Last night I pulled an old copy of The Freeman (May 1993) off the shelf, just to skim through (it beats television these days), and found a brief op-ed regarding national service.
In light of god-king Obama's grand plan for service-learning, it's certainly a timely, worthwhile read. Here's the whole thing.
National Service
Some years ago, German enacted a "Law for National Labor Service" that required one year of service for every youth between the ages of 18 and 29. Like the current American proposals, the service was part military and part civilian. The plan was initially voluntary, but was made mandatory after two years.
The proponents of the German national service law promised that all work "undertaken by the Labor Service may only be supplementary, i.e., work which would not be undertaken in the ordinary way by private enterprise." Similar promises are made by contemporary American supporters of national service.
The German plan also praised collectivism and sharply criticized individualism and the market system. It advocated that young people be made to perform "service rendered to the German nation," and its overall purpose was "to lift men out of economic interest, out of acquisitiveness, to free them from materialism, from egoism ..."
The Hitler Youth were institutionalized by the "Law for National Labor Service," which operated under the premise that "the child is the mother's contribution to the state." This was the ultimate in national socialism: the nationalization of people.
This is not to suggest that the American supporters of national service are fascists or "national socialists," but to underscore what a tremendous threat to individual liberty such a program entails. Current American proposals may not sound too threatening since they are supposedly voluntary. But the Nazi program also was voluntary when it began, and, as mentioned above, there already are many powerful political supporters of mandatory national service in the United States. For these reasons, national service could pose one of the greatest threats to freedom in the coming decade.
- Thomas J. DiLorenzo
Joining the military on a voluntary basis is cool, but any form of conscription is anti-liberty and therefore anti-American!
DiLorenzo wrote this 16 years ago … today it’s coming to fruition. “We the people” better pull our collective heads out of our asses and wake-up! Fast!
This ain’t no dress-rehearsal.
I think many young people should consider military service but it should not be mandatory. I see all this talk of required service and forgiving student loans for service as a way to indoctrinate the young people of America into the Left way of thinking.
On a side note, did you notice how the Obama-run press does not show the dead American military that much anymore since their guy is in the White House? When Bush was in charge, we saw casualty reports every night.