This should mean a period of full-time national
service as a rite of passage for every young American, ages 18 to 28. Such
service could be military or civilian. Young adults could choose the Army or
Peace Corps, Marine Corps or AmeriCorps, the Navy or VISTA.
So exhort John Bridgeland and Alan Khazei, co-chairs
of the Franklin Project at the Aspen Institute, writing at Politico under the
title “National Service Is Key to National Strength.”
I hasten to point out that as Bridgeland and Khazei
envision it, “National service would be optional.” However, they immediately add, “but expected.
Every college admissions officer or employer must start to ask, ‘Where did you
serve?’”
Bridgeland and Khazei are joined in this promotion
by Time magazine, whose editor, Richard Stengel, boasts in “our annual national
service issue” (July 1): “Six summers ago, we published a cover story called
‘The Case for National Service,’ in which I proposed that every American high
school student do a year of service after graduation.” He repeats that call
again this year. The magazine’s cover shouts: “How Service Can Save Us.”
So-called national service need not be compulsory to
be objectionable, although that would make it something far worse: short-term
slavery. I say “so-called national service” to draw attention to the movement’s
premise that one can benefit one’s fellow human beings only by serving “the
nation” through the state.
I wish to challenge this premise.
Leaving aside any question of moral duty, the fact
is that in a free society, in which aggressive force is barred and all
relationships are voluntary, people naturally seek to satisfy one another’s
wants in order to improve their own lots in life. As the early French
economists liked to say: Society is exchange, and exchange is mutually
beneficial.
Exchange is at the very heart of a civil society
based on voluntarism and free markets. (Government, by contrast, is force and
intimidation.) Each individual wants things in order to live the sort of life
she wishes, things she wouldn’t be able to make herself. In a free society, no
one may compel another to work for her benefit. If A wants something from B, A
must offer to perform a service on acceptable terms for B (for example, the
production of a good). To succeed, A must be sensitive to what others want. The
money A possesses after a successful exchange signifies that she has benefited
her fellow human beings, and with that money she may now engage in further
exchanges to obtain the things she wants.
Considering how common and how beneficial this
mutual service is, it is odd that it is not counted as service by those who
want young people pushed into government programs.
Perhaps it’s so common that most people take it for
granted. We simply don’t realize how much better off we are because of the
social cooperation, division of labor, and mutual service that arise naturally
among human beings — without government help. As Bastiat pointed out in
Economic Harmonies,
It is
impossible not to be struck by the disproportion, truly incommensurable, that
exists between the satisfactions [a person belonging to a modest class] derives
from society and the satisfactions that he could provide for himself if he were
reduced to his own resources. ….In one day he consumes more things than he
could produce himself in ten centuries.
Adam Smith had more than a few insights into the
services that human beings render one another in civil society. In the first
chapter of The Wealth of Nations, he wrote,
In
civilized society [the individual] stands at all times in need of the
co-operation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce
sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons. In almost every other race
of animals each individual, when it is grown up to maturity, is entirely
independent, and in its natural state has occasion for the assistance of no
other living creature. But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his
brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only.
He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his
favour, and shew them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he
requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to
do this: Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is
the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from
one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need
of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker,
that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We
address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk
to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.
Smith added later that a person’s direct efforts to
advance the social good are often less effective than efforts motivated by
personal gain:
He is …
led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.
Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By
pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more
effectually than when he really intends to promote it.
The advocates of “national service” might counter
that nothing counts as service that is motivated by personal gain. But how will
they know that the young people who enlist in VISTA or AmeriCorps aren’t doing
so merely to qualify for student loans or other government benefits, or to have
an answer for their college or job interviewers?
Champions of national service might also argue that
market activity only benefits people who have the means to buy things. What
about people in dire need?
Two answers: First, entrepreneurial innovations that
increase the supply and cut the cost of goods especially help those most in
need. Individuals who strive to make the necessities and luxuries of life
accessible to more people are indeed rendering a service. (Bastiat explained
that progress in the market consists in the transfer of wealth from the private
realm to the “communal realm” and the creation of “gratuitous utility.”)
Diverting young people into what is called national
service will merely keep them from work that will benefit others in ways that
really count. What makes anyone think that this delay would be worthwhile?
Second, what people typically think of as service
does not require government projects. For example, literacy programs can be
financed and administered on a voluntary basis — more efficiently and justly
because no coercive bureaucracy would be involved. And as long as we’re
thinking about literacy programs — perhaps these wouldn’t be necessary if the
bumbling, coercive bureaucracy removed itself from education and left it to innovative
and competitive entrepreneurship.
One suspects that even if national-service advocates
agreed that all worthwhile services could be rendered in a purely voluntary
manner, they still would not be satisfied because it would be too
self-directed, too individualistic. “It’s been generations since the majority
of young Americans came together to serve the nation,” Bridgeland and Khazei
write.
What do they really want: improvement in the lives
of people or service to “the nation,” which always translates into service to
the state? If it’s the latter, they should remind themselves that earlier
attempts to institutionalize that notion of duty weren’t pretty.
About the author: Sheldon Richman is vice president
and editor at The Future of Freedom Foundation in Fairfax, Va., and author of
Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State. Visit his blog “Free
Association” at http://www.sheldonrichman.com. Send him email.
This article was published by The Future of Freedom
Foundation.
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