Jan 27, 2016 2 min read

The Friday Observer-Reporter had an editorial making a case for compulsory national service, arguing it “would transform us from a nation with too many spoiled, self-indulgent brats into a one of citizens who have a sense of ownership and duty.”

I must express my sense of irony at how people, generally on the left, love to propose national service. Some 50 years ago, such people were probably speaking out against the compulsory service we did have back then – the draft – as the Vietnam War was in progress. I wonder what would happen if compulsory national service was expanded beyond young people to folks in their 50s or 60s?

Would it indeed make young people feel better about their country? Or would it create a sense of resentment at the prospect of two years of being an indentured servant to government busybodies? To give a more frightening prospect, suppose people of an anarchistic inclination decide that instead of fighting induction, they will use their national service posts to engage in sabotage as a means of protest?

Some years ago, I clipped one of “Bruce Kauffmann’s History Lessons.” It ran in the Nov. 10, 2013 Observer-Reporter. His subject was the free market economist Milton Friedman, who helped bring an end to the draft in the early 1970s. Kauffmann wrote, “When Gen. William Westmoreland defended conscription by saying he didn’t want to command ‘an army of mercenaries,’ Friedman replied, ‘You would rather command an army of slaves?'”

Robert Fisher

Corona, Ariz.