Anyone think we should have a 2-3 year mandatory draft for 18y/os?

[jefnvk]

Not necessairialy.

Mandatory military service, yes, for anyone able bodied 18-25, or some other similiar age group.  However, this would strictly be a National Guard type deal, except you would never leave your home area.  More like a militia system.  Couldn't be deployed anywhere outside the US, could only be moved outside your area of residence in time of attack or for training.

Needs some work, but sounds good in my head.

[Pb]

No.  The draft or other involuntary service violates the constitional ammendment against slavery and involuntary servitude.

[Oleg Volk]

Conscription is what made WW1 and WW2 possible, among other factors.

[The Rabbi]

Conscription is what made WW1 and WW2 possible, among other factors.

That's a positive then.

[Oleg Volk]

Why would it be a positive? Without mass availability of draftees, I don't think the aggressors would have even got started. From the US perspective, I think that entry into either WW1 or the European threater of WW2 was not keeping with self-interest.

[Sindawe]

That's a positive then.

Well, if one considers wars of aggression for Lebensraum and having the manpower to staff camps to deal with dissidents, gypsies, juden and other "untermenchen" a positive, then yes I suppose it is.

[Winston Smith]

Man Oleg, Sindawe, that was almost cruel, the way you guys brought the logic-hammer down.

AS one of the only ones here who would be enslaved according to the plan supposed, (natedog and combatwombat have yet to chime in) I feel exactly as I do when classmates of mine who don't pay taxes say what the government should do.

You're not paying the price, thus you don't get to make the decisions. Don't pay taxes, no input.

You cannot concievably think that it's all right to volunteer me to give up my liberty for a probably what is 1/40th of my life, under the misapprehension that it will be good for me.

Ah well.

Felionius Fig said:

Not compulsory MILITARY service, but just as Preacherman described, would go a long way to silence the snot-nosed, whiney, self-absorbed girlie-men (and EMO kids!) our society has produced over the last generation.

For the children, right?


EDIT:

Matis said:

I agree that most youth in America does suffer from self-absorption and a distortion in their understanding of life.  I tie this to the decline, indeed the vicious attack on religion that has been growing for decades, here.

Replace "religion" with "freedom" and you'll have something.

[Waitone]

Compulsory service, military or otherwise, just smell fascist to me.  The idea of the state having first dibbs on the early years of a young adult just scares the snot outta me.

That said, would service to the country be of value for a lot of reasons?  You betcha.  Build character, correct upbringing errors.  Build independence.  All good thangs but it not up to the government to do it by requirement.  In the wrong society the young can be taught socially unacceptable skills like unquestioned obedience to immoral orders.  Far too many societies learned that if you want really bad things done, get the young and twist them.

I am not saying the US is in that mode.  I am saying human nature being what it is makes such things possible.  The likelihood of it happening increases with the demise of religious training.

Service to the country should be voluntary.

[HForrest]

Wow. It's astounding and almost scary how many people are in favor of this. Slavery is slavery, and it's wrong in all circumstances. No friggin' way should we have mandatory service in any form.

[Preacherman]

I've noted the arguments of those against some form of national service (not necessarily military, as I said earlier), but I find them unconvincing.  I find particularly unconvincing the arguments of our younger members...  Folks, I was young, once, and I remember how shallow and self-centered I was.  I find exactly the same traits among modern youth.  Oh, I know, they can't help it, it's the way and the society in which they've been raised:  but it needs correction, and I think national service of some kind is a very good way to do it.

I don't buy the argument about "extending State control" or "major financial burden".  If the national service is actually doing good things for the country, including major projects like forestry, assisting in urban redevelopment, agriculture, etc., then the cost/benefit ratio is going to be at worst a wash, and at best rather a gain for the country.  As for those who opt for military service, they'll be getting a couple of years "grunt" experience, and learning a whole lot about themselves, which many of us have been through (either voluntarily or through conscription) in this and other countries.  I think all those who've been through it will confirm that while they may not have enjoyed it much, they certainly changed from children into adults.

I still maintain that the positive side of a national service system is far more significant than the negative.

[Firethorn]

Preacherman, in order to make it non-compulsary, how about we take Heinlein's idea.

You don't get to vote until you do your federal(and/or state) service.

While indeed, quite a bit of good can come, you have to wonder about the bad stuff.  Delaying college, stifling young businessmen.  Shortage of 18-20 year olds on the open market.  Seperation of people from the 'real' commercial jobs for a couple years.

There's only so much call for basically unskilled labor, especially if you only have two years to train and use them.  Even the military called for four for the longest time.  Even now, the 18 month or whatever the shortest enlistment time is is an experiment and sign of desperation.  Heck, the job market can't be that bad if the army can't recruit.

