Ilya Somin raises some great points about how mandatory national service for the young not only makes little sense, but is very unfair:
One of the most interesting (and in my view sinister) aspects of proposals for mandatory "national service" is that they virtually always target only the young, usually 18-21 year olds. This might be understandable if the proposals were limited to military service. But most current proposals (including those by Charles Rangel, John McCain, Bill Buckley, the DLC, and Rahm Emanuel noted in my last post), incorporate civilian service as well. When it comes to office work and light menial labor, there are many elderly and middle-aged people who can do the job just as well as 18-21 year olds can, if not better.
Indeed, the moral case for conscripting the elderly for civilian service is arguably stronger than that for drafting the young. Many elderly people are healthy enough to perform nonstrenuous forms of "national service." Unlike the young, the elderly usually won't have to postpone careers, marriage, and educational opportunities to fulfill their forced labor obligations. Moreover, the elderly, to a far greater extent than the young, are beneficiaries of massive government redistributive programs, such as Social Security and Medicare - programs that transfer enormous amounts of wealth from other age groups to themselves. Nonelderly poor people who receive welfare benefits are required to work (or at least be looking for work) under the 1996 welfare reform law; it stands to reason that the elderly (most of whom are far from poor) can be required to work for the vastly larger government benefits that they receive. Middle-aged people are also not obviously inferior candidates for civilian "national service" than the young. I know I could do most kinds of service better today than when I was 18. To be clear, I am not arguing for imposing forced labor on the elderly or the middle-aged; but I do believe that doing so would be no worse than imposing that burden on the young.
From a practical standpoint, the blustering rhetoric about mandatory national service is ludicrous. It is little more than a form of slavery that is imposed blindly on the citizenry, as it is a mandatory confiscation of a few years of a citizen's freedom without being the punishment for a crime. The value of the labor that is unfairly confiscated by the federal government, both for the military and service groups, would be of dubious value. The last thing America needs is a flood of angry conscripts who would rather be working or going to college, and an equally large number of people forced to work for the benefit of people they would never choose to postpone their life plans for. If you think social services and welfare agencies are bad enough in their bureaucracy, put in legions more of people who would never in their right mind have chosen to be there in the first place.
If we are going to mandate national service, then it is only fair that the elderly be forced to join in alongside the young. It only makes sense, as most of the elderly can no more be said to have "paid their dues" to society than the young can. What is worse, is that many elderly people today are enjoying government benefits that they never paid for during their "productive years." What's more, for the sake of international competitiveness, it only makes sense to not create any barriers that would decrease the professional experience of young Americans. In some areas, such as many of the engineering fields, those first few years out of college can be very, very important.
What I propose is a very simple compromise. The vast majority of elderly people who are living off of any government social benefits should be kicked off of the public dole and be required to go back to work. There can be little doubt that with millions more elderly people working today, that the economy would not need illegal immigrants to do many jobs. Perhaps many elderly citizens' brains would not have prematurely atrophied if they had gone to work as a greeter at Wal-Mart, to work at McDonalds, or some similar job. Retirement is a luxury that one acquires from a lifetime of unusually productive work that allows one to live entirely off of the saved up wealth one has created; pensions and similar funds should be tied to a lifetime of genuine public service.
In fact, dare I say, there is a moral case for making any able-bodied elderly individual work. Idle hands (and minds) are the devil's workshop.
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