'National Service' And
Conscription - A Question
Of Ownership
By William Norman Grigg
Campaign For Liberty
3-18-9

Government-mandated "community service" is integral to Barack Obama's vision of "change." Obama has described such service as a key element of creating "a new era of responsibility - a recognition on the part of every American that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept, but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task."

Actually, there is nothing novel about Obama's emphasis on government-imposed citizen "service." National service, in some form, has been endorsed by every U.S. president since George Bush the Elder. But none has promoted it as insistently as Barack Obama.

Of course, most Americans are hardly strangers to responsibility. They hold jobs, provide for families, and perform volunteer work for schools and churches. Thousands of acts of service occur literally every second of every day in America, both in the form of mutually beneficial business transactions and charitable deeds performed out of conviction.

The problem with such service, apparently, is that it is neither mandated nor brokered by the government. So from the perspective of those who believe that life should be organized by the state, such spontaneous service simply doesn't count.

Before it created a small but significant scandal, the Obama campaign's position paper on national service promised that as president he would "inspire" Americans to render "universal voluntary service."

It was not explained how service could be both "universal" and truly "voluntary": Was the assumption that differences over opinion regarding the proper type of "service" would simply vanish? Or would the reluctance of many Americans to surrender valuable time to carry out government-approved activities be overcome by the sheer power of Obama's charisma?

Obama's vision of "Universal Voluntary Service," as originally outlined in his campaign literature, displayed far greater ambition and more than a touch of authoritarianism: "Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year." The blueprint likewise called for the expansion of AmeriCorps from 75,000 to 250,000 and the creation of five separate "Corps" of government-funded "volunteers" to deal with education, health, energy, veterans affairs, and homeland security.

One element of the Obama plan, the "Classroom Corps," employed frankly militaristic language, stating that the administration would "enlist" retired teachers, "recruit" civic leaders, and "draft" parents, grandparents, and others to serve as mentors.

The campaign for "universal voluntary service" is bipartisan and enjoys enthusiastic support from the mainstream media. Richard Stengel, Time magazine's managing editor, is co-chair of Service Nation, a non-profit established to promote Obama's service campaign. Former GOP presidential candidate John McCain has joined with Obama in promoting government-imposed service.

Tony Blankley, who served as chief of staff for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, has called in his new book American Grit for the re-introduction of a universal military draft.

Blankley's proposed system is similar to legislation being promoted by House Democrat Charles Rangel; it would require all Americans who turn 18 to spend two years either in military service or in a government-selected "Homeland Security" role. He proposes a "compulsory program for all Americans aged eighteen or nineteen, men and women, after most have graduated from high school. The military, reviewing these graduates' transcripts, extracurricular activities, and medical reports, would select however many they needed to fulfill their draft allotments for a two-year period of military service. Those not chosen by the military would undertake a two-year service obligation."

Setting a tone likely to be emulated by other Republicans, Blankley condemns Obama's national service proposal not because it represents a presumptuous imposition on the lives of Americans, but because it wouldn't provide soldiers for ongoing and envisioned military conflicts.

"We will soon be faced with the choice of severely scaling back our role in the world or expanding the army through conscription," observes Blankley, blithely assuming that the former option is simply inadmissible. Since "there is a limit to the number of people willing to volunteer to be a soldier," the government must return to a system its critics consider nothing less than military slavery.

All "national service" proposals, whether civilian or military, are rooted in the assumption that individuals owe service to the State - indeed, that the State has the first claim on the individual's time, labor, and wealth.

Although the legally protected practice of chattel slavery ended roughly a century and a half ago, politicians routinely insist that the government is entitled to claim uncompensated labor from the citizenry in the name of "community" or "national" service.

The first American public figure of significant stature to endorse this concept was philosopher and psychologist William James, who in 1910 urged "a conscription of the whole youthful population. . . for a certain number of years as part of the army enlisted against Nature." James envisioned a national system of conscript labor to build roads and bridges, skyscrapers and tunnels; to extract ore from the ground, and fish from the sea; and to do various other kinds of manual labor as a way of having "the childishness knocked out of them."

Through government-imposed labor, James insisted, young men "would have paid their blood-tax" to the amorphous entity called "society" without serving in the military. In fact, it was through this proposal for universal conscription that James infected American political discourse with the phrase "moral equivalent of war," an expression that has become one of our more obnoxious clichés.

William James was not the first or only one to propose universal conscription. The eighth plank of the Communist Manifesto dictates a "universal liability of all to labor" as the state directs, and the creation of state-supervised "industrial armies."

After seizing power in Russia through the Bolshevik coup, Vladimir Lenin demanded that his subjects consider themselves part of a "great army of free labor" to be deployed as the ruling oligarchy saw fit: "The generation that is now 15 years old. . . must arrange all the tasks of their education in such a way that every day, in every city, the young people shall engage in the practical solution of the problem of common labor, even the smallest, most simple kind."

Undergirding such grand pronouncements is the shared assumption that only labor or "service" that is mandated and supervised by the state is worthwhile. Left to attend to their own business, human beings have an amazing capacity to serve each other in mutually beneficial ways.