[Moondoggie]

Firethorn, "Basically unskilled labor" in the military is AKA "Cannon fodder".  Two year enlistees get very limited options for MOS's.   Most of them spend much of their enlistment sleeping with a rifle in the dirt.  Ditto for draftees in former eras.  During VietNam, Marines returning from RVN with less than 6 months remaining on their "enlistment" were offered "early outs".  Many of them weren't "offered", they were just "out" based upon their service record.  The Gov't used them for 1 tour in RVN with prerequisite training and kicked them to the curb.

Conscription is also what facilitated the "War of Northern Aggression", except in those days you could officially buy your way out of service.

[Ben]

If you advocated this when our founding fathers were still around, they would be at your door step waiting for you to open the door so they can kick you in the balls.

I'm not sure why they would kick me. I'm a white male landowner -- the only type of US citizen they would allow the ability to vote.

[Seymour Skinner]

It's pretty scary how many gun owners support governmental parentalism.  It's not a good sign how many posts I had to scroll through before somebody (c_yeager) finally called a spade a spade.

I have long noticed that "gun owner" does NOT necessarily mean a person is pro liberty, which many assume it does.

Particularly frightening are the rationalizations (they expose what is REALLY in people's hearts) for mis named governmental parentalism like "national service":

You don't get to vote until you do your federal(and/or state) service.

*shudders*  HOW did we go as a nation, from "only land owners may vote" to the above abomination?

Folks, I was young, once, and I remember how shallow and self-centered I was.  I find exactly the same traits among modern youth.  Oh, I know, they can't help it, it's the way and the society in which they've been raised:  but it needs correction, and I think national service of some kind is a very good way to do it.

*sighs* Let me translate the above: "I'm going to use government force to do what I couldn't otherwise force you to do, under the guise of making YOU less selfish."  Holy smoke, I honestly can't believe I'm reading this among gun owners.  I expect to hear preacherman's posts on the campus of my local government university.  Preacherman, how do you NOT realize that such a program would only make them young wipper snappers "less selfish" when it comes to GOVERNMENT?  They will be turned into the kind of livelong government loyalists that we've seen and continue to see in Europe (which is not far from the American public today, no wonder it's taking hold among people who used to know better).

By the way, those of you who have this idealized fantasy about so called "national service" can take heart in the future.  The powers that be have made no bones about the fact that this is a long term goal of theirs.  Every administration (including this one) has floated their own version of the same animal.  UN connected organizations salivate at the very thought of compulsory government "service."

I believe we already have something GOOD in the "military service" department for 18 yr olds that is systematically ignored, even among gun owners.  We suffer from a lack of real courage within men in this country, otherwise you would see functional and unique *gasp* local militias all over the land.  They would be meeting, training, teaching, discussing, preparing, and many other good things that narrow minded militia bigots could never conceive of.  Whenever someone like me dares to point this out, there is an inevitable chorus of the comfortable gutless among us who ask, "Well what are YOU doing to accomplish this?"  These guys aren't reconstituting their local militia, they simply A. want someone to do it for them, and B. feel real big by focusing on the one pointing it out instead of the subject itself.

If you are too whatever, to join/reconstitute your local militia, you have no moral right in the universe to use government as your mercenary to compel your fellow citizen to do what YOU think is "best" for him, or will make him "less selfish" .  No one will come along to forcibly compel you to reconstitute your local militia (despite the fact that it IS the state's responsibility), so doing the right thing will take personal initiative and backbone of a different sort than hanging Christmas lights, and WON'T involve backwards government programs.

[SpookyPistolero]

Just wanted to add my two cents, that the words 'mandatory' and 'freedom' don't play well together. Some people might be self-centered and immature, but they've the freedom to be that way in this country. Would military service turn that around? Probably. Would taking away millions from the super-rich, super spoiled celebrities in this country help bring them down to earth and improve them as people? Probably. But you can't do either, and for good reason.

It can only be imagined to put forth mandatory service in the form of a draft, when absolute self-preservation is the question at hand, not self-improvement.  Even that is a stretch to my mind.

[Guest]

If we really wanted to make our "society" a better place we shouldnt be sending out people who are actually making a contribution to it off to fight our wars. Really it makes a lot more sense to send out a fundamentally useless portion of our population off to die. We would be well served in many ways if we were to reverse the age bracket and simply send everyone over the age of 55 off to places like Iraq.

- Its an age group that has built the world in which wars are still necessary, so why shouldnt they be the ones to clean up the mess?

- They already have valuable skills that would save us having to train new recruits.

- It would take a HUGE drain off the healthcare and social service systems. And if *anyone* owes a "debt" to society, it should be the people who are sucking so forcefully at the collective teet.

- If the unthinkable were to happen and every single one of them were to get wiped out, our nation could proceed quite hapilly without them.

- There are more people over the age of 55 than between the ages of 18 and 20, so its a bigger pool of available labor.

- These are the people who have had over 30 voting years to make this country a better place, and they failed miserably, time to make up for it.

