Both presidential candidates are slated to say nice things today about the idea of National Service. McCain supports it, but lacks specifics (I am told), while Obama has another large program in mind, the kind that inflates the dollar as it inflates the federal budget.
Service is wonderful, a gift to one's fellow beings. But service loses something, doesn't it, when you pay for it? When it is is required, of course, it not service at all, but a form of involuntary tax on time. No national candidate is proposing compulsary "service" these days, but once you get a system that seeks universal compliance, compulsion won't be far behind. After all, it nominally is cheaper. With compulsion, the budget costs are all indirect, and the front end costs (foregone income, for example) are borne by the hapless "service person".
My case against National Service goes back (dare I mention?) over forty years, to the campaign against the draft in the 1960s. I wrote a book called The Wrong Man in Uniform in 1967 that sold remarkably well, especially when the paperback came out just as the draft became the national high school debate topic of 1969!
This issue comes up from time to time now, but not in connection with the military. No one doubts that our volunteer military is far superior to the old Selective Service System. Instead, social engineers of various stripes use the National Service romance as a means to change society to reflect their aims for other people's lives.
When we last went through this debate, in 2002, I wrote a piece for The Brookings Institution that summarizes the negative argument on National Service. Read it before your misguided idealism gets the better of you.
