Against Compulsory Federal Service

The following was originally posted as a reply to a friend of mine who had just heard of Rep. Charles Rangel's (asshole) bill, H.R. 5741, which would create compulsory Federal service for everyone.

This is the same Rep. Charles Rangel who was recently arrested for "ethics violations". You know it's bad when Congress has a problem with your ethics.

But on with the show.

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While I am a fan of the concept of service as a requirement for suffrage (a la Heinlein's Starship Troopers, and for many of the same reasons) such service would be meaningless if it were not voluntary (a point which I believe Heinlein also addresses in that novel). Such is a different conversation.

In a more immediate sense, compulsory service is a really bad idea, especially when it becomes understood that the traditional name for such service is a Draft. I have seen the bill, and it is definitely military in focus, the service in "homeland security" being a catch-all for those who are inadmissible for military service.

Why? Take it from a pragmatic standpoint. Today's military is an advanced professional military that uses some rather complicated equipment and tactics and therefore needs people who are capable of using them and motivated to do so. The military needs to be able to refuse people who are not only physically incapable of the demands that would be placed upon them, but also to refuse the mentally and psychologically incapable.

There has also been a cultural shift in our military over the last 20 years to change the image of the military from a bunch of rednecks, dropouts and delinquents to an organization of professionals worthy of respect. Not too long ago, young criminals were often given military service in lieu of jail time. During this same period, the public image of the military was of a group of thugs, a place for people who couldn't get their shit together any other way and who only needed to be smart enough to follow orders and shoot a gun. This is no longer the case.

Military service is now career focused. The vast majority of MOS' are support roles that simultaneously give a soldier real-world skills; and even the lowliest infantry have access to a rather generous college program. On one side of things, more and more soldiers are required to learn various computer and telecommunications-based skills, while on the other squad-based tactics have taught leadership skills to everyone. Unlike 20 years ago, a soldier leaving todays military is a respected member of society. People don't look at their resume and wonder what they did that made them need to join up. In many fields, military training is an advantage and a boon and many employers actively seek out veterans.

By making service mandatory - even if not ALL government service is military, just some of it! - the military loses all these gainss it has worked very hard to achieve over the last two decades. It becomes just another branch of the public school system.

My final point that relates strictly to the military (I will address government service in a broader sense shortly. Whether you take that as a promise or a threat is up to you) is that no soldier in a volunteer army wants a draftee watching his back. Today's military enjoys an unheard of esprit de corps. Unit cohesion is keeping combat casualties at an all time low in general and friendly fire is practically unheard of. Every person in combat today is there because they volunteered for military service AND they took a combat MOS. If you start throwing draftees into the mix, morale goes down, discipline problems rise, desertion becomes a major issue, and friendly fire casualties stop being accidents. I have a lot of friends in the military (including a Captain in the Army) and every single one of them speaks with horror and disdain at the prospect of fighting alongside a draftee. I, for one, will not dishonor our troops by inflicting such horror upon them.

They have enough to deal with.

As for government service being compulsory in general, well, it remains a bad idea. First up are the economics of the idea: Somebody has to pay these people. Now in the rest of the market, a business provides a service or product, people spend money on that product, the business makes more, etc. In this system, things are being produced, wealth is being generated. If enough people want to spend money on a product, the business can pay people to help it create and sell the product. If it hires too many, it can't afford to pay them, and has to fire some. The number of employees a business can have is contingent on the value of the service or products it generates. That value is determined by how much people are willing to spend on it.

Government work, on the other hand, is make-work. The vast majority of government employees are engaged in paperwork and redundant functions. They produce no product or service. If we pour more people into this already bloated system, we alleviate nothing. We would have to pay them, but with what? We can either cut a government program to "free up" funds, which would accomplish nothing because those funds are simply being shifted to another government program. (As Robert Anton Wilson once noted, "Bureaucracies never die, they just change names) The other option is to print more money, but since money is a representation of value, and no additional value is being produced, this simply inflates an already excessively inflated economy. The end result, economically, is either 1990's Russia or 1920's Germany.

