Are You Being Served?
On her campaign site, Marianne Williamson, a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President has an item on “National Service.” It starts out as follows:
I believe the United States should institute a program whereby every American citizen between the age of 18 and 26 can perform one year of National Service.
Guess what? The United States already has such a program. It’s called freedom. Every American citizen who’s not in prison is now free to perform one year, or half a year, or two years, or ten years of “National Service.” Many are already doing so. When I went to a McDonald’s for breakfast in San Francisco this morning, someone served me. When I went with my my friend Charley Hooper for dinner in San Francisco last night, someone served us. In both cases, they did it with a smile and they were paid and, in the case of the dinner, with a nice tip on top.
I’m going to my doctor for my semi-annual checkup next month and he’s going to serve me. Even better, he’s not between age 18 and 26. He, like Ms. Williamson and me, is in his 60s. Service can happen at many ages, not just in the narrow range that Williamson proposes.
You might think I’m making fun of Ms. Williamson’s proposal. I’m not. I’m pointing out that the whole of idea of service has been distorted. I was at a Hoover conference to celebrate George Shultz’s 95th birthday a few years ago and chaired a panel in which that came up. My colleague Condi Rice talked about the various ways people could serve–in the military and in domestic situations. I pointed out one such obvious domestic situation: waiting tables.
Does the fact that waiters and waitresses wait tables for pay or the fact that doctors provide medical check-ups for pay mean that those activities are not service? No. Indeed, the fact that they’re paid and that the payers are voluntarily doing so makes it all the more certain that it is service. Ironically, the fact that what Williamson proposes is a government program paid for by tax revenues, which means paid for by unwilling payers, means that it might not be service. And even if it is service, the fact that taxes would pay for it means that there would be no guarantee that the value is as great as the cost.
READER COMMENTS
Mark Brady
Sep 24 2019 at 8:44pm
“I believe the United States should institute a program whereby every American citizen between the age of 18 and 26 can perform one year of National Service.” (Emphasis added)
“…this service would be a way that every American citizen spends one year of their youth in service to the repair of our nation.” (Emphasis added)
Would this program be mandatory for all American youth? It sounds as if it would be.
robc
Sep 25 2019 at 5:20am
She said “can” not “must”.
It is quite possible she doesn’t know the difference.
Mark Brady
Sep 25 2019 at 10:45pm
Would every American citizen voluntarily spend one year of their youth in service to the repair of our nation? If not, it would have to be mandatory.
Yaakov
Sep 26 2019 at 4:27pm
These programs, despite being based on voluntary work, are very expensive, as the volunteers still need to receive some money to live on. So when she says “can” I assume she means that no matter how many youngsters are interested in taking a year off for voluntary work away from home, the tax payer will pay the bill.
Jim Dunning
Sep 24 2019 at 9:54pm
Hear! Hear!
TMC
Sep 25 2019 at 3:47pm
Condi Rice must be an interesting person to talk to. I had hoped she would run for President someday.
Benjamin Cole
Sep 26 2019 at 8:29am
Whether right or wrong, sometimes one must engage in base compromises.
Seems to me we need a way to wipe out the student debt problem, A year of service and a debt jubilee (that is, the Fed prints money an pays off the debt).
The central banks are migrating towards helicopter money anyway.
Plus, an end to student loans.
You know. college kids used to work summers to pay for school. Before heavy immigration, often that was farm work.
Mark Z
Sep 27 2019 at 4:32pm
Why not instead have the recent graduates work at a job they were trained for by their education? And if they can’t get a job whose pay is proportional to the debt they incurred to get it, the the problem isn’t a political one; rather, it’s that they made a bad investment, and paying them potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars for a year of unskilled labor makes no more sense than paying off the losses of day traders who lost their shirts in the market in return for them picking up trash in the local park every day for a few months.
David Seltzer
Sep 26 2019 at 7:24pm
Does Ms. Williamson not see the irony of the possible compulsory nature of her proposal?
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