Require Paid Public Service by 24

^{David Almandsmith}

1. The United States’ government already provides plentiful opportunities:
   • Volunteer programs:
     • Volunteer.gov Programs
       • Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Department of the Interior, Fish & Wildlife Service, Forest Service, National Park Service, Office of Surface Mining, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Park Police
     • AmeriCorps Programs
       • AmeriCorps, AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps, AmeriCorps Vista
     • Peace Corps Programs
       • Peace Corps Response
       • Peace Corps Volunteer
   • Military services:
     • Air National Guard, Army National Guard, Coast Guard, Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Space Force
2. Qualifying year-long volunteer programs offered by NGOs such as The Red Cross, churches, and Habitat For Humanity should be included.
3. The socio-economic (and personal) benefits will more than compensate for the cost of expanding already existing public service positions to accommodate all of our younger citizens.
4. Too many voting-age American citizens have never lived outside their geographic and cultural origins. In order to be a wise participant in our 21st Century world, we all need to share hopes and dreams with people in other locations and in other subcultures. Effort will be made to place youth in previously unfamiliar environments to gain a wider perspective of what it means to be an American.
5. Much of our country, and indeed much of the world, needs people to assist with education, literacy, health services, infrastructure improvements, environmental improvements, housing, eldercare, water quality, nutrition, technical training, security, etc. Our youth can assist where most needed and, in turn, help themselves in their journeys to reach their full potentials in life.
6. Regardless of their academic accomplishments and/or skills, our youth deserve the opportunity to develop life skills and on-the-job skills in non-competitive settings.
7. Our youth deserve a time to find direction and an occupational passion in life before being thrust into cookie-cutter jobs in the competitive and often cutthroat world of employment.
8. Former public service workers almost universally refer to their experiences as life-changing in positive and deeply meaningful ways.
9. The subset of workers who serve in other countries will return with global perspectives that are so valuable in business enterprises, in governmental careers, and in good citizenship.
10. Service to country is not only patriotic, it often lays the foundation for a life-long sense of allegiance to country.

Send this page’s link to your friends and to your representatives and voice your approval of this valuable vision. https://cogito.blog/require-paid-public-service-by-age-24/

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Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute expressed multiple reasons why a program of mandatory public service is not only a bad idea, but is also infeasible. His paper is “Mandatory Universal National Service: A Dystopian Vision for a Free Society” Cato Institute, February 21, 2019. I have combed through his arguments and present all of them below (some slightly paraphrased), each followed by an analysis.

It is hypocritical for the older decision-makers to consign the young to be conscripted for a year, knowing they won’t be asked to serve.

A mandatory youth service program must start at some point in time and implementation will logically be led by folk over 18 years of age. Also, many of the strongest advocates are themselves former public service members – i served in the Peace Corps – which dilutes concerns of hypocrisy.

Ripping a person away from home and family for a whole year is traumatic.

Undoubtedly it will be traumatic for a few 18-year-olds somewhere, but it is typical human nature to venture a bit (or a lot) from family ties at that time in life. Except for those in the military, public service members will have holidays to join with family and the ability to visit occasionally on weekends. Also, these programs would have therapists on staff.

They would be taking jobs away from professional workers who rely on a living income. Public service recruits would take income from workers in construction, painting, plumbing, gardening, landscaping, repair, eldercare, child care, security services, disaster response, tutoring, teaching, etc., etc.

This is truly a difficult issue and one that has been addressed in the past with assurances that these mandatory service programs would in no way negatively affect people working in the private sector. Nevertheless, this issue puts a constraint on the specific projects that service workers will engage with. 

For example, simply clearing sidewalks of trash raises the question whether that is instead the obligation of each storefront business, and each business should allocate some of its budget to pay employees or outside contractors to keep their sidewalk clean. However, we all know of areas in front of homes and vacant commercial properties that would welcome clean-up by national service workers. ¿But was the city’s budget manipulated to curtail cleaning knowing that service workers were coming? Another example: School districts hire teachers aides when their budgets allow. ¿Would they lay off a teacher’s aide if they knew a service worker was coming? 

