national service?"
"America needs a draft," Moskos and Washington Monthly Editor Paul Glastris declare in a recent Washington Post op-ed piece. They urge universal conscription of 18-to-25-year-olds to "meet the sudden manpower needs for military and homeland security." |
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