What many of those first world democracies have in common is that they are small countries(and in some cases with unfriendly neighbours) that lack the population base necessary to maintain sufficient army on a voluntary basis.
There lies the fundamental pragmatic problem (as opposed to the fundamental philosophical problem, which is that the concept is antithetical to the culture of a free nation). You can’t make costs disappear; you can just stick somebody else with the bill.
If you weed out sociopaths (i.e. persons with no noral objections to a slave system), there goes the contingent who would actually collarorate with your regime.
Oddly enough, though, the wealthy in this country are trying to do exactly that. Along with the Republicans and the Tea Party.
My cite is their absolute refusal to consider increasing government revenue to pay for what’s already been bought - i.e. the current debt crisis fiasco.
This “national service” idea is just more of the same - make someone else build or do what is wanted by confiscating their labor, rather than offering competitive wages to the people who already do those things for a living.
Yes, yes, the more I think about the more I’m convinced that’s what it is - it’s a tax by any other name, levied on the young by their elders, who hold themselves immune.
The average kid doesn’t get a free ride to college on his parents. And no, a kid who starts off with that kind of advantage is probably not better off going into the military.
Right. Because in a job, you don’t need to learn any of those things. You don’t have to stay on task, you don’t have to pace yourself, you can come and go as you please and do whatever you want, and you never meet anyone.
Nonsense. Taxes may (or may not, depending on details) be a fair level of payment for services (e.g. national defense) inherent to govenment. Forced labor has no such justification – if the government needs work done, it can hire people to do it at the going rate and collect taxes to pay for it.
That’s a concept with wider applicability. For example, NASA could quit worrying about getting maximum utility from its rockets and focus on lowering the overall strength of gravity to bring costs below the threshold established by a cosy-benefit analysis.
Modifying the law of gravity would also make it cheaper to build all sorts of things on the ground (just like modifying the laws of economics). Win-win!
You did not pay much attention to what I had written. I specifically said that the real cost of something is not its monetary cost but its opportunity cost.
If you force me to work for you, whatever you pay me doesn’t reflect opportunity cost, it just means you picked a number.
Yes – they finally figured out what a white elephant the system is:
(emphasis added)
Brick,
“threshold established by a cost-benefit analysis”
Acting according to cost-benefit analysis is something I fully agree with. However, the concepts of cost and benefit can be counterintuitive. We are used to thinking of cost and benefit in monetary terms and those are usually the prices which are exchanged between contractants. However, when we encounter non-excludable or non-rival or prices which do not reflect relative scarcity, this relationship breaks down and prices do not reflect the real costs and benefits, which are the opportunity cost for the aggregate and the utility for the aggregate, respectively.
I’m sure they could, but,
This ain’t like the military.
Spending a year or two of a two year commitment learning how to operate heavy implements of construction, pointless in a bad way.
Spending a year or two of a two year commitment learning how to operate heavy implements of destruction, pointless in a good way.
CMC fnord!
There are very few opportunity costs to making an otherwise (likely) unproductive worker work for slightly less than might be able to work for. Especially since they will be receiving free school among other things. That the wage does not reflect the true cost of hiring them is really not that important since they are not competing with other workers by and large.
So does that make it acceptable in your opinion? More importantly, do you really think a country like Norway a greater collective hostility against it than the US does?
I was mainly thinking about Israel, Taiwan and South Korea, but Norway has a population of 5 million people and shares a land border with Russia. Which is very different from having 300 million people and an ocean between you and any realistic military threat.
Of course, I do have a feeling that conscription in Europe today is mostly a relic from the cold war and not a response to any current outside threat.
You’re contradicting yourself again. Obviously, if a deal that incurred few costs resulted in free higher education, people would voluntarily flock to it, making your proposed coercion not only immoral, but also irrelevant.
Which is precisely why leaving it to the free-market price system (and hiring workers at the price set thereby) is the efficient way to do things.
The fact that they would not be competing against other workers does not matter. It’s not about protecting other workers, it’s about making it so that private marginal cost is the same as social marginal cost and that private marginal gain is the same as social marginal gain. Your scheme fails to do that.