This was a real-life issue in my Peace Corps experience. Peace Corps administrators were assured by Lesotho’s Ministry of Education that they would not lay off any teachers to make room for the soon-to-be-arriving volunteers. That was not strictly true, as some Lesotho teachers lost their positions to Peace Corps volunteers.

¿Are there sufficient projects to continuously keep 4 million national service workers busy without encroaching upon private jobs? The answer is clearly ‘yes’ since deficiencies in our country have not all been met via extant economic forces. E.g., homelessness, malnutrition, inadequate healthcare, urban blight, street violence, recidivism, the digital divide, and much more have not been adequately addressed through simple capitalism. 

Economics is a better arbiter on what services need doing.

This point was addressed above when considering the loss of income of private sector workers due to national public service recruits taking away some of their livelihood. Allow me to repeat: Deficiencies in our country have not been met via extant economic forces. E.g., homelessness, malnutrition, inadequate healthcare, urban blight, street violence, recidivism, the digital divide, and much more have not been adequately addressed through simple capitalism.

¿If it’s so good, why not for all ages?

It is good for all ages, but:

1. it is hard enough managing a force of 4 million youth without adding millions more;
2. it would be economically and socially detrimental to remove adults from their jobs and remove parents from their families;
3. service opportunities exist for adults already, and i encourage anyone with the ability to give their time to enroll in one. (E.g., AmeriCorps has a Senior Corps program with 200,000 older adults.)

The benefit to society is not worth the loss of personal liberty.

This criticism is mostly a Libertarian vs. Progressive issue. The Libertarian view is that America is largely about personal freedom. The Progressive view is that the future of America can only be as good as the effort we invest to make it good, and we all share in that obligation. This issue was debated by the founding fathers, and predates them, of course.

My take is simple; reifying personal liberty above collective responsibility oils the gears of classism, and it permits a dearth of empathy for the travails and misfortunes of others.

It is philosophically utopian.

Yup. I have no problem with that. A dictionary definition for utopian is: aiming for a state in which everything is perfect; idealistic. Of course perfection is unattainable. Robert Browning’s words come to mind: Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?

The program would be manipulated by the rich and powerful for their own benefit. Participants would be subject to indoctrination in the values benefitting the government in power; e.g. hyper-nationalism, the positive values of self-sacrifice, obedience to authority, xenophobia, et cetera. Participants could be used for building border walls, snitching on illegal, subversive, and unpatriotic activities, inhibiting free-speech events, etc.

These are warnings to take seriously as recent events proved. 

One of my “Change the World” buckets involves taking wealth out of elections by limiting donations by any one individual to any one candidate (or measure) to $100 (adjusted for changes in median family income or similar index). This would help, but might not be a sufficient safeguard against the future selection of the wealthiest, or the ascension of autocrats.

Government service is not inherently better than private service. A new service ethos is needed instead.

Amazingly, this criticism came from the same person that attacked mandatory national service as “utopian.” Yes, indeed, a strong service ethos among our citizens would be hunky-dory, but he fails to offer a pathway to get there. A program of national service could be a step on the path to a new service ethos, but this is not its major mission.

A one-year civilian service option would force the military to offer shorter term enrollment in order to compete.

I can easily make the counter-argument. When every 18-year-old (who is not college-bound) faces the choice of enrolling in:

• a one-year national service stint with barely enough to live on, or
• a multiple-year military obligation with more generous remuneration, a spiffy uniform that commands respect, the possibility of valuable in-service education such as in aviation or electronics, and the potential as a career path with generous retirement benefits;

then i am certain that the military services will see an increase in applicants.

Establishing a vast civilian program would eliminate the military’s unique role in providing a service opportunity to the patriotic young.

Yup. That’s right. There will be another service opportunity for the patriotic young, and the military will no longer be unique in that regard. That’s a big plus in my book.

Service is societally much better when decentralized, privately organized, centered around perceived needs, and an outgrowth of people’s sense of duty and compassion.