But this is done without the intrusive and presumptuous involvement of social engineers who desire to correct what they see as defects in the way other people live. For such people "service" is simply unsatisfactory unless it somehow helps build and fortify the state. And to them the state of crisis produced by a war, or the "moral equivalent" thereof, is useful as a pretext for the regimentation of society.

This is why aspiring social engineers welcomed the onset of World War I, which offered unprecedented opportunities for government intervention in private life.

During World War I, Bernard Baruch, chairman of the Wilson administration's War Industries Board, brazenly endorsed the concept of state ownership of every American:

Every man's life is at the call of the nation and so must be every man's property. We are living today in a highly organized state of socialism. The state is all; the individual is of importance only as he contributes to the welfare of the state. His property is his only as the state does not need it. He must hold his life and possessions at the call of the state.

Baruch insisted that this form of human bondage - that is, the ownership of one person by another - was not prohibited by the 13th Amendment, since "involuntary service for a private master is and has been clearly and repeatedly defined by the Supreme Court as slavery." This isn't the case, he insisted, regarding the military draft of conscripted labor, since in those arrangements there "is but one master. . . and that master is America."

In its decision in the 1918 Selective Draft Cases, the Supreme Court took a very similar approach to the 13th Amendment in dealing with the World War I military draft: Grandly describing compelled military service as "the supreme and noble duty" of a citizen, the High Court simply insisted that the amendment didn't apply.

The common understanding is that government exists to protect the lives and individual rights of citizens. Military conscription, which is the most severe form of "national service," is based on the idea that the people exist to protect the government. This principle was given voice in a July 1863 editorial supporting the draft in which the New York Times claimed that "our national authority has the right - to every dollar and every right arm for its protection" (emphasis added).

In any form, government-compelled "service" is an assertion of state ownership of the individual, and a violation of the most fundamental property right - self-ownership. In the Western tradition of individual liberty under law, no other human being, either individually or acting as part of a collective, can properly claim ownership over any part of our lives, or the product of our exertions, without our consent. That consent can be expressed through contract, commerce, covenant, or charity. It cannot properly be obtained through coercion or fraud.

Thomas Jefferson, in a letter written to John Adams during the War for Independence, referred to conscription as "the last of all oppressions." If the State can steal you - not just your labor, but your physical being - as those controlling it see fit, you have no rights.


A Memo to Congress:

"Shame on you! you who make unjust laws and publish burdensome decrees, depriving the poor of justice, robbing the weakest of my people of their rights, despoiling the widow and plundering the orphan. What will you do when called to account, when ruin from afar confronts you? To whom will you flee for help?" -- Isaiah 10:1-3


Traditional Values http://www.anglocatholicsocialism.org/acsoc.html


Mar 19 08:11

House Passes Mandatory National Service Bill http://www.prisonplanet.com/house-passes-mandatory-national-service-bill.html


Tags: DICTATORSHIP The House passed a bill yesterday which includes disturbing language indicating young people will be forced to undertake mandatory national service programs as fears about President Barack Obama's promised "civilian national security force" intensify.

Webmaster's Commentary -


Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. -- 13th Amendment to the Constitution.


THE BACK-DOOR WAY TO THE MILITARY DRAFT! BE AWARE OF WHAT THIS BILL MIGHT LEAD TO IN A DICTATORSHIP, WHICH IS WHAT THIS IS (DO NOT BE DECEIVED)

RatTube » Google/YouTube Filters "The Give Act"? - Mandatory Volunteerism
http://rattube.com/2009/03/17/googleyoutube-filters-the-give-act-mandatory-vo...



This Week in Congress
Your Headlines, Your Issues, Your Opinions
March 17, 2009


SHOULD THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT EXPAND VOLUNTEER PROGRAMS ACROSS THE NATION?

Following President Barack Obama's call for more volunteerism and public service, Congress is considering a bill this week that would encourage national service. H.R. 1388, the Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education (GIVE) Act, would more than triple the number of positions in the Americorps program, from 75,000 to 250,000, and would increase educational stipends and other financial awards for people of all generations who enter public service programs.

Should the federal government expand volunteer programs across the nation? Tell President Barack Obama and Congress how you feel by voting in our action poll.

ACTION POLL: (Cast your vote by sending a message)

Yes,The Federal Government Should Expand Volunteer Programs
http://capwiz.com/congressorg/utr/1/LCFAKBMNGX/HZAZKBORXB/3058873361


No, The Federal Government Should Not Expand Volunteer Programs
http://capwiz.com/congressorg/utr/1/LCFAKBMNGX/EROVKBORXC/3058873361



Remember - it's not what the opinion polls say, it's what Congress hears.

You want our labor on the cheap? What do you think you're getting now, while you give yourselves and Wall Street fat pay raises at our expense?

Why should we volunteer anything more than we already have? We've been compelled to acquiece to extortion and looting of everything we have, our homes, jobs, and futures. We're already being forced into involuntary servitude simply by having to remain in this country.

Whatever happened to the common good and the general welfare? How does what's being done to this country in any way resemble "the Kingdom of God on Earth?" Aren't we supposed to be about 'our Father's business'?

When do we get OUR bailout? Inquiring minds want to know.

Sincerely,

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http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=11