Second is the idea of entitlement. We already have enough of a problem with it in this country, and handing people a job doesn't make it any better. A person is generally granted a job based on their own merits. Usually, this job is given to them over several other applicants. Nobody was entitled to a job, they had to work to get it and they have to work to keep it. Being a high school student might qualify someone to work at McDonald's, but telling the manager that they have to hire you is a sure way to remain jobless. The most important thing for people, especially young people, to learn - what working in a place like the grocery store or a burger joing is supposed to teach a person - is a work ethic. The understanding that work sucks, but you still have to do a good job; that at the end of the week your paycheck MEANS something, that you EARNED it, is of paramount importance.

This is not accomplished by handing out do-nothing government work to any schmuck who happens to be over 18 in America. In this compulsory service system, a person IS entitled to a job. Not only can they get the work through no virtue of their own, but they can do a piss-poor job and the government has to keep them. Two years later, these people go to get their first real job, having been "prepared", and find that this "experience" doesn't make it any easier for them to find work. Why? Because EVERYONE ELSE has the exact same experience. Which means that the professional jobs which these people are suppsed to be qualified for (having been working in an office environment for two years) aren't available. They now have to go get that same post-high-school burger flipping job. That same job that barely pays minimum wage, doesn't have a union, and enjoys such high turnover that they can - and will - gladly fire any slacker they catch taking an unauthorized smoke break. Employers, on the other hand, undoubtedly start to notice that a lot of these so-called "experienced" employees don't actually know how to work. They want vacation benefits right away. They call in sick all the damn time. They complain about working overtime. All because they never actually had to work to work before. Sure, some people will excel, get promotions, move on to better jobs, but these are the SAME people who would have done that anyway, the people who know what a work ethic is, and all that has happened in their cases is they wasted two years of their lives in government service rather than getting started on their careers.

The argument that this would create a paradigm of civic duty is also bunk. There is a large amount of evidence that the exact opposite effect would actually be created. Of note is a famous study of day care centers by two economists in the 1990's. The day care centers had a policy that the children had to be picked up by a certain time. As can be expected, some parents would usually be late each day. In a controlled experiment, some of the centers imposed a fine for parents who arrived over 10 minutes late. The result was that late pickups at the centers with the fine SKYROCKETED. The reason for this result is that before the fine, the parents were bound by a sense of duty and respect to the teachers. Those who were late were only a little late. What the fine did was allow the parents to buy off their duty. For a small fee each day, they could no longer feel guilty about being late, because they had already compensated the teachers for that inconvenience. The situation in mandating service cheapens the sense of civic duty in the same way. By making it mandatory for people to serve, we actually DECREASE the likelihood of future public service because, in the minds of these people being enlisted, they have already done their time or met their quota. What is interesting about the study is that it took place in Israel, a country that already has a service requirement. If such mandatory service did indeed create the effect of amplifying a person's sense of civic duty, we would very likely have seen completely different results.

Finally, service is meaningless if it's not voluntary. You cannot imbue someone with a sense of civic duty by forcing them into it. All that creates is resentment. Besides we already have a word for mandatory or involuntary service. That word is slavery, which was, by the way, made illegal and unConstitutional in the United States by the 13th Amendment.

Contempt of Congress

Congress today voted to approve a measure which would extend unemployment benefits to those whose benefits ran out at the six-month mark. The vote was conducted after the swearing in of Senator Carte Goodwin, who cast a vote which broke a "Republican Filibuster" and sent the bill on its merry way.

Those of you who read a previous blog post will know the distaste I have for the manner in which Congress conducts itself, and it is with the new information provided by this most recent abuse of power that allows me to put a finger on what, exactly, disturbs me.

Think back to, say, elementary school. You and ten other students get together on the playground and try to decide what you want to play.

"Hide and Seek!" you shout immediately.
"Red Rover!" another student shouts almost as quickly.

Debate ensues as to which option is more appealing. Being young, the idea of dividing into two groups never occurs to you, or if it did, the idea of a game consisting of only 5 people sounds like no fun. Finally, one student says those fateful words.

"OK, let's vote on it."

The votes come down: five for Hide and Seek, six for Red Rover. Your suggestion was defeated and the group will play Red Rover. This is the nature of the democratic process: A group of people resort to the will of the majority to decide an issue and - and this is truly the most important part of the process - these people agree to be bound by the results of the vote, whether they like the result or not.