I agree that service is more rewarding when recruits perceive the need for their work. I also agree that the world would be a better place if every person felt a ‘sense of duty and compassion’ to give at least a year of their life doing public service work, but this again is an unrealistic utopian vision. Sitting around waiting for a perfect world is risible. However, if a child grows up with both parents telling tales of their public service experiences, that child just might develop a ‘sense of duty and compassion.’ When Mr. Bandow asserts that service is ‘much better when decentralized,’ and ‘privately organized,’ he is merely conforming to his associates’ bias against our government’s expansion and their bias favoring private enterprise.

The government would need to massively expand governmental agencies and/or utilize government contractors to manage the millions of recruits.

Yup, and to pay for all of this, taxes would need to be raised or need to become more progressive.

Attempts to profit from this system will result in the worst sort of political infighting.

Unfortunately and undoubtedly. ¿But in excess of the current normal? Likely not.

Mandatory service will create methods of evasion such as faking injury or illness, going underground, bribing doctors or service officials, expatriation, etc.

I’m guessing this will be a minor irritant, perhaps, and certainly less a problem of draft dodging during the VietNam War. However, i doubt this would ever be worse for the United States than the current and growing phenomenon of expatriation by educated and wealthy Americans. Expatriation is fueled by a plethora of reasons. High among them is a disappointment in America’s socio-political reality and an expat’s lack of patriotic commitment to country. Both of these factors would be directly ameliorated by mandatory public service, rather than the reverse.

Many of the 4 million yearly recruits will be obstinate, disdainful, and uncoöperative.

I am certain of that, and i am well experienced in dealing with just such youth – I was a secondary public school teacher in south-central Los Angeles. Just ask any secondary public school teacher and you will learn how they have been struggling – and mostly succeeding – in dealing with obstinate, disdainful, and uncoöperative youth. It will be a problem, but there are well-known strategies for helping obstreperous youth become productive team members.

Mandatory public service is in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution: To wit, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” 

Let’s dive into the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in Butler v. Perry: 

[T]he Thirteenth Amendment declares that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist. This amendment was adopted with reference to conditions existing since the foundation of our Government, and the term involuntary servitude was intended to cover those forms of compulsory labor akin to African slavery which in practical operation would tend to produce like undesirable results. It … certainly was not intended to interdict enforcement of those duties which individuals owe to the State, such as services in the army, militia, on the jury, etc. The great purpose in view (of the 13th amendment) was liberty under the protection of effective government, not the destruction of the latter by depriving it of essential powers.

The court then ruled that the State of Florida had the right to require every able-bodied man to work on maintaining public roads because requiring work by citizens is one of the government’s essential powers.

Mandatory service will not reduce young people’s attitude of entitlement, such as taxpayer-paid higher education.

¿Why do you suppose “young people” might hope that taxpayers would pay their college tuition? Perhaps because this is true in the following countries: Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Kenya, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Morocco, Norway, Panama, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Uruguay.

Mandatory service would be a ‘price to pay’ for being born in the U.S.

Quoting from “Mandatory Service Around the Globe” from the National Commission on Service (2018): “In total, about seventy-five countries have some form of mandatory service.” Perhaps Mr. Bandow should have said, “Mandatory service would be a ‘price to pay’ for being born in the U.S. or in any of 75 other countries.”

It puts private lives at the disposal of the government.

As mentioned above, the Supreme Court ruled that an essential power of government is in requiring public work of citizens.

It is in conflict with deeply held American values.

I believe it is safe to say that he meant, “It is in conflict with deeply held Libertarian values.”

Government‐​mandated service is not an effective tool for soul‐​molding. It will not turn out virtuous citizens and create a moral society.

