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Mandatory Community Service is a Basic Assault on Anglo-American Liberty.-- Every year around so-called “tax freedom” day, people talk about moving from working for the government to working for themselves. But this is too glib because it conflates paying taxes with compelled physical labor. There is a big difference, one central to the history of Anglo-American liberty.
Under the medieval system in much of Europe, serfs or peasants owed obligations of actual physical labor (beyond military service) to their political overseers. As English liberties grew, this obligation of physical labor was replaced by the right to pay taxes instead, with the chief exception being obligations of military service for males. Free men were increasingly free to choose their line of work and pay their political overseers with money, rather than owing an obligation of service to whatever physical tasks happened to be thought important or profitable to the upper and the political classes.
Service Nation is an organization devoted to stripping away this bulwark of Anglo-American liberty, hoping by the year 2020 to require every young American man and woman to be drafted into either military or community service. Their more immediate goals include passing a National Service Act in 2009 (which would probably not require universal service).
But they do not even discuss the Constitutional Amendment that ought to be required before they can mandate community service and take away the hard-won Anglo-American liberty from involuntary servitude. The Constitution gives the Federal Government the power to raise a military, which in the 18th century contemplated an obligation of male citizens to serve in the military. In my opinion, the Constitution does not give the Federal Government the power to compel community service.
Let’s hope that the Supreme Court would not permit Service Nation's move backwards to a more feudal relationship between ordinary people and the people who govern them. One senses that de Toqueville understood American values of volunteerism and freedom of association much better than the people behind Service Nation, an understanding that was also concerned about the tyranny of the majority.
UPDATE: Service Nation's coordinator, Alan Khazei, argues that doing community service turns on one's "'justice nerve. . . . And once a justice nerve is turned on, it rarely goes off."
It seems to me that, if it really turned on one's justice nerve, one would have a good enough sense of justice to oppose Service Nation's unjust goal of state-mandated public service. I wonder whether instead forced community service would tend to turn on one's "collectivist nerve."
Mandatory Community Service is a Basic Assault on Anglo-American Liberty.-- Every year around so-called “tax freedom” day, people talk about moving from working for the government to working for themselves. But this is too glib because it conflates paying taxes with compelled physical labor. There is a big difference, one central to the history of Anglo-American liberty.
Under the medieval system in much of Europe, serfs or peasants owed obligations of actual physical labor (beyond military service) to their political overseers. As English liberties grew, this obligation of physical labor was replaced by the right to pay taxes instead, with the chief exception being obligations of military service for males. Free men were increasingly free to choose their line of work and pay their political overseers with money, rather than owing an obligation of service to whatever physical tasks happened to be thought important or profitable to the upper and the political classes.
Service Nation is an organization devoted to stripping away this bulwark of Anglo-American liberty, hoping by the year 2020 to require every young American man and woman to be drafted into either military or community service. Their more immediate goals include passing a National Service Act in 2009 (which would probably not require universal service).
But they do not even discuss the Constitutional Amendment that ought to be required before they can mandate community service and take away the hard-won Anglo-American liberty from involuntary servitude. The Constitution gives the Federal Government the power to raise a military, which in the 18th century contemplated an obligation of male citizens to serve in the military. In my opinion, the Constitution does not give the Federal Government the power to compel community service.
Let’s hope that the Supreme Court would not permit Service Nation's move backwards to a more feudal relationship between ordinary people and the people who govern them. One senses that de Toqueville understood American values of volunteerism and freedom of association much better than the people behind Service Nation, an understanding that was also concerned about the tyranny of the majority.
UPDATE: Service Nation's coordinator, Alan Khazei, argues that doing community service turns on one's "'justice nerve. . . . And once a justice nerve is turned on, it rarely goes off."
It seems to me that, if it really turned on one's justice nerve, one would have a good enough sense of justice to oppose Service Nation's unjust goal of state-mandated public service. I wonder whether instead forced community service would tend to turn on one's "collectivist nerve."
