I have seen some people on here say that they think some kind of government service is good for young people after high school or at the age of 18. I have a few questions for those that think it’s a good idea.
How would you envision something like this working?
Is it mandatory for everyone?
How long would this service take?
Is it full time work or community service hours that would have to be put in?
Do you serve after high school or at 18?
If after high school, what about those who drop out?
If at 18, what about those who can become professionals or go to college?
Will they be paid?
How much?
Will it vary by job?
Who decides what jobs they would get?
What if they refuse?
Could they stay in their present location or would they have to move?
What purpose would this serve society?
What purpose would this serve the individual?
Sorry that this is just a collection of questions, I really had trouble just presenting the questions in paragraph form.
ETA: More questions
I admit, this is pretty much the only way I see any form of military draft being politically feasible these days. If everyone had to go at some certain point then the (presumably) shared burden would make it palatable to the electorate.
As for your questions? Who knows? Call it two years after high school with some expression of choice where to serve (military, peace corps-like, planting trees, whatever) and government attempting to honor the choice unless otherwise contraindicated by need.
I don’t see it working. At all. Makes for a fascinating hypothetical, but a huge cock up in reality. And you simply couldn’t make it mandatory. Too many groups would be fighting tooth and nail to exclude their members.
Not to mention, you’d have a HUGE military, and sooner or later, someone would decide to see just what could be done with it.
We’ve gotten by pretty well with a volunteer military. A draft or conscription would bloat it, and assigning conscripts to government jobs would cause a howl from the public sector unions.
Although I’m not really arguing in favor of such a service, I think it might be interesting to see how it does work here.
For all able-bodied males; In order to lower the numbers it is current policy not to draft certain groups like married men, fathers or anyone over 23.
Currently nine months, maximum was 20 months civillian, 18 months military
Full time.
The default is 18. If you are still in school you get a deferment easily. (In many German states the best shool degree still takes 13 years, those students are about 19 when they finish school)
Under certain conditions it is possible to get deferments, but e.g. college/university only counts after the first year is completed. Just being accepted or planning to go to college isn’t enough. In practice people usually serve after a short school track plus vocational training or directly after a longer school track.
Yes, $10.04-$12.14 a day plus a number of extras. You have a right to a position with free accomodation.
The actual wage doesn’t but the extras do. You receive payments for all meals that aren’t offered by your employer, clothing if you aren’t issued a uniform…
You can apply directly to potential employers. If you do so early enough there is a good chance that you find something that matches your preferences. If you don’t, they assign you to a position of their choice, probably a less desirable one.
The short answer is: Usually a suspended prison term.
In the military most have to move, in the civillian service you have no right to a position at your location but most people find one.
Military:[ul]
[li]The service is supposed to integrate the armed forces into society.[/li][li]In Germany the armed forces have a horrible reputation. This way they they have access to a more normal demographic.[/li][li]At least during the cold war one advantage was that the draft creates large numbers of trained reserves.[/ul]Civillian:[ul]Many positions in healthcare and charities are seen a valuable but wouldn’t be economically viable on the free market. Those serving are healthy, young, often overqualified and still work for welfare-level wages.[/li][li]It’s a tax on young people. The service is worth more than the same people would realistically be able to pay during the time.[/ul][/li]
For many people a period of guaranteed employment actually sounds attractive. For others it means their first independence from home. Some even enjoy working for a good cause.
The o.p. said “some kind of government service”, not specifically military. There are plenty of ways in which a large civil service organization could be hypothetically used.
That said, I think it would be a big cock-up. 18-year-olds as a group have no vendible skills; they aren’t construction workers, or medical technicians, or IT workers. So you’d have a massive entry-level workforce which you’d either have to find some kind of makework for or invest thousands per head to train to do something useful. This makes some kind of sense when the term of enlistment three or four years, but is a waste when a term is just a year or eighteen months. And you’re going to have to have a large professional organization of supervisors and managers to direct all of these younglings, analogous to the NCO corps of the Armed Forces. Where do these people come from, and how do you keep them from abusing their lawful authority over your conscript force? And of course, you’d create a massive new bureaucracy which would, like all such bodies, put its growth and continued existance above all other priorities. In short, you’d have a big, costly mess.
Everybody registers, people allowed to defer it if they’re going to college and maintain a certain GPA, otherwise right after high school
Yes
Say, two years, with a possible exception, see below
Full time work, except I could see making it possible for some people who spread it out over a longer period, in which case it would be more like community service hours.
Yes, except for college deferral
I’d let 'em sign up at 16 or 17
Deferral
Yes. Token amount, plus allowances for clothing, food & housing if those aren’t provided by the job.
As above, whatever constitutes a “token amount.” Less than minimum wage, but then they’re getting food, housing, clothing.
Not at first. Maybe incentives or rewards (combat pay, etc.)
They would have choices. They might not get their first choice.
It wouldn’t be that unattractive.
They would have to move, unless they did the long-term community service thing.