I agree. But this is a strawman argument that misrepresents the actual and attainable goals of mandatory youth service. A friend of mine, Roger Scholl, expressed the goals best:

I completely agree with this – a public service “draft” which can include a wealth of ways young people can contribute to their country. What a terrific way to bring people together, while rebuilding the country. I have long believed that one of the wedges in society today is that we no longer meet or get to know people from other economic spheres, other occupations, other geographical areas. One of the (few) good things about the old military draft, and the Second World War is that it brought people from all walks of life, and all educational levels, together, and helped us to see that first and foremost, we are all Americans. In Coming Apart, Charles Murray points out that that no longer happens – we meet our spouses and friends in our professions and at the universities we attend, and we no longer meet or interact with blue collar workers or waitresses or assembly line workers, or people who don’t attend college. This would be a way to bring people together, and help us to get past the social media bubble and conservative radio bubble and Fox News bubble and conspiracy bubbles and see each other as fellow human beings, worthy of friendship and respect. (Personal communication)

I thank Mr. Bandow for his numerous objections. I now feel better able to evaluate many of the objections other people may raise in the future. Curiously, Mr. Bandow also included praise for public service in his paper:

[The Potomac Institute (1979)] envisioned national service as a means to provide job training and jobs, encourage social equality, promote tolerance and civic‐​mindedness, expand access to college, encourage patriotism, and address ubiquitous “unmet social needs.” 

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President Clinton supported the implementation of a mandatory public service program:

We’ll ask you to help our police forces across the nation, training members for a new police corps, that will walk beats and work with neighborhoods and build the kind of community ties that will prevent crime from happening the first place; we’ll ask young people to work to help control pollution and recycle waste, to paint darkened buildings and clean up neighborhoods, to work with senior citizens and combat homelessness and help children in trouble.

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Similarly, President George W. Bush:

The men and women in this room and the members of my administration are working to foster a culture of service, of citizenship, and of responsibility for decades to come. You’re part of a cultural change that will make America a much better place. . .

We serve because it’s important to our neighbors. We understand that serving others meets needs that a Government can never fulfill. You see, Government can hand out money, but it can’t put hope in people’s hearts or a sense of purpose in people’s lives. The need for kindness and for understanding and for love is not a Government function. It’s a human function. And that’s why we serve our neighbor.

We serve because it’s important to our own character. Acts of compassion add direction and purpose to our lives. Serving something greater than yourself in life is part of a fulfilling life.

And finally, we serve because it’s important to our country. Our Nation is the greatest force for good in history, and we show our gratitude by doing our duty. We express our love for America by loving Americans.

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I wish to end with snippets from a Brookings Institution paper:

What if it is . . . a means to strengthen the ties that bind us as a nation? What if it creates bridges across groups in our society that have little to do with each other on any given day? What if service, as the New Left’s Port Huron Statement put it 40 years ago, can mean “bringing people out of isolation and into community”? What if it fosters civic and political participation in a society that seems not to hold the arts of public life in the highest esteem? In sum, what if service is not simply a good in itself, but a means to many ends?

Neighborliness, charity, and social responsibility are genuine virtues. It is both good and useful to assert, as Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin did, that “my neighbor’s material needs are my spiritual needs.” It’s just possible that a nation responding to the call to service would, over time, become a nation deeply engaged in questions of public justice.

The debate over national service is a debate over how we Americans think of ourselves. It’s a debate over how we will solve public problems and what we owe our country and each other. If our nation is to continue to prosper, it’s a debate we will have in every generation. For if we decide there are no public things to which we are willing to pledge some of our time and some of our effort—not to mention “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor”—then we will have quietly abandoned our nation’s experiment in liberty rooted in mutual assistance and democratic aspiration. “United We Serve?: The Debate over National Service” E.J. Dionne, Jr. and Kayla Meltzer Drogosz. Brookings Institution, Sunday, September 1, 2002.

FURTHER READING
“Inspired to Serve: The Final Report of the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service“, March 2020
“Should Young Americans Be Required to Give a Year of Service?” The Editorial Board, The York Times, 1 May 2021.
“To Unite a Divided America, Make People Work for It.” Jonathan Holloway, Ph.D., The New York Times, 2 July 2021.
“9 questions about the Civilian Climate Corps, answered.” Tik Root, The Washington Post, 16 September 2021.