National Service? Puh-lease

One of the comforts of middle age — a stage that the editor of TIME and I have both reached — is that you can start making demands on young people, safe in the knowledge that they won’t apply to you. Having safely escaped the Vietnam era draft ourselves, we are overcome by the feeling that the next generation should not be so lucky. Many of these young folks are volunteering for socially beneficial work, and that’s good. But it’s not good enough. “Volunteerism” is so wonderful that every young person should have to do it.

Problem number one with grand schemes for universal voluntary public service is that they can’t be both universal and voluntary. If everybody has to do it, then it’s not voluntary, is it? And if it’s truly up to the individual, then it won’t be universal. What advocates of this sort of thing generally have in mind is using the pressures of social conformity and the powers of the state indirectly to remove as much freedom of choice as possible, while still being able to claim that everyone who signs up is a “volunteer.”

More specifically, these plans aim to achieve near-universality with a couple of incentives. One is a general ethic of “volunteerism,” enforced by peer pressure, corporate public service advertising campaigns, earnest reports from blue-ribbon commissions, speeches from politicians, covers of newsmagazines, goody-goody student-council types who infect every college campus, Oprah, Larry King, and so on. America is very good at marshalling all the forces of bullshit in our society toward a noble end, like stopping cruelty to animals or hounding sexual predators. Pressuring young people to “serve” for a year or two is a perfect subject for one of these campaigns.

A second incentive is to make college loans contingent on a year of service, or some such formula. That would snare all but the richest young folks. The hope would be that some fraction of those so ensnared will be inspired to dedicate their lives — or at least a part of their lives — to public service. And it’s possible. But a larger fraction may regard the whole exercise somewhat cynically, and the very concept of “volunteerism” under this kind of pressure may turn the word into a joke. The exclusion of kids whose parents are wealthy enough to buy their way out — as young men could buy their way out of the Civil War — will do nothing to reduce such cynicism. And young people may ask why, for example, farmers are not required to “volunteer” for a year or two in exchange for the massive subsidies they enjoy. Or what about boomers like the editor of TIME, when they start collecting Social Security and Medicare in a few years? Why should they escape the maw of mandatory volunteerism?

As it happens, we already have a system for inducing truly voluntary activities that benefit the public. It’s called free-market capitalism. It works this way: if you need something done, you offer enough money to induce someone to do it. There is no need for inspiration or other malarkey. In fact, the voluntary nature of transactions under capitalism is what gives our economic system its moral authority. And if the need that has to be satisfied is social — if satisfying it would benefit everybody or the worst-off among us who need help — we have another well established system called taxation. It works this way: through democratic processes, we decide as a society that something is worth doing or someone is worth helping. Then we tax ourselves in order to buy this service from someone who wishes to sell it for the amount we are willing to pay.

It is this second arrangement — democracy and taxation — that has broken down in our country today. People don’t have faith that their votes get translated into governing arrangements that reflect the popular judgment about what the government should do and how it should be paid for. I would have to add that a generation of mainly Republican leadership has trashed the very idea of government. Much worse, politicians of both parties (though mainly, once again, Republicans, it seems to me) have made the voters totally unrealistic about any need to equate the taxes they pay with the services they want. What bothers advocates of “volunteer” schemes is the disappearance of a sense of obligation — obligation for the blessings we enjoy as Americans. And the lack of any sense of obligation makes it very hard to expand those blessings to include, for example, some kind of guaranteed health care. But obligations are not voluntary. And the most efficient and fairest way to satisfy them is cash on the barrelhead.

The writer Nicholas von Hoffman had a slogan during Vietnam: “draft old men’s money, not young men’s bodies.” The military draft raises special issues. When “volunteerism” may involve paying the ultimate price, it is very tempting to say this really is something you should not be able to buy your way out of. The whole “volunteerism” crusade, in fact, starts with the discomfort people feel about how we fill our military. To some extent, this discomfort is misplaced. The armed services are more socially diverse today than during Vietnam or even Gulf War I — even including several children of national politicians. The discomfort also may be misguided: if the military has, by historical accident, turned into an important path out of the underclass and into bourgeois society, used disproportionately by African-Americans, is that necessarily a bad thing? (Especially when the lifetime risk of dying on the job may be no higher in the military than in other dangerous careers like coal mining.)

Even conceding the case for a military draft, there is a problem. The problem is that the military has no use for more than a small fraction of draft-age men and women. So if you are going to piggyback some vast national service plan on the military’s need for relatively few recruits, what do you do with the rest of them? There are, it seems to me, just three possibilities: give them useful jobs that someone else is already doing; give them useful jobs that currently are not being done; or give them make-work jobs.

This is where the notion of “volunteerism” begins to seem little short of Orwellian. Consider the first category. If someone is forced, by law or by social pressure or any other reason, to “volunteer” for a necessary job that he or she otherwise would not take, someone else is going to lose that job. This someone else presumably was or would be content with what the job paid — at least content enough not to quit. Now he or she is unemployed, and someone else who doesn’t want the job is stuck with it. What’s the point?

Now, consider the second category. There are jobs we would like society to do but feel we cannot afford it. Most of them are just the kind of therapeutically unpleasant tasks — such as emptying bedpans at nursing homes — that volunteerism enthusiasts are anxious to force young people to do for their own damned good. So what’s the problem? It’s this. There is a price at which someone would be willing to take this crummy job. Let’s say it’s $20 an hour. For $20 an hour, you can fill that job with a true volunteer. It may be an injustice that people should be driven by a lack of other options to want a job emptying bedpans at $20 an hour, but we are not offering them those other options in any event. Instead, we are going to take away that lousy $20-an-hour job and give it to someone who is “volunteering” out of idealism or isn’t really volunteering at all. It would take $50 an hour to make this job seem economically worthwhile to this person, but since this is part of “national service,” you are only paying him or her $5. Result? Someone who truly wants the job cannot have it, while someone who really doesn’t want it is forced to do it for $45 an hour less than what it would take to induce him or her to truly volunteer. You’ve made everyone involved unhappy, all in the name of some vague social-engineering notion about changing the social atmosphere. With all the varied public and private power centers behind it, this really does start to seem like something out of 1984.

Here is an easy prediction based on past experience: if the government employee unions have anything to say about it (as they do), most of the work done by this national volunteer program will fall in category three: make-work. Only jobs that accomplish nothing important can really avoid trouble. Scandals are another easy prediction. A desperate Commissariat of Volunteerism will find itself placing young folks as interns at home decorating businesses or excusing them entirely on grounds of an allergy to cats. As with the discredited Vietnam-era draft, the challenge for bureaucrats will be finding ways NOT to use people — because there will be far more people than can be usefully used.

And then, of course, will come a study showing that, when you add in training and supervision, each job, be it emptying bedpans or designing sculptures of bedpans for a National Museum of Hospital Equipment, actually costs the government $100 an hour.

I’m perfectly prepared to believe that today’s young people are deplorable specimens, ignorant and ungrateful and in desperate need of discipline. Or I am also prepared to believe that they are about to burst with idealism like a piñata and only await somebody with a giant pin. But they aren’t the only ones who could use a lesson about social obligation. What about grownups? Grownups, who still have some hope of collecting Social Security and Medicare before they go broke, who have enjoyed the explosion in house prices that make the prospect of home ownership so dim for the next generation; who allowed the government to run up a gargantuan national debt, were miraculously bailed out of that, and immediately allowed it to be run up a second time; who may well have gone to college when tuition was cheap and you didn’t automatically graduate burdened by student loans. We are not in much of a position to start dreaming up lessons in social obligation for the kids.