Posted by Ilya Somin:
The Threat of Forced Labor Through Mandatory "National Service":
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_09_23-2007_09_29.shtml#1190600503
At the always fascinating Becker-Posner Blog, [1]Richard Posner and
[2]Gary Becker each have excellent posts critiquing proposals for
mandatory "national service." As Posner points out, "[t]here are
perennial calls for drafting all 18 year olds to serve in either the
military or some civilian alternative. Congressman Charles Rangel has
repeatedly introduced bills in Congress (the "Universal National
Service Act") that would do this. The bills have never come close to
passage, and are unlikely to in the future even with Democratic
control of both houses of Congress. But universal national service is
one of those seductive ideas that refuse to die completely." Rep.
Rangel is not the only supporter mandatory national service. Other
advocates include [3]prominent Democratic Congressman Rahm Emanuel,
the center-left Democratic Leadership Council, Republican presidential
candidate John McCain, and conservative icon Bill Buckley.
Becker and Posner do an excellent job of marshaling the
consequentialist economic arguments against mandatory "national
service." I would only add that advocates of this policy implicitly
assume that whatever jobs the governments assigns to program
participants actually will benefit the nation as a whole. That
assumption is unlikely to be true, given what we know about the power
of narrow interest groups to divert government resources for their own
benefit.
Be that as it may, there is a deeper moral issue here: mandatory
national service is not just an inefficient policy proposal, it is
forced labor. And forced labor on a massive scale. Most proposals
would require millions of young people to do compelled work at the
behest of the government for one to two years each. Even in the
unlikely event that mandatory national service could be shown to
provide benefits that outweigh its costs, it would still be morally
repulsive. It would still strike at the heart of the liberal idea that
each person owns his or her own body, and cannot justly be compelled
to work for others merely because it might be convenient to do so.
Short of outright slavery or the murder of innocent people, it is hard
to think of anything that violates individual liberty more clearly
than forced labor.
The rhetoric of "national service" obscures the true nature of the
idea, perhaps intentionally. It suggests that forced labor at the
orders of the government ("national service") is somehow morally
different from forced labor at the behest of other private
individuals. But there is no intrinsic moral difference between the
two. Yes, forced labor for the government might benefit the nation
(though that result is by no means guaranteed). But so could forced
labor for a private enterprise. Indeed, even outright slavery was
regularly defended on the grounds that the labor of slaves produced
valuable benefits to society as a whole.
As Posner points out, there is little chance that Congress will enact
a forced labor program in the near future. In the long-term, however,
[4]I fear that constant advocacy of the idea will erode our moral
resistance to it, and that some crisis may occur that will enable the
proposal to go through. The fact that it continues to attract the
support of savvy politicians like Emanuel, Rangel, and McCain,
suggests that it has some legs. And once enacted, a forced labor
program may be very difficult to repeal. Both government and
(possibly) private enterprises will become dependent on these "low
cost" (from their perspective) workers, and will lobby hard to avoid
having to give them up. Moreover, government forced labor programs
tend to target the young (usually 18-21 year olds), a group with very
little political power; this factor also makes them difficult to
abolish. For these reasons, among others, mandatory "national service"
remains in force in France and Germany, despite the disappearance of
the security threat from the Soviet Union that originally justified
it.
We may not be able to completely eliminate the danger of forced labor.
But we should at least recognize that forced labor is not only
inefficient, but a great moral evil.
References
1. http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2007/09/universal_natio_1.html
2. http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2007/09/universal_natio.html
3. http://www.popandpolitics.com/2006/11/05/saying-no-to-national-service/
4. http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_03_25-2007_03_31.shtml#1174960427
_______________________________________________
Volokh mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.powerblogs.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