- We could make an amusing reality show and take bets to see which ones died in Basic Training.

- We could even use a Heinlenesque system and, rather than drafting people, make service a prerequisite for recieving social security and medicaid.

This makes a lot more sense, but it will never happen. Why? Well, because this is a group of people that EXPECTS the rest of us to clean up after them, and really thinks its a great idea for young people to carry them upon their shoulders, because somehow they owe them for making such a mess of the world that they have to live in now.

Sorry folks, but the people who are coming out of schools right now have already looked around, and they have seen what you have done to this country. Thanks for all the gun control, a near-totalitarian government, more unnecessary wars than could ever have been imagined, an entitlement system has created an underclass of serfs, and an economy that requires a person to owe a lifetime of debt just to have a place to live. People dont feel that they owe this society anything anymore, simply because its isnt a society than one feels is worth it. If you want today's kids to spend their blood on this nation, then maybe you should have given them something worth fighting for.

[Winston Smith]

I find it highly offensive that you think that you (better than me) know what's best for me.

I already have a father. I don't need you, or the government in that role.

Preacherman, what you have demonstrated is the worst kind of political arrogance, the assuming that you know what other people need. That kind of political arrogance gave us welfare, war, and quite the bloated government.

You are part of the problem.

I was taught that we should at least AIM for the principles of live and let live, but apparently Preacherman and some of my other elders find other courses wiser. Which is fine, of course, except that they want to force their choices on me.

Which is, you know, what's that word....?

Ah yeah, fascism.

Sieg heil.

[Nightfall]

I've always thought of voluntary service to be another layer of protection against a government getting too big for its britches, and becoming expansionist/tyrannical. When your military force is the citizenry serving by choice, the people (or at least a good part of them) have to accept and rally to the cause. Government trying to use the armed forces against the people? Well, how many people are going to sign up to subjugate themselves, for example? Be it draft or mandatory service for the youth, it's the same thing. A guaranteed supply of troops and man power for whomever is at the top, whatever his ambitions for power. Free choice is a great way to throw the monkey wrench into the works of potential dictators.

[jefnvk]

I find it funny that people keep bringing up that the founding fathers would have never done such a thing, when in another argument, we will immediately bring up that at one point, everyone was forced to be in the militia.  And we will use that as a good example of why the 2A exists.  

Now that the idea comes up, though, it seems that many don't much care for the idea.

[natedog]

What is the purpose of the military?

Hint: It isn't a daycare center or dicipline school.

[Felonious Monk/Fignozzle]

While indeed, quite a bit of good can come, you have to wonder about the bad stuff.  Delaying college, stifling young businessmen.  Shortage of 18-20 year olds on the open market.

Firethorn-- and the "bad stuff" you mention is...?
Delaying college while children become adults...
stifling young businessmen long enough that they can solidify their ideas from age 18 (still a child) until age 20...
(almost a man)...
Shortage of 18-20 year olds on the open market.  Yep, our economy would REALLY be hurting without them.

Where's the downside?

The most vocal against this concept of youth internships, CRYING waaaah "slavery" and "you're not the boss of me",
are the children.

"mandatory and freedom are mutually exclusive"?
Not if you're not a total libertarian anarchist.

Freedom = 50% rights, 50% responsibility.

Kids SCREAM for their rights, but quickly leave the room when responsibility comes due.
Grow up, boys & girls.  SO self-centered to think you are "owed" all these freedoms.


Interesting conversation!

[Guest]

The most vocal against this, CRYING waaaah "slavery" and "you're not the boss of me",
are the children.

Yeah, because they are the only ones with someone to lose in this proposition. But of course that's not why they're opposed to it, it's because they're whiny little brats who don't want to be forced into government service for two years.

Freedom = 50% rights, 50% responsibility.

Kids SCREAM for their rights, but quickly leave the room when responsibility comes due.
Grow up, boys & girls.  SO self-centered to think you are "owed" all these freedoms.

My responsibility for being born in a free country is to take no more than what I put in and harm no one else. Of course, that's a simplistic answer, but that's the gist of it. I shouldn't be forced into two years of government servitude.

[Iain]

Nothing new under the sun.

Every generation thinks that their kids are wastrels and would benefit from being 'whipped into shape'. And their kids disagree and swear that they'll never think that way. And thirty years later...

If it isn't 'for the children' then it's 'those darned kids'.

[Justin]

I've got better things to do than spend two years kow-towing to some beauracratic nitwit.

The state already requires that I give 30% of everything I make to them, and that, in my estimation, is more than enough.

[Guest]

I find it funny that people keep bringing up that the founding fathers would have never done such a thing, when in another argument, we will immediately bring up that at one point, everyone was forced to be in the militia.

You cant possibly be equating the militia with service in a government commanded military. The militia is a body of citizens ENTIRELY INDEPENDANT from government authority, thats the entire point.