A Republic, such as what exists in America, is an interesting twist on Democracy. As a straight Democracy becomes increasingly cumbersome the more people are involved, the people vote democratically on certain, but not all, issues. For the remainder - often, the bulk - of the issues, they select representatives (democratically, of course) who take on the daily business of government and make decisions amongst themselves on behalf of their constituents via the democratic process.

In short, a Republic is a system of government whereby the people engage vicariously in pure Democracy.

Let's return to the playground. In an ideal world populated by honest, mature, and just people, you would accept the outcome of the vote and get on with the game. But what if you refused to accept the outcome, and not only that, but you got your fellow students to vote again and again, until circumstances changed - you bring in other students to vote your way, or players who voted against you leave, or you just bully people into changing their votes - such that you finally got your way? Would that be democracy, or would that be something else entirely?

As it so happens, this latter behavior is the manner in which Congress conducts itself with disgusting regularity. It seems that (through abuses of the rules which govern procedure, which I will discuss topically later in this essay) the Pass/Fail vote which is the hallmark of a real democracy has been usurped by a Pass/Filibuster system. The key difference between the two is that after a vote is taken in a true democracy, the issue is settled. In the latter system, a motion only fails to pass for now.

If a Republic is a government in which those selected to attend to the business of the government conduct themselves democratically, then what else can you call the refusal to be bound by democratically achieved results than a perversion and a failure?

As I said before, the most important detail of this system is not so much the process itself, but the understanding that the participants agree to be bound by the process. In most representative governments, the process is codified well beyond "we vote on stuff". Several such systems of rules exist and are commonly referred to as "Parliamentary Procedure" and they exist in order to organize and expedite efficient discussion and voting. Rules are crafted to determine who may speak, what may be discussed at a given time, what gets voted on when, and numerous other instances which require consistent procedure in order for discussion and the process to be deemed fair.

It is also common within democratically derived systems to set certain rules upon the voting itself. For instance: it is generally understood, but in some cases need be stated explicitly, that a single person may cast a single vote. In a case where a single person may cast multiple votes, information such as how many votes a person may cast and how they may cast them must be delineated. Some rules apply to determining an outcome - certain issues, such as amending the Constitution, are deemed too important to be left to the whims of a simple majority and must be approved by "supermajorities" of two-thirds and sometimes three-quarters of the vote.

In these systems a motion may be made, discussed, and amended; other motions may be substituted; and any or all of these may be tabled, denied consideration, or voted upon. What they have in common is that, once a motion is voted upon, the issue is settled, yea or nay, good or ill. The question cannot be raised again unless significant new developments occur, a pre-determined length of time passes (usually requiring a new term of office or a new session to begin), or the motion changes substantially.

No parliamentary authority recognizes the addition of pork as a "substantial change" unless the subject being discussed is Lunch.

One of the principal difficulties of these parliamentary systems (principal, as anyone who has spent any time in a board room or convention can surely describe the many subtle and nuanced failings of whichever system they experienced) is that the more rules are in place, the greater the opportunity for abuse. These rules are in place to move discussion along, to keep it organized, and to assist in keeping track of what is being voted upon and what happens when it passes or fails. Societies who implement parliamentary procedure are often fond of saying the rules are "intended as a loose-fitting blazer, not as a straitjacket." And while this sentiment is certainly true of the authors' intentions, the "spirit of the law" is often usurped by the "letter of the law" and we find ourselves watching Congress.

The current congressional paradigm of Pass or Filibuster means that there is not a single hare-brained piece of malevolence that can be moved and seconded in those halls that will ever disappear. If it fails to pass on a vote, rather than being eliminated until a better (or at least different) idea comes along, it sits dormant, a victim of "filibustering" until somebody retires, dies, or forgets to show up to a session and the vote can finally swing the other way. Any measure with a chance of passing greater than zero will, given enough time under a "filibuster", be passed and inflicted upon America.

The recent passing of the unemployment measure may have been done technically within the bounds of the parliamentary authority but the manner in which this task was completed was not only contrary to spirit of democracy and the parliamentary authority, but shows open contempt for the fair, open, and enlightened intentions of the processes.

For those of you who doubt me, there is a footnote worthy piece of information: the next step in the process of implementing the measure which inspired todays blog is for the Senate to choose whether to incur more national debt, or to cut funding from other government programs in order to finance their decision.

How fortunate for us.