Various–good will, defense, education
Personal growth, discipline, possibly widening their view of society and the world
I could see young people picking from among several options along the lines of defense, outreach (like the Peace Corps), community service (Americorps) which would allow most of them to serve in non-military functions.
For instance, I knew conscientious objectors who were sent to work in hospitals as an alternative to being drafted. I also know one who worked for two years at the Metropolitan Opera in NYC, don’t know how he swung that one.
If people have already married and started families, I’d give them the option of longer-term community service (maybe using the National Guard as a model) but I wouldn’t let anybody off because they had a baby–unless for some reason we needed to get the birth rate up.
This program could encompass things that are for the good of society, for instance someone who wanted to defer service while attending college and medical school might get a deferral based on spending a few years after graduation as a GP in some rural underserved area.
I don’t think it should be one program, but a variety of options, one of which would be expected by any young person before taking his/her place in society. Incentives could be financial–college scholarships. Or education that took place during the service itself. Preferential hiring for those who had completed some kind of service.
I don’t think this would be a bad thing at all. In looking at my high school classmates, the ones who were drafted into the military were all much improved by the experience of getting out of a small town in Oklahoma and going somewhere else for a few years, even though they didn’t necessarily think so at the time. As far as I can tell, nobody was ruined by the experience, although the three of them who went to Vietnam sure could have been.
The only reservation I have is if the federal government takes charge. Bureaucracies screw up everything.
The punishment for not serving or the service itself? No matter how “attractive” you make forced servitude some people will refuse. And why should only young people need to serve? Why not make every able-bodied person of all ages (excluding veterans and those who’ve already done an equivalent service) take time out of their lives to do government service? And how do you keep performance levels up? Even if conscripts are given some choice there’d still be alot of them who couldn’t care less if they’re doing a good job.
We already have government programs dedicated to education youth, they’re called schools.
Hilarity N. Suze: How would you envision mandatory service for everyone? Take, for instance, a child who is mentally retarded. What service would you have that child do? And what of those who would have benefactors working to pull strings so that they could avoid service?
And while I think that,
are noble things that all should aspire to, I’m not sure you could easily or evenhandedly make it mandatory.
And I find it interesting that you think it’s a good idea for young people to choose from several options such as defense, outreach (Peace Corps, per your post) and community service (Americorps), then say in the last two sentences of your post that the Feds shouldn’t get involved. After all, the options you outlined are all federal programs. How would such a program exist if it wasn’t federal?
Okay, every able-bodied person has to do it, fine with me. I think most people would want to do it young and get it out of the way.
For those who don’t care if they do a good job, how about fast-forward toward the job interviewer who says, “What? You got kicked out of VISTA? For slacking off?”
They aren’t, but we should work on improving them rather create a bunch of new institutions.
People who aren’t young when the program is instituted won’t have that choice. Someone’s who’s 47 when it starts should have the same obligation as someone who’s 17.
So the the few lucky heirs and heiresses [cough]Paris Hilton[/cough] who’ll never have to worry about working for a living in their lives get off free?
I grew up in an era where boys were drafted, and it was not evenhanded. People got out of it if they were rich, or if they were smart, or if they were crazy (or could fake it). I know someone who got 4F because of flat feet or somesuch and went on to play major league baseball for a couple of seasons.
Sure, there are some people who are just not going to be capable. But mentally retarded people can and do hold jobs, and a lot of them like to feel useful, so why should they be exempt from this?
As to the federal programs, yeah, I guess they’d have to be. The Peace Corps etc. were examples of how nonmilitary volunteer services could work.
People are not usually very well-educated when they get out of high school. They need a tech school, or college, or work experience. This would provide that for some of them.
I don’t see why. If, for instance, the military ever re-introduces the draft, I’ll bet it still exempts people over a certain age–probably early 20s. Life isn’t fair, but barring some extreme emergency people should not be plucked out of the lives they’ve chosen and thrust into some different one. Eighteen-year-olds, for the most part, are not real committed to a certain path or lifestyle, and if they are, and such service would irretrievably disrupt it, then they should get a workaround.
Yeah, they can slack off. What are ya gonna do, throw 'em in jail?
Bring out the old CCC and WPA again. There are a lot of state and federal parks that can use fences, footbridges, weedwhacking, small outbuilding repairs and so forth. I actually had a friend who was in the CCc back in teh late 70s as a summer job and she helped repair the stacked stone fences in Letchworth State Park in NY.
How about as ‘candystripers’ in hospitals, hospices and retirement homes - they could help feed people, push them in wheelchairs, peel spuds in the kitchen, mow the lawns, trim teh hedges, do laundry, clerical support …
How about in schools as teachers aids, playground attendants, clerical assistants.
All positions that take minimal training, serve very useful roles, and are minimum paying jobs normally … and perfect for conscientious objectors, males and females.
No matter how “attractive” you make forced servitude some people will refuse. And why should only young people need to serve? Why not make every able-bodied person of all ages (excluding veterans and those who’ve already done an equivalent service) take time out of their lives to do government service? And how do you keep performance levels up? Even if conscripts are given some choice there’d still be alot of them who couldn’t care less if they’re doing a good job.