You propose that “all able-bodied 18-year olds, and illegal immigrants willing to work as a path towards citizenship”.
You presume that all 18 to 20 year olds would be unproductive workers.
You say they could go to school at the same time. They cannot both work full time and go to school full time. The more you let them go to school, the less mandatory service you get. The more mandatory service, the more delayed their schooling/experience in other jobs will be, which means society will not get as many years of their skilled labor. For some people, the best skills acquisiotn they can do is to join the military of the civil service but by no means all. They know better than you and I because they know more about their own preferences and situations than you and I do.
You also say that they would work for slightly less than they might be able to work for. If that’s the case, then there isn’t much monetary savings since they only work for slightly less. If you only pay them slightly less than they would otherwise make, then the organizations in question could just hire them and pay them slightly more. No need to force them.
The fundamental problem is that you think you know how everyone else should spend their labor better than they do even for private (non-exludable, non-rival) goods. You don’t. If someone could know that, 5 year central plans would work quite well.
Your solution to collective action problems (look up the term) is to make 18 to 20 year olds bear the brunt of those costs. Why should 18 to 20 year olds bear more of it than others because of their age?
Judging from the non-response to various suggestions that other age cohorts (possibly including brick’s own) be selected instead, I suppose it boils down to the fact that 18-20-year-olds are “that guy behind the tree”.
Wait, which is it? Are we forcing these kids to work for nothing, or do we pay them wages comparable to new privates in the army, and pay for their college after they’re done with their service?
If we’re trying to find a way to cut taxes (or rather, substitute a labor tax for a monetary tax), then paying for everyone’s college education won’t work. These are unskilled teenagers, right? And so the average value of their work is going to struggle to meet minimum wage. Two years of minumum wage work is $30,000 or so.
The only way to make the program pay for itself, let alone allow us to reduce taxes (or rather, not increase taxes), is if the average benefits we pay for are less than that number. These kids will need food, medical care, housing, uniforms, training, and so on during their service. It’s very likely that the average kid won’t provide enough value to just pay for their own upkeep during this time. Let alone provide enough surplus value to pay for their college later, or earn a salary during their service.
So that means, the taxpayers have to subsidize it. That is, the national service program will add to our taxes, rather than reduce our taxes.
If it’s such a good idea to hire kids at minumum wage to do neccesary public work, why can’t we just hire a bunch of kids at minumum wage to do necessary public work? Why do we have to pay for their room and board and future college after that?
Why do you feel that is the case? Or rather, why do you feel the need to be the same? Isn’t the social marginal cost equal to the private marginal cost plus the marginal external cost? Given that that is the case, why do you feel the MEC is negative or zero?
No, I didn’t. I never said ALL of them are. That said, most are relatively unproductive.
You certainly can given a flexible schedule.
It’s a less efficient way of doing things in many cases, but it’s often necessary in running a functioning democracy. Is it fair that the state makes me do jury duty when I could be out earning money? Maybe. But, acting as though denying individual choice always has a negative outcome is pretty naive.
You realize the “solution” to many collective action problems is government intervention, right? On your second point, younger people would be enlisted because they are on the whole more physically able, and less productive workers.
They would be able to receive free college while enlisted. What happens afterward is on them. Additionally, they would be paid less that prevailing wages.
We are not out to cut taxes. Taxes would likely go up (they probably will anyway). We are trying to lower the costs of completing social projects currently not being done as a result (in most cases) of high costs so that people would see more of a value in doing them. Whereas some people may not vote for a bridge repair if it costs $2MM, then might be on board if it costs $1MM.
Well, of course taxes will go up as a result of a foolish white-elephant program such as your proposal. (Extrapolating from the German figures above to the size of the US, we’re talking several billion dollars a year in extra costs.)
Well, it ought to be easy to get everybody to support it if it only costs $2.98. Now where did I leave that roll of duct tape…?
(Hey, if you’re going to ignore the laws of economics and reality in general, why not go all the way?)